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November 15, 2013 04:28 am GMT

The Omniture Of PR? AirPR's New Analytics Platform Aims To Show CMOs How To Invest In PR

Screen Shot 2013-11-14 at 2.57.35 PMStartups and PR firms have long had a halting, if not embattled relationship. Spend time talking to entrepreneurs and those working at startups, and it won’t be long before you encounter the nagging mistrust founders have of PR firms and the PR process. On the one hand, that’s because, frankly, public relations and communications aren’t skills most entrepreneurs excel at or are comfortable with (and vice versa). On the other hand, as Zaarly co-founder Eric Koester wrote in a recent blog post, startups are all about math, and the job of a founder, simply put, is to make a simple math equation work: R > E. “You need to show how you can make the revenue you earn from a customer exceed the expenses you incur to get that customer,” he writes. It’s for this reason, among many others, that most founders not only pay attention to math, they’re datavores. The prevailing psychology, especially in a highly technical world, is that if you can’t measure and quantify the value of some activity or spend for the business, it’s not worth pursuing. So, why is there a sense that entrepreneurs struggle to find good PR firms? Well, startups, and particularly the founders and CTOs of tech-focused companies, aren’t always the most “outward-facing” people to begin with. Couple that with the fact that — and take this from someone in the media — good PR people can be hard to find, and you’re already halfway there. On the other side, entrepreneurs are already data and metrics-focused, so unsurprisingly, they have trouble seeing the value in spending money on a PR firm. Why? Well, if it’s an early-stage startup, capital is tight to begin with, but, really, it’s the fact that the PR process is largely opaque. Traditionally, it’s been difficult, if not impossible, to effectively measure Return On Investment (ROI). In the past, PR firms and startups have used “advertising value equivalency” as a placeholder for measuring media coverage compared to a particular publication’s CPM or CPI rates — or the functional equivalent thereof. But this really isn’t the most effective benchmark. If you haven’t already fallen asleep, this is the thought process that led Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer to create AirPR. The startup’s initial product, as we wrote in June, was a kind of “Match.com for PR.” In other words, AirPR offered a marketplace designed to match top, pre-screened PR talent with tech

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/RlvbTQEfN1U/

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