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).
But I digress, this isn’t a “slam ATDC companies” post. They just have an easy list of companies that I could analyze and use to understand what is going on. My point is that I’m having to wade through a lot of noise (30 of 42 companies) to get a view on the handful of companies that are generating ongoing news that they’re willing to talk about and trumpet on their own. Note, I didn’t analyze the releases to find out if they were worthwhile news. I’m merely looking at the act of engaging with the pubic via press releases.
So I’ve talked about complaints about lack of coverage of local companies. Heck, I’ve made the same point too and that we’re a virtual unknown even though we have great stories to point to. But first, perhaps we need to look at the lack of media savvy that our local companies have. Yes, I know that ATDC companies aren’t representative of all companies locally or on the East Coast. But I think we need to take a look at what startups need to do to market themselves. Can you really complain that we don’t get press locally when the people who are doing things aren’t creating anything worthy to write about? Actually, let me rephrase that - can you really complain when the people who are doing things aren’t taking the time to write/talk about what they’re doing? Most of these companies have to be doing something, they just expect other people to write about it. Sorry, that isn’t how this works. No one is going to champion your cause if you aren’t willing to do some of the work.
So do you have a company blog or news feed that you think I should be monitoring? If so, leave a comment with a link to the feed. When I see good news, I’ll make sure I write about it. I’m planning on setting something up soon where you can privately pitch news as well. In the meantime, if you see me at a local event don’t hesitate to come up and tell me about the newest, coolest thing you and your team is working on.
Good grief.
Not that it really matters but I think a total of three have blogs. Evoca, Intelehealth, and Vendormate. One other (that I know of) is planning to launch one.
Would you like to come in and present your findings during a ATDC brown bag and perhaps offer a plan of action for folks to remedy their lack of self promotion? I think people would find your research and perspective valuable.
Lance - thanks for the note. Yeah, it’s very possible that I missed some methods of communication. As I said, this was all self-interest to let me get news and not spend my entire day doing this. I’d love to come in and do a brown bag on this topic. I’ll contact you off blog and we can set it up.