Scott Burkett did a good post on the Atlanta Business Chronicle today in which he talked about how Justin Rubner has left the ABC and there are no plans on replacing him. I heard about this as possible a few weeks ago but it looks like Scott has outside confirmation. The funniest comment though comes from Stephen Fleming:
Q: Does the Atlanta Business Chronicle care?
A: No.
See, wasn’t that simple?
Honestly, I don’t really care if the ABC continues to report ion startups. In my opinion, a weekly newspaper can’t really report fast moving news of startups effectively. Granted the reason why they decided not to cover this area of news probably has more to do with advertising dollars than journalistic effectiveness. If you talk to anyone who has started their company in the last year or two, they’ll likely not have even heard of the Atlanta Business Chronicle but they sure have heard of TechCrunch or Mashable or Read Write Web. Of course, if you haven’t heard of these sites, you just might be an Internet dinosaur.
Our friends over at JungleDisk have been nominated for a Webware award in the utility & security category. Show your love for an Atlanta based company and vote for them to win.
I’m not sure if any other Atlanta based companies are represented but I’m sure other East Coast companies are. If you find them and like what they’re doing, use their proximity to the East Coast as your tie breaking decider on who to vote for.
About a month ago, Jeff Haynie tweeted that he was heading out west for a filming of Startup City TV. Honestly, I didn’t know what Startup City TV was but now that I see Jeff was interviewed by Fritz Nelson, I get it. Fritz is a particularly nice guy who I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago. Jeff says the guy in the video is a dork (pretty sure he means himself and not Fritz). That might be true, but if so I want to be a dork too. Good job Jeff and the rest of the Appcelerator folks!
After reading one of my early posts on Bilgistic, Lanceinvited 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!
I heard an interesting PR related tidbit at SoCon this last weekend. Someone mentioned that Justin Rubner left the Atlanta Business Chronicle as their technology reporter. You can verify this by looking at Justin’s LinkedIn profile. This same person (whose name I’m intentionally avoiding) also mentioned that their PR firm said PR and the press in Atlanta are dead. I’d say that statement is probably pretty accurate. Of the two major papers we have (ABC and AJC), neither has really committed significant resources to covering the local startup scene. Yeah, we could get back to complaining about no awareness but instead I think our collective energy would be better spent in figuring out how to overcome this hurdle.
So what’s my contribution? Starting this blog for one. Getting into arguments about the local funding environment for another (there was a bit of this during SoCon as well). And for the third, I’m heading down to ATDC this Wednesday to do a brown bag discussion on PR and raising the awareness of your startup. I’ve worked up some analysis that I published before that I’ve updated and added to for this presentation. I think the brown bag is only open to ATDC companies but I’m not the one in control of that. If you really want to come, let me know and I can see if there are open spots for non-ATDC folks.
Oh yeah, if you want to get PR on this blog - it’s pretty easy. Just drop me a note and we can chat about what you’re doing and see if it fits with what I’ve been writing about.
I heard an interesting PR related tidbit at 