Hacking the Press
My good friend Kevin Hoctor of No Thirst Software recently asked me on Twitter how i "wrangled" so much press for the recent MercuryMover v2.0 launch.
The 140 character limit on Twitter didn't leave me enough room even for a token response. Here's what i said:
@kevinhoctor I've been working on my press hacking skills. In <70 chars: Listen for mentions. email everyone. give press free lice ...I would like to take this opportunity to state once and for all that i do NOT advocate giving lice to members of the press. On this blog, we truncate where i say to truncate, so there's a little more room to describe how i engineered some very decent coverage for the MercuryMover 2.0 launch and how you might get some of that press goodness for your product. The term "press hacking" and in fact the very ethos thereof is derived from an evolving talk that Adam Engst of TidBITS fame has been giving for a number of years. I saw a video of his talk from C4[1] and it really shaped these thoughts of how to work with the press. I can't overstate how grateful i am to Adam for really opening my eyes on this topic.
So how do you hack the press? Here's my four step program:
Have a Desirable Product
This pretty much goes without saying, so i won't belabor the point. None of this will work, if no one in the press wants (or can be convinced that they want) your product.Listen
The first order of business is to establish an intelligence operation. In order to really connect with the movers and shakers in the Mac-o-sphere you need to know what people are saying about your products and your company. I use an elaborate set of RSS feeds to keep track of who is talking about me. I have the following feeds set up in NetNewsWire and i read them multiple times during the day:- Social Media Firehose using MercuryMover and Helium Foot as keywords
- Google blog search using MercuryMover as a keyword
- Newsgator Smart Feeds one for MercuryMover and one for Helium Foot (you need to be logged into Newsgator for the link to work)
Of these, the richest is probably the Social Media Firehose whose existence i was tipped off to by Neil Lee (of Cocotech fame) via a post on the MacSB yahoo group.
Email everyone
Now that you have good sigint, whenever you get a signal, try to respond. If you get mentioned on a blog, then comment (or email the author if comments are disabled). If you get mentioned by an established (or even not so established) news outlet, then email the author. Thank them for the mention (and this part is important) and give them a complimentary license for your product. Make it as simple as possible for them to start using and keep using your product. You get extra credit if you offer to give free licenses to any member of the staff of that particular publication. Also, if any blogger or member of the press asks for a license, don't hesitate to give it to them. I even take this a step further and offer unsolicited free licenses to writers who i think might enjoy MercuryMover and thus write about it. I often get ignored when i send these unsolicited licenses, but some of the best relationships that i have with members of the Mac press were started through this type of unsolicited communication. If it doesn't get you ignored, these sorts of activities will endear you to the movers and speakers.Get Noticed
There are a lot of ways to get noticed and the best is to put out great products and wait for all of that notice to come in. Of course the waiting really can be the hardest part, so it helps to do something a little out of the ordinary or even downright goofy in order to garner some extra attention. In the aforementioned video, Adam Engst related a story of someone who sent him a jar of his favorite pickles and how it made him take notice of the sender. I didn't have any pickles, but my wife is a bit of a baker and makes some mean confections. To get noticed, i sent out physical press kits, via U.S. mail that contained a note, a personalized CD and a small batch of home-made chocolate chip brownies. The CD had a personalized label, and when it opened on the desktop, the window background image was personalized with the receiver's name. After double clicking MercuryMover's icon, MercuryMover would be installed and licensed to that person. There's nothin' like a sugar high to induce effusiveness about your product.So did it work? Absolutely! By listening and emailing for the last few months, i've built up a decent address book of contacts, many of whom wrote up the MercuryMover release. The press kits were effective in that some of the recipients wrote really nice write-ups in very prominent online publications. Even better, some members of the press are starting to contact me so hopefully this is just the beginning. I've been keeping an informal list on my site of some of my press clippings and here's where it stands right now:
- MercuryMover 2 - Even better window management: Pick of the Week: Mac OS X Hints - Oct 6, 2008
- Mac Gems: MercuryMover 2.0: Macworld - Oct 2, 2008
- MercuryMover 2.0 Puts Windows Where You Want Them: TidBITS - Sep 22, 2008
- MercuryMover 2.0 window resizing tool released: Macworld - Sep 22, 2008
- MercuryMover 2.0 doesn't require you to move to Mercury (whew): MacUser - Sep 22, 2008
- Mercury Mover: Mit Fenstern arbeiten ohne Maus: macnews.de, Germany - Sep 22, 2008
- MercuryMover 2.0 est finalisĀ: Mac Generation, France - Sep 22, 2008
- MercuryMover Developer Interview: Softpedia - Sep 22, 2008
Happy hacking.