Shiny foreign things – why Australia’s startups are terrible at PR
Australia's tech startups are as a group terrible at telling their story. Cutting through an indifferent media and governments focused on shiny things from overseas means they are going to have to lift their game if they want to have media coverage, argues Mumbrella's Paul Wallbank
Last week’s media blitz around Elon Musk’s visit to South Australia threw into stark relief how poor Australian startups are at PR.
South Australia is already leading the nation. Today, we lead the world. pic.twitter.com/1mEJoNC0ma
— Jay Weatherill (@JayWeatherill) July 7, 2017
Of the many things Silicon Valley is good at, the Bay Area startup community excels at courting the media as Tesla, Uber, AirBnB and a host of other startups show. Strangely it’s something their Australian counterparts, with a few notable exceptions, struggle with.
For startups following the classic Silicon Valley model success is based on attracting customers and finding a cashed up buyer to finance a lucrative exit for the shareholders, so PR matters.
One venture capital manager explained to me how the typical spend for a Bay Area startup that’s attracted VC funding is one dollar on product development, four dollars on customer acquisition and five dollars on PR as the founders and investors look for a ‘greater fool’ to buy the company based on ‘hockey stick’ user growth.
A good local example of this was during the group buying mania in 2011 where a plethora of Groupon copycats flooded the Australian airways flogging their wares – the biggest battle though was getting into the business media to attract attract corporate buyers.
In that case it turned out there was only one Greater Fool in the Australian market and Yahoo!7 purchased Spreets for $40 million in 2011.
However the group buying mania is an exception and for the most part Australian startups are pretty poor at banging their own drum, leaving the few that are adept at telling their stories overexposed in the local media.
The reasons are varied, with one of the main ones being the nature of Australian commerce with the insular nation of the local business community meaning deals are often done at the Balmoral Beach Club or Bondi Icebergs, far away from the attention of the media. For many Australian investors, PR isn’t seen as a priority when mates can stitch up deals over lunch.
Another reason is Australians are naturally shyer than their American counterparts, selling the vision is far harder for the typical Aussie business founder. Coupled with media expertise not being a core skill for those likely to be starting a new venture and its not hard to see why they struggle with broadcasting their message.
Even when they do get publicity, many of the local startups blow their opportunity. One of the worst examples I came across in burning bridges was a publicity hungry founder who, to put it bluntly, lost her shit over an innocuous story.
Her complaints to the management of the major masthead over what were a bunch of largely imaginary complaints cost the writer her freelance arrangement with the outlet, forever souring that writer on the startup community and warning other journalists that covering that space is too hard.
And sometimes when startups get too savvy, they overreach as we saw with the rise and fall of social media app Sociabl.
Sociabl spectacularly imploded when co-founders Brandon Reynolds was interviewed on Channel Nine’s Today Show by stand-in host David Campbell who was touted as an endorser of the app when in fact the presenter knew nothing about it and said so on air.
The naivety of Sociabl’s founders is common among most of the local startup community which regularly posts incomprehensible media releases to the wrong journalists or outlet and, even more unforgivably, promises exclusives to multiple publications at the same time.
While it’s understandable startup founders with little media experience struggle with getting the PR strategy right, well staffed ministers’ offices and governments departments don’t have the same excuse.
The most stunning of this was the Federal government’s, $28 million dollar massive promoting its Innovation Nation initiative that quickly fell flat on its face. The National Broadband Network’s well staffed corporate communications team has spent tens of millions on PR only to find public sentiment souring against the project.
Another weakness is government story telling is ministers’ attraction to shiny, usually foreign, things. Turnbull’s adoption of Silicon Valley terms sounded good but fell flat at the feet of Australian voters while the Victorian Government’s duchessing of Sydney and Silicon Valley startup organisations has resulted in continual embarrassments for the state’s media hungry innovation minister.
The Victorian Government’s, NBN’s and Innovation Nation woes could be attributed to public disappointment when the products didn’t live up to the hype but there’s also another fundamental issue at work – the Aussie media really doesn’t understand tech.
For the general Australian media, technology stories are usually about internet threats to your kids or reviews of shiny gizmos rather than any substantive coverage of broader issues and the business press prefers to ignore tech unless its about Amazon and Bitcoin threatening our cosy retail and banking oligopolies.
That media disinterest in technology means a PR strategy has to be well crafted to get attention. Some Aussie startups are good at this including Shoes of Prey, Canva and Atlassian – the former’s co-CEO public challenge to Elon Musk being responsible for the Silicon Valley icon coming to South Australia.
Holy s#%t https://t.co/I0Kiw3wZsd
— Mike Cannon-Brookes (@mcannonbrookes) March 9, 2017
While a PR success for the South Australian government, the Elon Musk visit again illustrates the shiny foreign things syndrome of local tech coverage along with the local startup’s community’s failure to tell its message, given there are dozens of domestic energy ventures which have failed to get any media traction at all.
The sector as a whole has to lift its game, maybe spending a few more of those investor dollars on professional PR advice would be a good idea if they want customers and greater fools.
So, who are the ‘go to’ PR agencies for cash-starved start-up ventures? Who’s doing the innovative stuff? Which PR agencies really know how to make ‘tech-talk’ understandable to the public? Are PR agencies pitching their services to start-up businesses?
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As a PR practitioner with experience with start ups, there are a few issues here:
* Journalists are extremely jaundiced regarding start ups (probably because of examples like Sociabl you outlined) – it is exceptionally difficult to get a story up and in my experience pitches often go unread because journos are so stretched and time poor – hence, a brand like Tesla/Elon Musk will always get the coverage over an unknown.
* Cultural cringe – this appears to be alive and well in the Australian media. Everyone loves a little Aussie start up that could – but only when they’ve been anointed by Silicon Valley VC.
* Start ups often misunderstand how PR can add value and they also have unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved within a short time frame – I worked with one which was obsessed with “backlinks” – I explained that this was neither the value of PR nor the role of the PR person to broker (and explained that editorial policies mostly prevented journalists from adding them to stories) from the outset, but they were insistent and were of course disappointed when they received none.
But you are right, it should be a consideration for start ups in any business plan they put together – PR can be very cost effective and can be a powerful brand builder, as my clever clients have discovered when a story we worked on over the course of several months yielded unprecedented site traffic and tangible sales conversions.
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If the prompt for this story was the amount of PR received by Elon Musk vs local start-ups, surely the problem here is your comparison, not the approach tech start-ups take to PR.
Elon Musk is one of the hottest business leaders anywhere in the world. He is not a start-up, any more than Richard Branson is.
The AFR is a great supporter of Australian start-ups, as is much of the Australian mass media once a concept moves from being just that to being funded.
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Hi Chris, that’s a good question which I’m going to wimp out answering as the PR firm or individual staffer that’s great for one client might not be quite the right fit for another. It’s worth asking around the various online and physical startup groups for who’s worked for your friends and peers. It might take some time to find the right one.
This article needs a good subedit/proof. Errors make for a distracting read. Lift your game Mumbrella please!
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As head of a digital agency that has built many start up platforms for clients, I’ve got to say I don’t agree. A number of these startups (some of whom have gone on to win awards in their own industries and develop viable longer term business plans) have engaged PR agencies and got zero traction (various PR agencies). Journos don’t know these companies, and very rarely, if ever, take the risk of covering them. Covering anything Elon Musk does, however, is somewhat less of a risk…
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@Chris I launched a start up earlier this year and highly recommend using the PR kit at http://www.idomyownpr.com
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Great article Paul, our agency specialises in launching startups and I think this overview is a really accurate reflection of where we’re at. I think another point is that a lot of agencies are not keen on taking on startups due to smaller budgets and lack of experience in doing PR which is another challenge for startups trying to get exposure, credibility and web traffic.
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The real problem is the gaping funding gap that lives between seed stage and the Series A round. There is a terrible lack of risk equity in the market so the media coverage doesn’t flow because there is not enough action. IMHO.
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I personally love handling start-ups as they usually have a great story to tell and a founder who is passionate and enthusiastic.But they can be all over the shop and in love with their idea to the extent that they can’t tolerate a cynical journalist who has seen it all before. As well as a founder, a good start-up has to have a good management team and they have to abide by the first principle of PR consulting and that is the consultant must be paid., . .
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“Her complaints to the management of the major masthead over what were a bunch of largely imaginary complaints cost the writer her freelance arrangement with the outlet, forever souring that writer on the startup community and warning other journalists that covering that space is too hard.”
Wow, how much does this ring a big bell. Someone (from a government agency) did exactly this in our newsroom the other day. Even rang the wrong extension, so ended up bending the ear of completely the wrong person. Did they get a result? Sure: every single journo within earshot knows not to go anywhere near that mob with a bargepole ever again.
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Totally agree. Pitching a tech start up to journos is massively frustrating, they never seem to find your email. As soon as the company gets traction overseas or is sold off in a big purchase then all the media know how to find you.
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Spot on about governments and shiny foreign things. It’s great the SA govt decided to augment the grid with energy storage, but why pick Tesla when there’s an Aussie company called Redflow doing the same thing? They have created an arguably superior battery chemistry solution for immobile storage needs. Who’s the CEO? Simon Hackett, one of SA’s well known entrepreneurial business leaders. But the PR was good when Elon Musk came to town. Can’t deny that.
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Its quite funny that this piece undermines a difficult market to break into by thumbing its nose up at these australian startups – I mean, its not like any of them have the brand name/clout of elon musk that ensures his news gets wide coverage. Bit tone deaf this one.
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Lets all stop throwing the word ‘startup’ around. I know it’s cool and it’s the buzzword but c’mon guys; it’s dead! Saying that Tesla is a startup is ridiculous. Musk was a billionaire businessman who set up a new venture, it was never a startup.
Back in the 90’s when tech was getting really exciting, yes people setup idea’s and look what happened: they were startups. Now please stop it.
(If I go into hairdressing or meats and set up a hairdressers or a butchers, are they startups? NO!!! Neither is any business now.)
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When it comes to local PR firms, it’s often a pretty uninspiring bunch all ’round but I’d direct people towards homegrown firms that don’t have o/s offices and, ideally, aren’t even in multiple states. Choose one in the city you’re doing business in, and stick with them. And please, whatever you do, steer clear of the multinationals – even the ones which pretend to be all hip and funky and local. Why? Because at the end of the day they’re all under the pump from their respective head offices to get new business in the door and increase profits, quarter on quarter no matter how unrealistic that might be (and most commonly achieved by a combo of some new business wins and not hiring any new staff to cover them). With staff spread so thinly (you wouldn’t believe how thinly in some cases), clients – new and old – only get a thin veneer of real service, with principals stepping in every week or two to pretend everything’s just peachy and ensure they don’t lose the business. The better they are at schmoozing, the longer some of their outfits maintain their clients. But they aren’t getting anything remotely resembling good service in reality.
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