To Get Press, Teach. Don’t Sell. — Jason Calacanis
on Feb 20, 2009 - 8:01 PM PSTThe full program
A few lessons from this program
Have you noticed how much press Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, keeps getting?
I have (including here, here, and here), so I asked him to show us how he does it. Here’s an edited excerpt of what he taught in his Mixergy program. (Download the full program to get the complete lesson.)
If you show them something and you deny the market, you’re going to get caught. Journalists are smart. So when we launched Mahalo Answers, the first thing I did is say: “Here are the top 5 Answer sites out there. Here’s Yahoo! Answers. Here’s wiki.answers.com. And here’s Naver.com that you might not know about. They’re in Korea. Here’s the competitive landscape. Here’s everything I learned about knowledge exchanges.
“Here’s what we’re doing that’s different. We realize that knowledge exchanges exist. We realize they’ve been a tremendous success in terms of traffic. We realize that they haven’t been a tremendous success in terms of quality. So we want to make something that’s a lot higher quality.
“Here’s how we’re doing that. We have a virtual currency. Nobody’s ever done that. We have multi-media-style answers. Where you could put in images and videos and audio files. And we have a curation team that deletes bad answers or obnoxious answers, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. We pay them $10 per hour. They work from home. And so the best way to make the quality of a site go up is to get rid of the misspellings and the bad stuff.”
And what I just told you in 30 seconds is exactly what I told people over a 20-minute session–with examples. Showing not telling. I don’t have the ability to show you right now. I would if we were sitting in front of a computer. That same process hold true with a journalist.
And have something of significance. If you don’t have something of significance, you don’t want to waste their time.
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February 27th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Thanks for the post, Jason is absolutely correct.
This resonates beyond journalism. Penetrating markets with new ideas and solutions is tough, the end user, consumer, who ever it may be needs to be educated so they can make calculated decisions. Differentiating yourself becomes easy if you have a good product and your audience understands their options.
Thanks again,
Dre
April 28th, 2009 at 1:31 am
This is a wonderful opinion. The things mentioned are unanimous and needs to be appreciated by everyone.
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leneth
One thing that a lot of people have missed in this recent economic down turn is the fact that in-game money for all of the massive mutliplayer online role playing games has not been effected. I guess it just shows how strong and stable the computer game industry really is.
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January 12th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
So true Andres. Being up-front with your customers about your competition – like Jason was saying about doing so with the press – lends you credibility. Showoff what you do differently, why it matters, and let them decide. If you lose one or two customers to competitors that you introduced them to, they'll remember you as the source of that info, and probably tell their friends about both your products.
January 13th, 2010 at 6:13 am
So true Andres. Being up-front with your customers about your competition – like Jason was saying about doing so with the press – lends you credibility. Showoff what you do differently, why it matters, and let them decide. If you lose one or two customers to competitors that you introduced them to, they'll remember you as the source of that info, and probably tell their friends about both your products.