Lesson: How to Get Press with Ari Dyckovsky & Catalin Voss

Step #7 Message Control: Control your message so that the public gets accurate information

Ari: One of the ways that we try to control the messaging with a reporter, especially because sometimes it can have a life of its own, is to have talks with them after the first interview to really just drive home particular points that we care about as well as just ask them very broadly what they're planning on making the article about.

A lot of times reporters are willing to work with us especially because they're writing a feature story as opposed to headline news. Overtime that probably won't be the case and they'll be writing stories on their own accord as opposed to what we would like for us to have a beneficial experience, but in the beginning, especially when we are trying to brand ourselves, we try to influence them as much as possible to put us in good light and also in the light that we want to be seen.

Catalin: We reach out to them. We knew we wanted to get something out there. Basically, one of our customers was going to reveal themselves the week after and we didn't want the first word out there to be something from a customer. We wanted to control the message, so we went and reached out to Wired and we had two options. We were either going to go with an embargo and basically get the TechCrunch, The Next Web, and those guys onto one page, or we thought there was an opportunity to do one exclusive with somebody who would do more towards our space; somebody like Wired who do a bunch of tech stuff.

So I got an introduction to the reporter, went and told him basically what we were doing, and told him that our customer is going to hit out a story on Monday. I met with him on a Thursday, so kind of tried to create a pressure of, "Okay, there's three days left. You got the weekend. It has to be out Monday to beat everyone else to the news,” and he jumped at it.