Tag Archive for 'press release'

ATDC Brown Bag: Why Should I Talk About You?

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!

Why No Awareness?

In an effort to cover as much local news as possible, I thought I’d go to every local startup website I could find and subscribe to their newsfeed. As a one person side-project operation, I don’t have the luxury of spending hours a day finding news at this point. And besides, why not let a feed reader gather interesting news for me and let me get to the good stuff as quickly as possible?

Well, I think I might have found one of the reasons that good local news isn’t discussed that widely. After checking every one of ATDC’s companies (which I would expect to be representative of most local startup companies), only one company has a blog (that I could find, let me know if I missed any) and one other has an RSS feed of their news stories (again, tell me if I missed any). Over ATDC’s 42 listed companies, I found 11 without news sections, one with listed stories but no link to them, two “coming soon” type sites, one with a broken news page, one site that was totally broken, and two without dates on their stories. Of the remaining 24 companies that listed press releases, only 12 companies had releases from the last four months (August - December, 2007). One company’s most recent release was in 2001 (announcing their joining of with ATDC).

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