 Hello, thank you so much for that warm introduction. Amazing to see so many people still alive at this time of day at Slush. I know these days are long, so thank you so much already for being here. So indeed, I'm going to talk to you about PR in mainly early stage companies. And I try to keep this very practical. Who am I? The name's Haney. I'm also a mom, and I have a dog and all that stuff. And maybe the thing I want to kind of point out this session isn't about Walt. I'm not going to get into that company. I'm not going to talk about DoorDash or anything. This is kind of my learnings from having done PR in the trenches. I've worked in multiple early stage, doing like the first PR rounds and stuff like that. So it's really kind of my advice for all of you. Cool. So the agenda, there's kind of two parts. How to pitch to the media. And then from that, how to build relationships. And also, I want to give you some practical tips. And if we get to the first part, the four things you need to remember when you pitch to the media is like, number one, start with your goal. Number two is have news. So actually craft an interesting story. Find the right media, and then perfect the pitch. If we go to the first part, so define your goal. I think many startups kind of have this like, we need publicity. OK? Why do you actually need that publicity? Publicity for the sakes of publicity probably won't do that much. So think a little bit beyond. Like, do you need more money? Are you looking to find investors into your company? Are you looking to recruit? Do you want to generate some awareness to get some first customers and partners? So really think a bit deeper about why you want to get that awareness, and start really building from there. So maybe you have a really cool product that has the potential to disrupt the pet industry, for example. And you want to get some early customers on board. So your goal will look very different than a sauce company doing something totally different. And I want to kind of mention something about PR goals. I know we live in this digital era where every click and every banner and everything is ultra-measured. For PR, my humble opinion is that most of those metrics are kind of bullshit. A lot of them don't really work, because ultimately what PR is about, it's about telling a story to an audience that it resonates with. And finding a measurable goal for that is really, really hard. So I'd kind of leave the UA metrics. Sorry, Frederick, I see you're the audience. I leave the UA metrics out of it when you're doing PR. So it's a storytelling thing. Cool. Then once you have your goal, you really need to have news, finding an interesting angle. And I'm going to tell you my number one advice usually for everyone is nobody gives a fuck about you, about your product, about your new feature. As you can see, there's 12 startups in a dozen. There's all the time stuff happening. So you really need to kind of get out of your own space and really think a bit broader than me, myself, and I. So you have to find an angle that people can relate to. But having said that, it's not about inventing a story. It's not about making lies that paid a pretty story. You have to be authentic and truthful. We've seen it. It backfires. When you start to lie and tell stories that aren't really true, ultimately, the truth will usually come out, and then your scene is pretty evil. So don't do that, either. And yeah, that's kind of the point in there. And I think something to think about is a step further. So you want to find a journalist. You want to tell your story. The journalist is serving their audience. So you have to think about the journalist's audience. Why would their readers want to read the story about you? And so I often kind of try to backtrack. Think about the problem that you're solving. If we use the pet industry as an example, tap into a larger narrative. So I have this make-believe startup. They do cat sand that's smart. So it will tell you when your cat sand needs changing. I know it's a stupid idea, but just to get you to the idea, there's a larger narrative there. So the pet industry is worth a lot of money. I think that's an interesting thing. People have more and more pets and less and less kids. You can find a lot of numbers. Maybe cats get depressed because their sand is not changed enough. Maybe they have infections because they're not being treated that well. So you can find something interesting and newsworthy if you do a bit of digging. And always tapping into existing news if it works. I think COVID has been a, from a PR perspective, there's a lot of ways to tap yourself into that. Maybe your startup does something that helps people who are working remotely have a better life. And you can tap into the pandemic and the working remote kind of new cycle from there. And then ultimately, what makes you unique? What makes you different? What's your, who's your founding team? Maybe you have some sort of, you went through a burnout and then you got this idea how you want to redo life and you have this amazing startup. And you can play that card. That might work really, really well. So yeah, ask yourself a lot of questions. Cool. That was that slide. If you don't believe me, believe Seth Godin, marketing guru guy, people don't buy goods and services. They buy relations, they buy stories, they buy magic. They won't buy the, you know, well maybe a select few will buy, you know, the newest megapixels, but a lot of people will actually buy the better looking photo. So anyway, so what is a good story? It paints a bigger picture. It's not only about yourself, it's about, you know, the unhappy cats and their urinary infections. What is the industry worth? You know, it's a massive industry. There's a huge potential there that will be interesting. How many people or cats can you impact in this case? It has to have emotion. Ultimately, people don't really remember the words, they remember the feeling and I think this is like a big component about any storytelling is having that emotion in there. Often this comes like the emotional component can come from your, you know, personal burnout experience. It can come from a customer of your platform, you know, maybe you were a huge help to their business during the pandemic or something along that line. Maybe your friend's kid uses your product and through that there's something, you know, emotional. And also it should make your company stand out. So if, you know, people don't want to listen to you, tell, you know, say how amazing you are. They might listen to an industry expert. They might listen to a vet who says how amazing this new cat product is. Cool, and it's authentic. It has to be authentic. If there's no truth behind it, don't even try. And then one thing is like, once you craft your story, you have an idea, kind of tell your mom or your dad or, you know, someone close by, tell them, this is my story and then ask them to repeat it back to you. Did they get it? Is it really like happening? Because it needs to be simple enough. You know, it needs to be the Uber of X, the Spotify of that. Like it has to be, you know, easy to understand. Cool, there. Okay, so at this point you maybe have a goal, you have an idea of your story, then you need to find the right media. And I think this is often a kind of challenging thing. It goes back to your goal. Who are you trying to reach? Are you trying to reach the investors? So they will follow the tech crunches, the financial times, you know, they follow a lot of news, there's a lot of newsletters that come into them and so forth. So you could really kind of gear your media line up for that. If it's for consumers, it really depends on the industry naturally. And you know, the more mainstream, the bigger it is, the harder it is to get into that. But then again, like for example, in the pet industry, there's Dogster Magazine. They might be easy to access to and you know, have a chat with versus getting yourself on Oprah. So you know, have some sense there. Recruiting, I think some kind of underutilized resource. So I think when we think about recruiting communication, podcasts, I think a lot of people listen to podcasts and that type of stuff. And it gives you a ability to tell your story a bit more deeply and in a bit longer format. So that's something to consider. And then you need to start following the media yourself. You need to follow, you need to read, you need to understand kind of who covers your space. And it also gives you a nice way to see what competitors are doing, you know, what else is happening in the industry. So yeah. And remember, I said this already once, but remember that the media is covering stories and for their readers. They're not covering them for you, for their readers. So always remember that. Kind of you know, and when you're doing your story and your pitch, you need to gear it a little bit based on your media selection as well. So the financial media won't care about happiness of cats. They will care about the worth of the pet industry, about, you know, the potential you have to make through your amazing cat product and so forth. And on a very practical level, like, do you know, take a Google spreadsheet or Excel, depends on your, you know, preference. And do a media list. It's really simple. You put publication, country, journalist, maybe their email, maybe their Twitter, depends on GDPR regulation a little bit. But just have that list. And then you kind of start to figure out for yourself, you get a kind of glimpse into who's covering the field. And you might want to have different tabs. You might want to have, you know, consumer facing, financial media. You might want to have tier one, tier two and so forth. But do that list. It really helps you kind of structure it. Cool. Then there. At this point, you should have enough to do the pitch. So you have your media list. You have your story. You have your goal and you're ready. Let's pitch. Who does the pitching? Are you going to do it yourself? Are you the CEO? Are you going to call them up and say, hey, I have a story. Are you going to hire a PR agency to do that for you? Might be worth it. They might already have the connections. Are you going to hire, you know, somebody in-house to do this part-time? Do you ask your marketing manager who's going to actually do the pitch? You need to decide this. Then you need to decide to who do you pitch? Is your story worth going all of your media list to? Or do you want to maybe go for five or 10? I'm often in the quality over quantity type of thinking. So trying to find a few, get a really like few good deeper dive interviews versus like blasting it all out. Sometimes you want to blast, but that's quite rare. You can also consider exclusivity. That means that you talk to one journalist only. You might get a better deal, meaning that you get like a more front page or at least closer to the front page type of thing if you do it only with them. That's something to consider. When do you do the pitching? You don't just send a press release and expect it to go out. That doesn't work. So you have your press release and you probably want to talk about it in advance. So we're talking about embargoes. So you're in touch with the reporter maybe three to seven days ahead of time, agree with them that, hey, this news is going to go out, then do you want to talk? That's the embargo. And this is what you have to do if you have a press release. And then ultimately, who's the spokesperson? If you're going to do interviews, who does the talking? And as you grow as a company, you might want to have more people do this talking. So often it's the CEO, but when you get to a different scale, you might want to have the CMO talk to start an audience and so forth. And now going even more into the details, that's a real press release that I edited for you a little bit, but a press release is nothing fancy. It's nothing to be scared of. It's not marketing copy. It's actually kind of you putting in simple words, what the fuck it is that you're trying to do or what it is that's your news. 80% of your work is the headline. Make that clear, what's happening, when and why. Under that you might have a couple of bullets, why it's relevant, include some interesting data, facts to back it up and so forth. You put a location, you put a date, you have one clear paragraph with the thing, then you have a quote. If you have more stuff to support your news, you might want to put another paragraph in there and if it's a partnership, you'll get another quote from that. Have your contact details linked to visual assets and that's it. And it's not marketing copy, it is news that you're trying to write. So save the hyperbole, save all the superlatives, unless you can back them up, just leave it out. That's the press release, then the pitching. I usually have a PR agency actually do it because they have a lot of contacts already and it takes a lot of time, but it's about calling or WhatsApping or emailing, depending on the preference of the journalist. Kind of like, hey, I have news for you and then you try to put it in short format on an embargo, care to talk type of thing and then if they agree, then you tell them more. Your pitch is kind of your press release in a nutshell that you send out and then you want to talk. And then if they agree to do the embargo or agree to cover the news, then you send them the press release in an email and then you have a phone call and talk about it or you do an interview with your CEO. The day of the announcement, so usually what we do is we embargo a few media ahead of time and then on the day of the press release, that's when we send it out and sending it out means an email. You don't attach a PDF, you just copy paste your press release, put in the media and you send it out. Unless you use a wire service, but that's typically in a later stage. This is kind of in the earlier stage, you're going to be emailing yourself. Cool, also have the release available on your website or your company blog. Have a link to visual assets so it's easy to get a nice image with it. And if you're going to do interviews, prepare. Don't go there cold. Ask yourself what are the tough questions, what will they probably ask and then be ready to answer those. And I usually just write down like, okay, here's the three core messages that we want to get through and here's a long list of different kind of questions that we can maybe anticipate and just go mentally through it so you don't go off cold. Cool. All right, that was the first part. I hope you all know how to pitch now. Good, ready? Okay, awesome. Then we go to how to build relationships and some practical tips. Relationships are not transactional, turns out. Humans don't like to be used. Humans like to have friends and help each other out. And I think kind of the best way to build relationships with the media is to have news, is have something worthy of a journalist's time, hopefully again and again. And when they ask for a favor, like, hey, do you know this and this person or have you heard about this and that, have a chat. You don't have to tell them everything or answer all the questions, but you can at least be helpful or intro them forward and so forth. Follow up, if somebody covers your company, send a hey, thanks for covering, I noticed. Awesome, or retweet. Try to become a resource, be helpful is my advice. And I think my next bullet is kind of a general, maybe life philosophies that humans like, well-behaving humans. Be nice, don't treat people like you want something out of them. And then go out to, I mean, obviously we haven't really gone out in the past couple of years, but now hopefully we'll see what happens. But you can go out to conferences, you can meet people, reporters are around, you can say like, hey, we're right for Bloomberg, cool, I do this and that. Maybe that will work and you get a contact from there. And then I think it really comes down to the follow-up game. I think that's the best way. Once you kind of have an in, then you hopefully continue to have a relationship with the reporter from there. Don't be a one hit wonder. It's kind of sad you do one piece of news and then you don't do anything anymore. So try to build a PR calendar with maybe some different angles and kind of a well-thought-out, okay, we have a new thing happening here, we can do something there. You have to, as a PR person, be kind of have a view in what's happening in the company in different parts of the organization. And PR, it's not like a one hit wonder. It's like, we're in the headlines, we made it. No, it's a long-term game. You won't expect ROI over one night, I think. Yeah, and it's ultimately telling the story. That's kind of the goal is you being able to tell your story. Like, I like to say it's like ads, kind of, you know, you push a thing out about your product. Like, it's super kind of quick and easy and you try to get the customer to click, but then PR is about telling the story. Why are you sending that ad out? You know, what is the product that you're advertising? It's like going a level deeper. Yep, I already mentioned the follow-ups, but then also kind of doing publicity for the sakes of publicity is also a bit meh. So, you know, be careful about this, or you don't want to be blasting the journalists every week, you know, once a quarter might be fine. Yep, remember your goals. A few tips, I mentioned this, don't attach a press release as a PDF, copy-paste it into an email. If it's a longer list of recipients, just put them in BCC and email yourself. And as mentioned, don't just send it and expect it to be published. Pre-brief, follow-up, call-up, like, did you notice? Are you gonna cover and so forth? I mentioned these terms, but I just want to be super clear what embargo means. Embargo means that you agree to tell the story to your reporter before they can publish it. So, you're gonna say that you can publish this on Wednesday at nine o'clock, but you're gonna talk a week before that. You just agree on that embargo very clearly. Exclusive means that you talk to one reporter and one reporter only. Don't piss anyone off by saying you're exclusive, but you're not. Also, in relationships, often not a good idea. And you can also try to negotiate this, and maybe you do an exclusive for the Finnish market, but also for the Swedish market and so forth, because there might not be that much overlap. And a few more tips. Forget Mondays, everyone's coming back from the weekend, their inboxes are full, just don't even try. Friday, people want to go out and have a drink and head out for the weekend. Forget Fridays. Tuesday tends to get quite busy because then it was not Monday, Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday might be a good idea. Avoid all the holidays. And remember, where is your target audience? Where is your media? You have to, if you want to do a thing in Israel, you need to be aware of their kind of different calendar than over here in Finland. US holidays, Thanksgiving was just, I think, last week, we always forget that in November, so be mindful of the globe. And then assets. I think it's worth investing into having some really good photos of your founding team, your CEO, your product, have some really nice looking screenshots, maybe a video even. Have your logo in multiple formats and colors. You might want to have one horizontal, one vertical and so forth. Have everything easily available? So either just on your website or downloadable. And then also something is, PR is also maybe, PR is always kind of focused on the media, but then you also have your own channels and you'll like, don't forget to kind of amplify whatever you're trying to do with the media and your own blog and your own social media. And your employees as well. You can try to engage them like, hey, we have something cool coming out, might be worth a LinkedIn post tomorrow type of thing. Yep, that was it. I'm super early on time. I tend to talk very quickly. I know for a Finnish person it's rare, but I want to thank you. This was an awesome opportunity to talk to you all today and I hope you have an amazing slush party and you're not too hungover tomorrow. Cool, thank you.