Mediaboss Marketing

Once upon a time, a startup could issue a press release and get the word out.

If it were only that easy today . . .

Now a starup is confronted with an information horde from Twitter to TV to YouTube to Yelp to Facebook and on and on. It becomes a challenge just to rise above the noise, not to mention controlling the message across all these media. Add the need to manage its communications cost-effectively and you have all the ingredients for startup agita.

So whats a startup to do? Here are seven ways a startup can raise its profile without breaking the bank:

Take an unorthodox approach. Remember Dollar Shave Clubs breakthrough video that caused the company to get 12,000 orders in the first 48 hours.

Why was it so effective? The video is irreverent and funny, the CEO likeable and also the chief evangelist sales officer--and is everything an officer could be, says Maha Ibrahim, general partner, Canaan Partners, a global venture capital firm.

Obviously, most startups won't benefit from the initial bonanza of a Dollar Shave Club. However, any startup can exercise creativity and a little boldness in its marketing.

Accentuate the difference. Take Kabam, for example, a late-stage gaming company that issued a press release detailing its financial performance. Normally private companies shy away from opening the kimono. But by doing so, Kabam sharpened the difference between itself and some of its better-known, yet poorly performing competitors, like Zynga, according to Ibrahim, whose company is an investor in Kabam. Differentiation doesn't mean focusing on some obscure feature that no one cares about. Instead, draw attention to a feature or benefit or expertise that matters to customers.

Founders need to evangelize what they do. Often lacking the budget to employ a full-time marketing or PR person, founders need to assume the marketing mantle. Marketing and PR needs to be incorporated into a startups culture so they are talking up the company to everyone they meet and ingesting ideas, advises David Beisel, partner at early-stage investors NextView Ventures. Cross a politician's zeal and charisma with a business person's product knowledge, and you get some idea of what is required.

Avoid stealth mode. Avoid stealth mode. This cant be said often enough, according to Beisel and Ibrahim. Startups cant afford to be in stealth mode where everything is kept hush-hush. Doing that deprives them of valuable feedback, ideas and support when they need it most.

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7 Ways To Make Your Startup Stand Out

WASHINGTON

Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell's Tidewater Virginia drawl could make the word "court" sound as if it had two syllables. And Justice Clarence Thomas, though he doesn't talk much, speaks in a deep baritone.

The voices of those justices and 30 others, as well as thousands of lawyers who have argued before the court, are now part of a massive Internet archive assembled by the Chicago-based Oyez Project. The group has spent more than a decade putting together recordings going back to 1955, when an audio recorder was first installed at the court.

Now, the group is finishing work that makes the archive even more accessible, linking the audio to simultaneously scrolling transcripts that also identify the justices and arguing lawyers as they speak. In all, almost 14,000 hours of audio are available for free. It would take more than a year and a half of continuous listening to hear everything.

"The only way to be authoritative is to say we have it all," said Jerry Goldman, the director of the project, which is based at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Goldman said the audio contains gems ranging from the sound of one justice forming a spit wad during the days when chewing tobacco in court was still acceptable to the time an arguing lawyer used the F-bomb, a word key to a 1971 case involving freedom of speech.

By this fall visitors to the project's website will be able to search all the argument transcripts, so someone could, Goldman says, search for and then listen to every time the phrase "strict scrutiny" has been used or every time someone said "broccoli" during last year's health care law debate.

The court's aural history has never been so accessible. Until fairly recently, the Supreme Court waited months before releasing the audio of proceedings. Now, oral argument recordings are released at the end of every week, but the court's own website only provides audio from 2010 forward.

The Oyez Project's website and an accompanying app are vastly more comprehensive. When Goldman began his work in the mid-1990s, he offered free streaming audio of about 100 hours of the court's most important cases.

In 2003, with funding from the National Science Foundation, Goldman was able to expand his offerings by digitizing reel-to-reel tape of the court's proceedings that had been archived in a warehouse in College Park, Md. Additional contributions from law firms and grants, including one from Google, helped him complete the project.

Read more here:
Supreme Court archive has about 14K hours of audio

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Mario Williams is back-tracking on attributing "kill" as a word Buffalo Bills co-ordinator Mike Pettine has used in describing defensive philosophy with his players.

In a series of messages the defensive end posted on his Twitter account Friday afternoon, Williams clarified that he wasn't quoting Pettine directly.

"Just to clarify a choice of words I used: The phrase 'kill them' has never been said by Coach Pet or any of my coaches/teammates," Williams wrote. "I said it as a figure of speech from my 'perspective' not literally or any actual intention."

Williams' posts came a day after he raised eyebrows in describing Pettine's aggressive approach to defence.

"He usually says 'Kill them or hurt them," Williams said, Thursday, following the final practice of the team's three-day mandatory minicamp.

Williams then smiled and added: "That's what I always hear, kill them or hurt them. So either way it's not a good thing for the other person."

The Bills took exception to Williams' comments.

At about the same time Williams posted his clarification, the Bills issued a statement from coach Doug Marrone denying that Pettine every used the word "kill."

"Mike has assured me that he has never used the word 'kill' in his terminology regarding our defensive strategy," Marrone said in the statement released to The Associated Press.

Marrone added that Pettine has used the word "hurt," but not in a physical context.

See original here:
Bills DE Williams clarifies attributing 'kill' to defensive co-ordinator Pettine

UpdatedJun 14, 2013 3:11 PM ET

Mario Williams is back-tracking on attributing "kill" as a word Buffalo Bills coordinator Mike Pettine has used in describing defensive philosophy with his players.

In a series of messages the defensive end posted on his Twitter account Friday afternoon, Williams clarified that he wasn't quoting Pettine directly.

"Just to clarify a choice of words I used: The phrase `kill them' has never been said by Coach Pet or any of my coaches/teammates," Williams wrote. "I said it as a figure of speech from my `perspective' not literally or any actual intention."

Williams' posts came a day after he raised eyebrows in describing Pettine's aggressive approach to defense.

"He usually says `Kill them or hurt them," Williams said, Thursday, following the final practice of the team's three-day mandatory minicamp.

Williams then smiled and added: "That's what I always hear, kill them or hurt them. So either way it's not a good thing for the other person."

The Bills took exception to Williams' comments.

At about the same time Williams posted his clarification, the Bills issued a statement from coach Doug Marrone denying that Pettine every used the word "kill."

See more here:
Bills deny DC Pettine used term 'kill'

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- Mario Williams is back-tracking on attributing ''kill'' as a word Buffalo Bills coordinator Mike Pettine has used in describing defensive philosophy with his players.

In a series of messages the defensive end posted on his Twitter account Friday afternoon, Williams clarified that he wasn't quoting Pettine directly.

''Just to clarify a choice of words I used: The phrase 'kill them' has never been said by Coach Pet or any of my coaches/teammates,'' Williams wrote. ''I said it as a figure of speech from my 'perspective' not literally or any actual intention.''

Williams' posts came a day after he raised eyebrows in describing Pettine's aggressive approach to defense.

''He usually says 'Kill them or hurt them,'' Williams said, Thursday, following the final practice of the team's three-day mandatory minicamp.

Williams then smiled and added: ''That's what I always hear, kill them or hurt them. So either way it's not a good thing for the other person.''

The Bills took exception to Williams' comments.

At about the same time Williams posted his clarification, the Bills issued a statement from coach Doug Marrone denying that Pettine every used the word ''kill.''

''Mike has assured me that he has never used the word 'kill' in his terminology regarding our defensive strategy,'' Marrone said in the statement released to The Associated Press.

Marrone added that Pettine has used the word ''hurt,'' but not in a physical context.

Read more:
Bills DE Williams clarifies 'kill' comment