After reading one of my early posts on Bilgistic, Lance invited me down to ATDC to talk about my findings and see if we could start some discussion about creating awareness for startups. So last Wednesday I did the brown bag session at ATDC (my third talk at ATDC overall - I mentioned the previous one here). The discussion was interesting and insightful for me and I hope it was the same for the attendees.
I will say I think my talk wasn’t as smooth as I would have hoped (and definitely not as good as my previous two brown bags) but since I’ve never given a talk about PR and awareness, I blame my lack of practice for any lack of coherence or structure. Also, I wasn’t quite expecting the very different levels of understanding in current social media technologies. Again, that probably goes back to my lack of practice and preparation.
I’ve uploaded my slides to Scribd although for some reason they didn’t publish totally right (I had to convert them to PDF and upload them since Scribd doesn’t deal with Powerpoint 2007 formats yet). Fell free to take a look although the slides lack quite a bit without my commentary. Thanks Lance for the opportunity to come down and gab!
Also, I got a note from Mitch Free at MFG.com pointing me to this YouTube video they created to celebrate their 8 year anniversary. This is actually a perfect example of what I was trying to convey at the session. Use tools available to you to highlight the great things your startup is doing. After watching the video I gotta think that MFG.com is a great place to work. The people in the video seem genuinely happy to work there. What a great piece of promotional content for future employee recruiting. Good job guys!
Sanjay,
I found the brown bag presentation to be very informative. My biggest takeaway was to remember even though you are a small company, attention to detail and frequent updates are still important. You never know who may drop by your website to make a decision about becoming a customer or investor.
Another great tip that came out of the discussion was to include a full press kit in pdf form on the site to make it easy for writers to get accurate information.