Glenn on DIY PR
Glenn has a great guest post over on Guy Kawasaki’s blog on DIY PR:
Just the other day a newspaper’s technology editor told me, “It’s just so hard to meet entrepreneurs these days. You always get their PR people.” A dozen entrepreneurs sprang to mind who would kill to tell their stories. All have agencies. So what I am recommending is not howto manage an agency, but something more radical: not hiring an agency at all. Here are ten reasons why.
There’s no doubt we do many things differently at Redfin.
Last week Glenn and Cynthia (our PR wizard) filled our conference room to the brim with Redfin employees interesting in hearing about how we approach PR at Redfin. They shared lots of tips and experiences giving us the background on how we’ve been able to spread the word about Redfin through the media. What was most remarkable about the hour is that at no time did they tell us not to talk to the media or blog. Above all else they trust us to do the right thing.
Contrast that with my previous job at Microsoft where I was allowed to blog (though negative blogging about Microsoft and its products was certainly frowned upon) and it was beat into our heads to never ever talk to a journalist and to always refer to them to WagEd. In fact when I blogged about changes to our employee benefits and was later quoted in the Washington Post I thought for sure I was going to be fired (thankfully I wasn’t!)