• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, August 29, 2008

In a recent hurl, Jason Calacanis, as is his wont, provocatively titled his rambling: On How To Get PR For Your Startup: Fire Your PR Company. In all fairness, something hard to associate with Calacanis, he makes some very good suggestions about how to foster relations with reporters that will, one day, result in some press. He argues that start up CEOs can do everything (or anything) a PR firm can, largely because in his formative years as a skanky editor of Silicon Alley Reporter, he allegedly refused to work with PR people.

"I've gotten more press than any entrepreneur could dream of -- certainly more than I deserve -- and I've never had a public relations firm working for me," he brags. And to which I would respond, most of it justly negative. He is simply his own worst enemy and in fact takes great pleasure in being smacked about by those don't drink his brand of Kool-Aid.

In his post, JC also revises history conveniently forgetting that while running Silicon Alley Reporter his sales people were out trying to "sell" coverage to tech companies in New York suggesting without a hint of vagueness that dollars spent in advertising in the magazine would result in more and favorable coverage within its edit well. He would deny this, but no one in the New York tech community ever believed that SAR represented unbiased, factual reporting. It was largely a reflection of JC's ego, who he wanted to suck up to (something he highly recommends in his posting). Which is why, as much as the bubble burst, it went out of business.

But I guess he thinks the experience of bully around tech CEOs and their PR folks makes him something of an expert on how real journalists function. It doesn't, but not knowing what he is talking about has never stopped JC.

In the approximately 5,000 words he devotes to his personal PR prowess, JC's constant refrain is "If I did it, you can do it." I agree that CEOs should be the primary evangelists for their brands, speak at conferences, chat up reporters in the wild and make appropriate direct e-mail or phone contact with them. All good stuff which I have told my clients for 35 years. But most of the CEOs of start ups I work with (and that included all seven years with TACODA before AOL destroyed it), have more important things to do than try and be a JC clone. Most of them are so slammed working out the technical details of their product offerings as they near launch, gathering investors, distribution and content partners, perhaps even making an ad call or two, that they don't have the time, the vocabulary or the relationships to reach out to reporters especially at the top tiers of coverage.

JC had the advantage of pretending to be a journalist as he built his initial relationships, something that is a huge door-opener most tech CEOs will never enjoy. Becoming someone real journalists view as a resource, rather than a temporary annoyance, takes an enormous amount of reading to keep up with the dozens of on and offline publications that are appropriate candidates for coverage. This is part of what you pay a PR person for. To know who is covering what and the right way and time to make a pitch. You also pay them for having relationships that will get your called answered or your e-mail returned (even if only to hear "no thanks."). You pay them to help make your highly technological product understandable to folks who are -- on the same day -- getting 200 e-mail pitches and taking 50 phone calls from other startups.

If your PR firm is any good you should get some good strategic advice about how to position your product against the competition, where among the 14,587 trade events you should try to speak, how to talk to the VC community, to research analysts and perhaps some advice about the web copy your cousin Henry wrote for your launch.

There are a dozen or so other legitimate PR functions that JC failed to cover (some of them noted in the comments section after the link to his post on Silicon Alley Insider), because after all he isn't really thinking about you. He is thinking about him. As ever.