You Have a Million Calls to Make

This is not quite accurate. If you truly want to tell everyone about your application, then you have a few billion calls to me. However, do you really think that calling every man, woman, and child on planet earth is a valid or even possible marketing strategy?

Of course not—that is why you should have started a list of media contacts, as explained in Chapter 4. You should have added a lot people to that list, and you should have created a press release, as discussed in Chapter 8. You should also have set up your social networking sites and Twitter so you can inform the greatest amount of people in the least amount of time.

Sending Out Press Releases

Hopefully you have given those press releases some revisions, and you can finally send out the polished result to a bundle of media contacts. If you want to make it easy on yourself, you can simply start a new e-mail message, and copy and paste your press release. You should use plain text e-mail format if you want media people to copy and paste your press releases to their articles. If you are unfamiliar with the world of news blogging, you should know that many online articles often include a copy of the official press release. In fact, I have worked for tech and gadget blogs that have insisted that I attach the press release to the article.

You should also include a few screenshots on the e-mail, and you also might make it easy on yourself and just use the screenshots that you used when you submitted your application to the Android Market.

You can send other types of images as well, but I would focus on images that you want to see in an online or printed journal. Every tech and gadget blog that I have written for has required me to include an image of some kind. So you definitely want to make it easy for tech reporters by finding an image that would be perfect for an article. Consider this the “cover” that readers might use to judge your “book,” if I may speak in clichéd metaphors again.

This “perfect shot” doesn’t have to be a screenshot; it could be a picture showing the application in use by an Android user. For example, if you have some application that improves a camera, wouldn’t it be terrific to show an Android user taking a picture with your camera-improving application? The point is that you are looking for the image that will show potential users what your application is. Figure 10-2 shows an excellent example of a good image for the media.

Figure 10-2. A terrific image for an article about the Pano Android application

The image in Figure 10-2 is promotional material for Pano, an Android application that allows the user to take seamless panoramic photos without using any additional software. It is what you will see if you open up its official Android Market entry on a web browser on your computer. If I were writing an article about this application, I would use this image (and I have, actually).

The reason I would use this particular Pano image is because it has everything. The company logo is there. The slogan is there. It shows what the program does with one picture. Granted, it takes some creative liberties by showing a stretched-out Android device, but I’m certain that Android users will know that this is not one of Pano’s features. For those who are interested in panoramic photos on an Android device, it will capture their attention.

The one thing that I do not recommend with your media contacts is attaching your press release and/or screenshots as e-mail attachments. As someone who has been on the other side of the table, I am less likely to open an attachment, especially if it is a PDF file. The reason is that PDF files open up Adobe Acrobat or Reader, which tends to slow down my computer a bit. Not only that, having an attached PDF is often a flag for spam filters, and you don’t want your e-mail to be going there.

Here is another thing that you should know about sending out a batch e-mail to the press. You do not want to put all the names in the To section. If you do this, then all the recipients of your press release e-mail are going to see all the people that you sent it to. This looks really bad to anyone who works in the media, as it makes them feel like they are just a name on a list. Worse yet, you reveal your media contacts to everyone. What you want to do is put all your addresses in the Bcc field. This way, each recipient will receive your e-mail without seeing the others that it has been sent to. See Figure 10-3 for an example.

Figure 10-3. The image on the left shows how to send an e-mail of your press release to many people. Notice the recipients’ addresses are in the Bcc instead of the To section.

You should also look into the option of using campaign management software. These services can handle not only e-mail marketing, but social media as well. You can run a search for “Campaign Management Software” to find many available services, and you might want to check out Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) and Swiftpage (www.swiftpage.com/).

Giving Your Media People a Complimentary Copy of Your Application

You will find that media reviewers are more apt to review an application if you give it to them for free.

As a tech blogger and reviewer, a product can capture my interest if its press release includes something that says, “Please let me know if we can send this to you to review.” Many reviewers will say yes, as they like getting free things from time to time. Just take my word on that one.

Setting up a free sample on the Android Market is sadly not as simple as it is for Apple. Apple’s App Store allows developers a “comp” code, but this is not the case for Android. Also, unless your application is on the Amazon Appstore, a gift certificate is not the best way to go. About the only way to give away a free sample is to put the APK program on your web site or make a link for it in an e-mail, after which the app can then be downloaded to the recipient’s Android device.

Even though this seems like you are buying a review in exchange for a free sample, it is not. You have no guarantee that the reviewer will give you a good review simply because he or she received something for nothing. As a tech reviewer, I would never agree to any deal that said that I had to give a positive review of any review model sent to me. (In fact, no company has ever had the audacity to offer me such a deal).

In addition to giving away free samples, it is important to maintain a good working relationship with your media contacts. After all, these are the people who are doing you a favor by giving your application some much-needed press. The least you can do for them is send a thank you note for publishing your article. You don’t necessarily need to make every media person your best friend, but at least establish a LinkedIn contact.

As someone who has worked as a tech and gadget blogger, I have found that I have entered into strange relationships with tech companies and their public relations team. There is sort of an unspoken rule that allows the company to give the tech reviewer something, and the tech reviewer publishes an article in return. Think of it as a quid pro quo relationship, but the reporter can only give an honest review. If the product is not of the best quality, then the review will reflect that. Therefore, send out your best product to the media, or suffer the consequences of a bad review that could be worse than any bad review on the Android Market. As a tech writer, I have often received products that are so good that I have contacted the app makers just so I could review more of what they have to offer.

Media people often get bored of looking at the same places for news stories time and time again. Sometimes they like to find a unique story for themselves, and it is helpful when these stories come via a press release.

Also, as someone who is in the media, I like to have contacts who are in the know more than I can afford to be. I keep the contact information of PR people and company representatives because they are a source for information that I may not be able to get otherwise. This book could not have been written without them, and I consulted them several times when it came to questions about developing Android applications. In other words, your developer insight could make you a good source for media people, and those media people could give you some press by quoting you. In this way, I’ll occasionally contact people who I have contacted before in order to get new story ideas. Imagine if one of your media contacts sent you an e-mail saying that he or she was looking for new stories, and you just happened to be developing a new application at the time. This is certainly a better contact than a cold call to a media contact.