6. Preparing For PR

A lot of work goes into preparing a product for its introduction to the market. Your blog pitch represents only a small part of that effort. There’s a website to get ready, marketing text to create, tweets to ... send, videos to produce, and more. In this chapter, we thought we’d share some of our thoughts about some of this supporting material, and how it affects us in the blogging world.

That’s because, as reviewers, we experience the full gestalt of your public relations. We don’t just test your product, we visit your site looking for information, we read your marketing materials, and we look at your storefronts. Your full presence on the web is just as important and interesting to us as it will be to your eventual customers. For those reasons, we decided to discuss a few critical preparation tasks that smaller devs often overlook in their run-up to product launch.

Get Your Product into Shape

This may seem like an obvious point we’re about to make, but it’s one that has tripped up more developers than we can count. It’s this: Finish your product before selling it or soliciting reviews. Your product should be complete, working, and ready for sale.

Apps should be thoroughly debugged and completely tested. Hardware should be fully vetted, certified if needed, and ready to be used. Your new product should, in fact, sparkle. Submitting a product that’s not ready for prime time represents an easy way to sabotage yourself and your business.

For software, your app doesn’t have to create world peace, but make sure it’s entirely developed and perfectly usable. Sand away any rough edges as you clean up your application to prepare it for launch. A philosophy that often hurts apps is “I’ll just throw it out there and see if gets an audience.” This attitude exists as plague of half-written tech demos, partially implemented feature sets, and rushed-to-market graphics. A good application doesn’t have to be overly designed. It just needs to be solid: well built, well tested, and workable.

Produce apps that do the job you state that they do, that provide enough features to make it worthwhile to its audience, and craft the app in a way that it doesn’t crash or break during use. If you do that, you will find an audience. It’s better to take a few weeks or months more to develop your app than try to rush out a product that’s not ready for the spotlight. Deadlines, especially artificial ones, doom more promising apps than any other cause.

For hardware, make sure your product doesn’t fall to pieces in the tester’s hands (it’s happened), that it does what it promises to do and that it won’t start smoking after it’s been plugged in (that’s also happened). If you’re waiting on final packaging, we’ll understand, but please send us materials are fully fabricated and ready for sale.

There’s a phrase that floats around the developer community, which is this: Real developers ship. We’d amend that phrase to read: Real developers ship real products. Too often, lost in the need to push an item out for sale is the understanding that the product has to offer value to the consumer and be worthy of an exchange of money. Regardless of whether your product is groundbreaking or a follow-on to an existing market, without that value, you won’t receive the good reviews you’re looking for and the loyal customer base your product needs.

Prepare Your Marketing Text

The marketing text you use to sell your product, whether on your website or on a third-party store, needs to be clear, simple, and effective. Your text explains to your customer what your product does and why they should purchase it. You need to do that without boring or confusing that audience.

Mac Developer Lyle Andrews offered some excellent advice on this in a recent TUAW interview. Here’s some of what he had to say about creating marketing materials for selling your product:

Keep it short. This indicates that you are confident that the customer is going to like your product if they are interested in general. It shows you feel like you don’t have to say that much to make the sale. This is true with new clients as well as products.

A long description starts to feel like an apology after awhile. However, some things are complex and merit a longer description. Conciseness is the actual metric. How can you say the most with the least words?

Keep it Plain. Plain descriptions with minimal self-praise and adjectives are trusted more by App Store customers than overinflated rhetoric.

Focus on Strength. Best in class in some way? Definitely say so. If nothing is the best, should you be aiming higher? This is true for Fireworks HD, it is in some ways a silly app I built to test out the store, but if you need beautiful 100% realistic HD fireworks for your event that don’t repeat in sequence and work when no network connection is available, there is nothing better available for Mac than Fireworks HD.

Be a master of the obvious. While there are many great naming strategies, if you can name a product after it’s product category, you have a home field advantage. With “Network Logger” for instance, the genus is instantly obvious, the customer just needs to know the species. They click, they are coming to see you, you are the category. The sale is yours to lose.

Choose Strong Branding

Make sure the icon or brand that represents your product is strong and clear. For App Store, it should differentiate itself from any other items in the same category. Don’t let your look blend in with the others; make it visually distinct. And regardless of what you are selling, your branding needs to be clean, professional, and sharp.

Both customers and bloggers relate poorly to imagery that is slapdash, rushed, or appears to have been drawn by a six-year old. A little extra investment of time or money to create a solid product image helps convey a sense of confidence in your product, that the same care was used to create it.

You can hire a company like the Icon Factory (iconfactory.com/design) to develop that branding for you—regardless of whether you’re a hardware or software developer. As Figure 6-1 demonstrates, you’re investing in an identity that sets your product apart from the crowd.

Figure 6-1. The Icon Factor creates high-quality custom icons for developers.

Website Essentials

Professional product development usually implies a professionally designed website to back it up. Good websites provide product information, pricing, and sale links to where customers can purchase your product.

Your main web page should proactively offer product information to its visitors and individual product pages should inform and excite sales. Consider Figure 6-2, which shows Netwalk App’s Promotee website. This page contains all the important elements needed to promote and support sales for the product. (It’s also a terrific app for creating exactly the shots you need for your own professional website, so keep that in mind.)

Figure 6-2. Promotee’s website provides all the information potential customers need to explore the program and purchase the product.

Promotee’s site offers clear branding both for the developer (Netwalk Apps) and its product (Promotee). It provides easy-to-locate purchase links both from the App Store and directly from the vendor. It explains what the product does (Overview, bottom left) and lists its key features (bottom right). And it offers support links (top-right corner) for anyone needing further information about product use before or after purchase.

Always make sure that your support site is ready to go before you contact bloggers for a review. Bloggers often visit product sites to check for background information, read more about the product, look at pricing, and so forth. If your website isn’t live, and this isn’t specifically an “advanced peek” at your app, you should not be at the point where you are sending out review requests.

If you want a professional impression, create one with a professional website.

Add a “Contact Us” Link

Make sure you put a working Contact Us link on your website. We prefer one on every page because it’s much easier to find, although it’s perfectly all right to place it in the “About Us” section of your site. Not all reviews happen because you submit a pitch. Bloggers often respond to word-of-mouth or come across your product through a Google search. If they cannot contact you, you lose potentially valuable coverage.

You wouldn’t believe how many sites have lost these opportunities simply because bloggers couldn’t figure out how to contact them. This isn’t just an occasional situation; it’s one that pops up frequently.

Put your contact information front and center on your website and, where possible, avoid contact forms. Provide a normal email address. We cannot tell you how many promo code requests we have messed up because it’s hard to work with someone else’s web page.

Take Care with Company Branding

We work in an Apple world at TUAW. Other similar websites deal primarily with Google and Android, or Microsoft or Nintendo. Apple has very specific guidelines for using its logos and badges on your website. The same kinds of rules often apply to other protected brands and standards, such as Bluetooth, Android, and so forth. Always check for guidelines when you promote an affiliation or technology as part of your app or other product.

With Apple, some marketing assets are strictly controlled and require marketing and advertising review. Others can be used freely so long as you follow simple guidelines. For example, here are things that make Apple cranky (see Figure 6-3): using the Apple logo, rotating Apple-provided art, and changing art colors. Other things include using the iTunes logo, animating the logo, changing logo text, and annoying passing aardvarks. (We may be kidding on the last item. Slightly.)

Figure 6-3. Apple issues strict guidelines on the use of its logos and branding.

To give you a sense of Apple’s level of control for App Store marketing, Figure 6-4 reproduces their Do’s and Don’ts list just for using product images on your website. This table does not even begin to cover such minutia as “Do not display Apple products smaller than 25mm in length for printed materials and 200 pixels onscreen.” You can find a full marketing guidelines brochure on Apple’s developer site, and we encourage you to read it through if your product is hosted on its App Store.

Figure 6-4. Apple issues strict guidelines on the use of its logos and branding.

Creating a Reviewer’s Guide

With hardware and more sophisticated or expensive apps, reviewers often receive a walkthrough or reviewer’s guide from the developer. Reviewer’s guides are meant for members of the media who evaluate software and hardware products. These guides explain, in a few pages, what the goal of the app is, who the intended audience is, what makes the app better than the competition, and how to use the app. If there are incredible features that a reviewer might not necessarily dig into, the reviewer’s guide offers a way to highlight those features and show how to use them.

Reviewer’s guides aren’t huge, complicated documents. A few pages with highlights, screenshots of UI features, and some simple instructions on how to do some amazing things with the app can go a long way toward getting a reviewer excited about your product.

To get an idea of a well-done reviewer’s guide, take a look at the one prepared for Penultimate for iPad (see Figure 6-5). Penultimate is a note-taking app that has been acquired by Evernote. Its seven-page guide starts with a description of the app, a note about some of the glowing reviews it has received, lists its key features, and discusses the guiding principles behind the development of the app.

Figure 6-5. The Penultimate reviewer’s guide offers an excellent example of what to do. It includes a summary of the product, a key feature bullet list, and a simple tour to familiarize reviewers with the app.

Next, the guide offers a quick tour showing how to use Penultimate’s built-in tools and integration with Dropbox and (of course) Evernote. At the end of the PDF document is an invitation to email the developers if reviewers have questions, with a live email link.

As you’d expect, you don’t need to print out and physically snail mail this information. We’ve seen developers who include a PDF of information for reviewers, while others provide the URL of a website featuring text and videos highlighting the app’s more dramatic features. However, if you have a physical product that you’re sending for a hands-on review by a blogger, it doesn’t cost any more to throw in a printed copy of the reviewer’s guide.

One hardware vendor that Steve works with on a regular basis provides a folder with every review device. The folder includes a cover letter, a short reviewer’s guide, a specification sheet, a business card, and one or two giveaway plastic pens. It’s a nice way to keep the information organized, even if the blogger isn’t.

This information is generally part of a press kit that is made available to reviewers. A well-written press kit also includes information about the developers, makes comparisons with competing products, and includes contact information for reviewers who want to ask questions or get clarification on a topic. Bloggers might also need tech support, specifically if they’ve found a bug that somehow eluded your best testing efforts. Don’t make it difficult for reviewers to contact you.

The Tao of Reviewer’s Guides

Never assume that reviewers understand the function or UI of your app as well as you do. We all love our children—human, accessory, and app—in a way that cannot be matched by others. So, convey your app’s functionality through a reviewer’s guide. Reviewer’s guides support your app by pointing out features that bloggers may otherwise overlook.

A reviewer’s guide focuses on exposing features that aren’t obvious and may need some manipulation to get through. We recently received a review copy of a somewhat obscure life-coaching application that focused on goal setting and problem solving. Unfortunately, despite investing time, we couldn’t figure out how to use the application. We ultimately decided to give the software a pass.

This is where a reviewer’s guide would have saved the review. If the developer had provided a walk-through, showing us how to set up goals, mark progress, and evaluate results, the app may have made it to our main page. Instead, it was deleted and forgotten.

A reviewer’s guide typically consists of the following elements:

• Summary of your product and a list of product highlights

• Separate list of any new features introduced in this release

• System requirements list

• List of common use cases for the product

• Tutorial walk-through of the product’s key features, with plenty of pictures

Think of a reviewer’s guide as an opportunity to brief the press, but instead of doing it in person with a live demo, you typically provide a 5–20 page how-to document. Your goal is to move a reviewer past any hurdles in performing a hands-on inspection of your product.

Videos are never a substitute for a written reviewer’s guide, although you can post them to the web as a supplement. As a rule, reviewers won’t sit down and watch a long show about your product. They want to refer to a set of instructions, perform them, build a general idea of how the product works, and then start their own evaluation from there.

Reviewers don’t have a lot of time to spend on each product. They need to get up and running in the shortest amount of time possible. A good reviewer’s guide is short and focused. It uses a simple document layout and skips hype. Think plain text, pictures, and usage diagrams. Avoid sales pitches. You’re not trying to convince anyone about your product merits, you’re just trying to convey its functionality through concrete usage examples.

Remember who your audience is: people who are technically capable and familiar with normal computer operations. Leave off any “here’s how you install the application or switch on the product” steps and skip directly to the “getting started” heart of your product usage tips.

Show off the highlights of your app in the fewest number of steps. If your product’s features are too complicated to demonstrate in a short guide, it may not be suitable for a simple review.

About Press Releases

For small indie developers, press releases represent pretty much the least effective way to get the word out about your product. A press release is a short written communication sent out en masse to members of the news media. You can pay a small fee to one of the many press services, and they will bulk email it to nearly every site you can imagine. You can also purchase writing services to craft a professional release.

It’s a pity then that the money you pay to create and send that press release might be a complete waste. Unfortunately, many reviewers tend to skip through each morning’s PR blasts. We encounter so much noise compared to so little signal in press-release content that zoning out entirely is a not uncommon response.

On the other hand, PR services such as prMac and PRWeb can get the word out to a number of sites that you might not even be aware of and ensure that your product gains some search-engine mojo. This helps provide you with statistics on how effective your press release was. prMac, for example, provides both free and paid press release distribution services. The extended distribution only costs $19.95 and is sent to RSS and social media aggregators, news agencies, and an extensive list of websites.

Our take is this: A well-written individual pitch to websites generally works far better in terms of connecting to bloggers than a standard press release.

In case you do want to go the press-release route, you can find a few excellent tutorials at prweb.com (http://service.prweb.com/learning/c/how-to-quick-tips) for writing press releases:

• PRWeb’s Press Release Writing Fundamentals

• PRWeb’s How to Write Press Releases

If you have a compelling need to create a press release, these how-to presentations offer a helpful launching pad. PRWeb also provides weekly free webinars on how to write and optimize press releases, which is helpful if you’re struggling for ideas for marketing your product.

Preparing that All-Important Product Video

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video has to be worth at least a billion. A short, focused, and widely distributed video of the best attributes of your software or hardware product does more to whip up excitement than the rest of a well-written pitch.

A top-notch demonstration video distributed on YouTube can go viral, although it’s rare, creating a tidal wave of buzz about your product that takes it from the realm of the also-rans to the hall of champions.

This section talks about some methods of capturing screen videos, what you should keep in mind when making a video, where to post the video, and how to leverage social media outlets to get views.

Recording Videos

When it comes to app demonstration, at least on iOS, one new product has solved many problems. Reflector (formerly “Reflection,” reflectorapp.com) allows you to use AirPlay to mirror your iPhone or iPad screen to a Macintosh or Windows system where you can then record the screen directly from within the application.

Before Reflector, we had to either Rube Goldberg our way through creating solutions with Apple TV, video-digitizing software, and screen-capture utilities, or use an external camera to record the mobile device screen. It was a real mess, and the quality varied all over the map. This is still the case when we work with Android and Windows mobile systems.

Over-the-shoulder video is still acceptable, but try to keep things in focus (literally, although figuratively helps, too). Your camera and device should be stationary and on tripods if at all possible. IPEVO makes both the Point 2View and Ziggi document cameras, which ship with their own multi-jointed stands. Just place the smartphone or tablet on a flat surface, set the document camera so that it is looking down on the device screen, and then use video capture software (Apple’s Photo Booth even works!) to grab your demonstration.

Don’t think that you need an expensive studio video camera to shoot decent handheld demonstration videos. Many point-and-shoot cameras and even smartphones are capable of capturing high-definition 1080p video that is more than adequate to the task. Steve used a Canon point-and-shoot camera to capture an over-the-shoulder video of Realmac Software’s Nik Fletcher demonstrating the wildly successful Clear app.

To shoot a product video with a smartphone, consider using a tripod mount, such as the Glif+ from Studio Neat with a portable tripod, like the Joby Gorillapod. An investment of about $50 provides a stable platform for grabbing video or taking high-resolution stills.

Developers of applications for Mac and Windows have many software options for capturing screencasts for product demos. Tools such as Camtasia run on both desktop platforms and capture high-quality video as you demonstrate the app on your machine. Once the video is captured, a suite of editing tools built into these screencasting apps makes it easy to do voiceovers, add titles, and even provide special effects such as highlighting the cursor or part of the screen.

Good Demo Videos Qualities

When creating pitch-ready videos, make sure you keep things short. Ideally, your video should last between 30 and 60 seconds, and always under 2 minutes. Bloggers have the attention span of fleas. Just get in there, demonstrate the heart of your product, and get out. If anyone is interested, they’ll subject your product to a far more thorough look-through than any video could help with when they get a chance to test in real life.

A good product video

• Highlights the product’s core functionality through action, not just screenshots

• Showcases the product’s interface and its level of finish

• Tells a story of the product’s hook

• Skips the background story of the app’s development (unless that story is what you’re specifically pitching to the website)

Editing Videos

You don’t need to be a professional video editor or spend thousands of dollars to make your magnum opus. Remember our discussion of the Une Bobine videos earlier in this book? Two of the three videos were made using the “film trailer” feature of iMovie for Mac; a great way to force yourself to tell your story quickly.

iMovie (see Figure 6-6) is simple enough for anyone to use, and there are similar applications available for Windows and Linux. Apple also makes iMovie for iOS, which produces surprisingly good-quality videos on an iPhone or iPad. If you’ve never used iMovie before, spending a few hours watching the iMovie tutorials at http://www.apple.com/support/imovie/ provides enough background to get you pointed in the right direction.

Figure 6-6. For Mac owners, iMovie provides a low-cost solution for creating high-quality product videos.

Simply capture video of your app or hardware in action, add titles where appropriate, and add music and/or a voiceover to explain important features. For the most part, letting your product tell the story is the best way to create a compelling video.

For building excitement about a product release, a series of short videos may tell the story better than one longer one. When Griffin Technology was getting ready to release its iPhone-controlled HELO TC toy helicopter, it created a trio of related videos. These told the story of a bored office worker who brought some excitement to work by buzzing his boss and co-workers with his little helicopter. Each of the first two videos provided a teaser for the next in the series, letting the story continue and resolving in the third video. Never underestimate the power of the cliffhanger ending to get viewers hooked on your videos.

Tightening Your Pitch Video

As a developer, you’re well aware that selling your product is just as important as creating your product. What follows are six tips to help you create tighter video pitches. Use these suggestions to help tune your product videos before you send them off to bloggers:

1. Be brief—Many videos are simply too long. If your video approaches 2 minutes in length, you’re forgetting a key fact about communication.

Squirrel¹

¹ Refer to the Disney-Pixar movie Up for an explanation of this term.

Many busy reviewers have the attention span of a toddler, if that. Instead of spanning 2 minutes or more, try cutting your video to 30 seconds.

2. Find your hook—Hooks, which are the big ideas that sell your product, are often buried deep in a good video. Hooks include enticing, clever, or catchy ideas that grab a potential consumer’s attention. Look for your hook, and then bring it out, punch it big time, and stop.

3. Focus on the message—Don’t make mistake that we best characterize as “you think viewers will be as enchanted with the moment-by-moment usage of your product as you are.” Don’t include long app excerpts or extended moment-by-moment use of your product. Let the reviewer follow up and test the item hands-out rather than trying to engage with it as a static video playback.

We believe hands-on testing is always a better way to appreciate a product. We don’t suggest you skip product coverage entirely, mind you, but you should just offer enough to engage interest and no more. The viewer should get a sense of how the product operates, but doesn’t need a blow-by-blow introduction.

4. Communicate your successes—Don’t fail to sell a really important strength of many companies. We call this one “play your winners.” If your company is rather well known for another product, we recommend that you punch that product somewhere in your presentation. If you have hired star designers or award winning programmers, mention that.

5. Avoid passive voice—Drop the buzzwords and passive-voice descriptions, and offer more engaging descriptions to the viewer. More often than not, the problem stems from a “good enough” mentality. You lead with your first attempt.

Take a break. Go back after a while and listen to your script, then edit it. You have nothing to lose but your “is”-es.

6. Guide the viewer—Conclude the video with concrete information of what to do next, should someone be interested in following up. It never hurts to lead a potential reviewer by the hand after engaging his interest.

Video Music

Recently, a developer sent a video as part of his TUAW product pitch. The app itself was interesting enough, but Erica was blown away by the video’s music. It was smart, contemporary, and it had excellent production values. She Googled to find out more about this music and discovered AudioJungle.

We’ve written in the distant past about purchasing royalty-free tracks for use in products and videos, but back then, it was an expensive option with limited vendors. The track Erica fell in love with (Give Our Dreams Their Wings to Fly by musician Tim McMorris) cost just $14 to license in a video.

That’s an amazingly reasonable price for nearly any software developer who’s building a product demo reel. Instead of thinking of licensing music as an expensive obstacle, it transforms that decision into an “of course, I can afford that” mandate.

We find AudioJungle to be an incredible resource for purchasing high-quality royalty-free music and sound effects at affordable prices.

Posting Videos

You can post your video anywhere: Vimeo, YouTube, your personal website, etc. When sending in pitches, make sure you include working URLs and a description of what the video’s role is (e.g., demonstration video, product marketing video, etc.).

Be sure to point out to potential reviewers if your video is capable of being embedded on a web page. Both YouTube and Vimeo provide automatic embed codes when sharing is enabled, making it simple for a blogger to add the product video to a post.

If your video is private, and not meant for public dissemination, feel free to mention that as well (e.g., “Here’s a quick video demonstration of our product. Please do not share this URL with others”). On YouTube, you can disable public listing so a video can only be shared by providing its URL. That’s a great option if your product or video isn’t ready for prime time exposure.

At other times, however, you will want to create a social media push. For those situations, make it clear in your pitch communications: “Feel free to tweet about this video, whether you review the product or not.” A strong, funny video can get a big jump from a Tumblr, Facebook, or Twitter mention from a large website, even if they chose not to review the product directly.

The Live Demo

During the past few years, we’ve seen an increase in what you could call the “live demo,” a demonstration of a product done using Skype, GoToMeeting, JoinMe, and other such services. These demos take more planning to accomplish, but are a way to show off the features of your product and answer the questions of your blogger audience at the same time.

For live demos, there are some simple guidelines to follow:

• Have a real product or at least give bloggers an indication that what they’re looking at is a technology demonstration and not a real product. Being shown something cool and then told after the fact that it may never make it to market can be incredibly deflating. Set expectations about the product’s availability date.

• Make sure the video and sound are clear, and that you’ve got the technical details down before you call your first blogger. A fast way to turn off the interest of a blogger is to waste 30 minutes of her time trying to fix a sound issue during a call or showing her a barely visible demo on the screen.

• Set a time limit for the demo. Don’t leave it open-ended. Let the blogger know that the demo is scheduled to run for only 10 or 15 minutes, and he’ll be more likely to accept your invitation. If a blogger shows a genuine interest in you or your product, let him dictate how long he stays on the line and asks questions.

• Offer to let the blogger record the demo for a podcast. Nothing makes a video podcaster happier than to get free video content that takes up airtime.

• Follow up after the live demo. If you’ve promised screenshots, video links, or promo codes, send that information as soon as possible after the demo. Likewise, if you have a physical product that you’re showing off and can send a review item to the blogger, do it as soon as possible after the demo to keep the blogger’s interest level high. Remember that we have short attention spans!

• Thank the blogger for his time and interest, and ask if he has any additional questions.

Live demos can also be done in person if the blogger and developer are in the same city or attending the same trade show. When some of the major trade shows or expos are imminent, don’t try to make an appointment with a blogger the day before or during the show. We’re usually running around haphazardly and would love nothing more than to have a precise schedule of appointments to keep. Contact us well in advance, ask if we’re attending the conference, and if we are, then set up a short time for a demo.

Bloggers usually enjoy meeting developers and manufacturers in person. It’s a wonderful way for us to connect on a personal level, to get a better idea of the people and products we’re writing about, and to even develop long-lasting business and personal relationships. TUAW Editor-in-Chief Victor Agreda, Jr., has built a continuing series of video interviews with developers known as “Origin Stories,” which highlight developers and hardware manufacturers. It’s a compelling video series that can give viewers insight into your product that may not otherwise be revealed.

Preparing Review Materials

When putting together review materials, you can generally focus on the basics: placing the item into the box and shipping it off to the address provided by the reviewing website or requesting a promo code or purchasing a gift card and sending that along. There are other factors to consider, however. This section runs down some of the things you may want to think about when preparing for the review.

Do You Want the Product Back?

Websites are always happy to run giveaways or donate your items to local charities. Make it clear whether or not physical products must be returned. For return items, provide a pre-addressed UPS or Fedex shipping label. Importantly, make sure it is legible.

That’s right. We’ve had to struggle at the Fedex office as the clerk tried to figure out who to send the product back to because he could not read the form. Trying to track down a vendor to clarify an address takes time and effort, and generally irritates the bloggers who may have to spend unpaid time returning materials instead of earning money writing reviews.

Should You Include Other Items in the Package?

The rule of thumb is that you never need to include any extra items, like T-shirts, hats, basketball hoops, or other miscellanea that often accompany review items. We may give you a 3-second mention for these extra bits on TUAW TV Live, but your product receives no additional consideration or special treatment. Plus, we have to give all those items away anyway.

Should You Submit Full Copies or Time-Limited Demos?

This will sound incredibly self-serving, but we think you should always offer reviewers full NFR (not for retail) licenses for your products. Why? Because, a few months down the line when we’re working on a write-up for a completely unrelated matter, we may think back to our original review and decide to mention it in that new post.

If we’ve passed the time limit for your product and can’t use it anymore, you may miss out on some valuable coverage opportunities. Sure, we’ll ping you again and hope to include the product in the write-up, but if the timing doesn’t work out and you zig while we zag, there’s a chance for good product exposure down the drain.

Social Media

Social media outlets, like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. (see Figure 6-7), provide excellent opportunities to extend your brand beyond a webpage. Consider creating a Facebook page dedicated to your company or product. Establish a Twitter account to be your virtual “voice.” A social media strategy can help you engage with the public and promote your product.

Figure 6-7. Social media outlets, like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, offer excellent ways to promote your product.

Here are some do’s and don’ts to consider as you integrate that social presence into your relationship with bloggers and customers.

Be Interactive

Don’t just post status updates. Engage in conversation. Show that there are real people behind your product and that you’re there to help point people to your support pages or answer simple questions. If a blogger tweets you with a promo code request or asks for more information about your product, start a conversation. Answering a support question in a highly visible tweet is a wonderful way to show how responsive your company is to the needs of its customers.

Be Diplomatic

Don’t alienate either bloggers or customers by getting into public fights, jumping into politics, or otherwise calling negative attention to your product or brand. You can use social media as a bully pulpit, but do so cautiously and with common sense. This is a business identity you’re using. Remember, it’s nearly impossible to retract your posts once they’ve gone online.

Don’t Be Hostile

Don’t ignore, block, ban, or argue with the public at large. This, of course, is an extension of the previous point, but it’s worth repeating. Twitter and Facebook can be your ally, but if you’re being hostile or rude to a customer, the world is going to see it. If you need to get into an “adult conversation” with a customer, offer to take it offline and talk to them on the phone or via email. Don’t let the rest of the world see your dirty laundry.

Be Human

Bill Gerth, Comcast’s PR point person on Twitter (@ComcastBill), has proved to be one of that company’s most valuable assets. By providing a warm human presence, he’s helped counteract a lot of the bad will aimed toward the broadcast and broadband giant.

Be Focused

Don’t open your accounts to all members of your team. The voice of your brand represents you, establishing who you are and what you are to the public at large. Decide who that voice is and support that person with the time needed to create and maintain your presence.

Be Informative

Make sure the public knows when you’re about to start a sale, launching a cross-promotion, or when other major developments happen. Another way to grab attention is to provide tips on using your app or product to the world at large. That’s a bit harder to do in Twitter than in Facebook or other social networking apps, but you’d be surprised how much information you can get across in 140 characters.

Be Active

No one wants to “like” a page or follow a feed that’s months out of date. When you commit to social media, make sure there’s someone there to follow through on that promise.

Use Automatic Posting Tools

It’s so easy to cross-post information on a number of social networking or web sites. Use some of the automatic posting tools that are available to do the work for you—post once on Twitter, see the post appear on Facebook, your Tumblr page, and more.

There’s no reason for you to spend a lot of time updating multiple social networking outlets when there are ways to do this automatically. If your main website uses a common content management system, like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, any post you make can be blasted to the social networking services with no work on your part.

Cover All Possible Outlets

Sure, there are a lot of social networking sites out there, and you may be thinking that hangin’ with the big dogs—Facebook and Twitter—is going to be enough. By adding other social networking outlets, such as LinkedIn, Google+, Posterous, and Tumblr, you’re increasing the chance that someone is going to hear about your product. As mentioned before, many of these tools work together—one post can automatically appear on many outlets.

Be Giving

Social networking is a wonderful way to get attention by giving—giving away your product to randomly picked people who retweet or “like” a contest post. Everybody loves free software or hardware, and contests done through Twitter or Facebook are going to provide a lot of focus on your products. We suggest asking users to retweet or “like” a post to enter a giveaway; it’s up to you to figure how to pick the winner.

Wrapping Up

There’s more to marketing your product than just your pitch. Before you click the Send button to announce your product to your favorite blogs, be sure to have all of your proverbial ducks in a row. Those ducks should include a polished product, a good website, a product video, a reviewer’s guide, and social media. Gather your flock together with these salient points:

• Don’t send out information about a product that’s half-baked. Bloggers and the buying public aren’t happy with untested or incomplete products, so take your time and polish the product.

• Consider having a professional designer create a custom icon for your app, as strong branding can attract both bloggers and customers.

• A product video is an excellent idea, and it doesn’t need to have Hollywood-caliber production values. Just make sure that it demonstrates the most valuable features of your product in as little time as possible.

• Unless your product is so intuitive to use that it needs no explanation, consider creating a reviewer’s guide to lead bloggers through setup and usage.