Krugle Launching at Demo without Traditional PR

Krugle announced a couple days ago that it will be launching at Demo Feb 6-8.  They didn't write a press release, they just blogged it. Krugle is addressing search issues for the open source community.  It will allow people everywhere to find what they need to develop, alter, hack, tweak or modify code in the name of shared and collaborative innovation. As a blogger, whose enthusiastic about Krugle. I'd love to tell you more and show you screen shots, but we must honor the conference's NDA rules.

Krugle is the fourth company in 12 months, I've helped get ready for this premier venue for startups and companies with new technologies.  Jambo, launched at last February's Demo without using a PR agency and generated lots of ink including a six-part series on Forbes.com (before they considered us bloggers a lynch mob I guess). Yackpack has used a blog strategy and achieved DemoGod status at the DemoFall event. Riya will also launch at the upcoming Demo, and chances are you already know who they are and if you read traditional media chances are highly likely you already know about them, even though they have never spent a penny for PR and have not yet issued their first press release. I've induced Krugle to drink the social media KoolAid.  They have also chosen the route to ignore traditional media in favor of a marketing strategy that stated simply--is to blog.

We didn't say this in the book, but I have now become convinced that if you are a Web 2.0 early stage company, you are better off going with blogging and NOT using a PR agency until you are further along in your development. I say this without glee, because I spent 25 years doing PR for startups, and remain proud of the work I did for companies in early phases.

But times have changed, and so must PR firms in my opinion, if they are to survive.

I know that I will get in trouble for saying this, but since the early days of Naked Conversations, when I was interviewing founders of ICQ, and FireFox as well as managers at Skype, I have begun to question whether traditional Command and Control PR is a benefit.  In recent months, looking at the successes of Riya, TechCrunch, PodTech, Flock and an increasing number of Web 2.0 companies, I have become convinced that having a PR agency at launch is not only unnecessary, it can be a mistake. 

The executive summary is that  when you have limited time and limited resources, you really need to limit focus.  Blogging strategists and traditional PR practitioners will create conflicts for you in human and financial resources; in timing in priorities and so forth.  It is very much a channel conflict situation.

Here are a few observations of the conflict:

• Traditional PR will tell you to keep in stealth mode, then get the word out at an imaginary moment which is the technical launch.  The blogging strategist will tell you to get pieces of your story out early and often and to ask people who care about what you're doing to to help you make it better.
• Traditional PR tries to control message, to get a company to speak with one voice.  Blogging strategy argues that it is more credible and more human to speak with many voices.  These voices may be in harmony, but a little discordance just makes your story all the more interesting.
• Traditional PR pushes messages through media to reach customers, considering both to be "targets." Bloggers have ongoing two-way conversations.  The company talks, but customers talk back.  It's out in the open. 
• PR programs cost a great deal of money, usually North of $10 k a month for at least six months to be effective.  Blogging costs a great deal of time, but almost no money. What you save by blogging can be put into R&D, or customer support r investor's pockets.
• PR spends a great deal of effort pro-actively pursuing press. They get others to say you are great by writing up case studies about a few customers, then pitching them to the media or splicing them onto websites. Bloggers assume the best editors will find what customers say about you in the blogosphere by using search engines.  No advertisement, PR campaign or PR pitch can possibly come close to the impact blogging as on search engines. I would argue that a new company with disruptive technology will get more ink, faster, with less effort and money through blogging, than through a PR campaign.
• Traditional PR's philosophy is top-down.  They determine the biggest and most influential in your category, then they target them.  Blogging assumes that good news distributed at the grassroots level will emerge very quickly.  The examples of stories starting with some unknown blogger and getting to the front page of major national publications are manifold.  It happened last week, when a blogging passenger wrote about his experiences on a decompressed Alaska Airlines flight and drew scorn that turned out to be coming from Alaska Airlines employees who did not identify themselves as such. Scoble has twice in recent months gone from a blog to the New York Times for something he posted. In fact, the evidence is pretty compelling that the shortest route from obscurity to prominent coverage in traditional media is through blogging.

No, I don't think PR is dead. Companies will always need relationships with their publics.  I do think that the current model is broken and overdue for a reshaping. PR people need to let go of the systems they have in place and realize there has been a flattening of who is important.  Because of social media, everyone is now an influencer.  In PR, you need to use social media to reach more people, because everyone now has world access and blogging is cheaper, faster and better than owning a printing press.

Comments

[Kami Huyse]

Shel; This is great stuff. There is a lot in this post that I agree with, and other stuff that I don't. More on all that later. However, I will say that the way PR is practiced, and how it should be practiced, have been disconnected for some time. First of all, the media was never supposed to be the "target" audience, the consumer of that media was. That is why there have been so many bad press releases, few consider the end consumer. Blogging is indeed a powerful tool, and totally the way to go for tech companies, but the idea is that they still make it to the mainstream media. This is important becasue, as you know, not everyone reads blogs. The tech media definately does, but not all reporters read the media either. The micro-audience is the new reality, and blogs, pod and vodcasts are part of the strategy.

[shel israel]

Kami,
Thanks once more for a very thoughtful comment that extends the conversation. Please note that I went through some pains to say startups in the web 2.0 category no longer need a PR agency in early phases. I also said that blogging will attract press notice through search engines which have become a common place for reporters to search by topic. I did not say PR is dead or even that a Web 2.0 company reaching a certain level of critical mass don't need PR agencies. I do hope you take this conversation to your blog. I would like to see this issue publicly vetted and I hope it facilitates a general debate on PR's changing role.

[Lynann Bradbury]

Frankly, hasn’t this topic been vetted enough?

As a PR professional, I’m not concerned about being part of a dying breed. If I had subscribed to command and control theories, I would have planned a good Irish wake about five years ago. But then again, I’m not Irish. Nor am I a traditional PR person.

The key to public relations is the second word: relations. PR people will always need to be good relationship-builders. We also need to be able find, tell and share stories that impact people and make a difference in their lives. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the need to develop outreach programs that are much more interactive, that leverage new technologies such as podcasting and video-blogging, and that engage the blogging community (inside and outside a company) so that many voices can participate in the dialog.

It seems to me I’ve spoken those words before. Of course, it’s your blog. Vet all you want...just please don’t serve me any Irish whiskey at your party. :-)

[shel israel]

Lynann,
How ironic, the whole mental journey that got me to this point, grew from my dinner conversation with you at the Blog Business Summit. I agree with you that your business is about relations. It always has been. What has changed is that as that best-selling author (boy do I envy him) Thomas Friedman says: the world has flattened, and instead of needing a few, elite relationships for your client, you now need a great number of them. Now everybody is important. Blogging today is the best way of having an authentic conversation with everybody. As far as the Party goes: will you settle fr champagne?

[Philip Young]

Shel

I've been thinking a lot about this post - and in particular about one phrase which I wonder if you would mind expanding upon: "a little discordance just makes your story all the more interesting..."

[shel israel]

Philip,

No story holds reader interest without some conflict. No movie, book, news article, nothing not even a blog. If a business blog just tows the company line, always nice, always certain, always cheerleadig the company it is guilty of the worst sin in story-telling. It is boring. Does that help?

[Philip Young]

Shel

Rather than clog up your blog with some rather esoteric thinking, I have posted something that tries to continue this on Mediations. Thanks for replying.

[Graeme Thickins]

Shel, as a followup to the notion that "a little discordance just makes your story all the more interesting"...and "no story holds reader interest without some conflict"...

I recently blogged about a panel discussion in which Kal Patel, EVP of Strategy at Best Buy, gave a great definition of intelligence: "The ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your head and still function." Today's corporations can take a lesson there as relates communicating via the new media. Some are starting to catch on...

[Bleu]

As a developer, I'm irked by Krugle's PR stunt. I went to the site expecting to find this great search engine but instead I got put on a list and forced to wait. These "invitation only" and non-traditional tactics are just manipulative, and eventually people will see them as such.

How about they just launch the site and skip the teasing. "We’re scheduled to go-live on March 8th at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego. The sooner you sign-up, the sooner you get it."

Well not soon enough Krugle. All the hype did some good. I discovered www.koders.com, and I'm loving it. Way better than Google for code.