Tech Luminaries Peddle Really Bad Advice
On full display: My first two laws of marketing & communications
Last summer, I was lamenting to a dear former colleague that tech founders (and only sometimes even the successful ones) tended to think that early success in one discipline entitled them to assert unimpeachable expertise in a host of others.
He had a name for it: “The false claim of adjacent intelligence.”
And if there’s one area where that adjacent intelligence is most aggressively asserted, completely unburdened by experience, humility, self-reflection, or even common sense, it’s in marketing and public relations.
Much of what I write for Pennyheads is an attempt to counter this. We’ve covered influencer-marketing nonsense, NFTs-in-marketing, media-relations monomania, expectation management, what to do during “list season,” and so much more.
(I’m not a total curmudgeon, though. We’ve also been generous with praise — I still want to staple-gun Qiao Wang’s counsel memo for startups on every founder’s head.)
The hope is that when trendy or retrograde notions hit the marketing memesphere, I can do my part to provide you with the perspectives that you might need to counter them.
This brings us to the very online entrepreneur/investor/engineer Balaji Srinivasan, who recently managed to dredge up well-covered ground from decades ago, slap it onto the current moment and, as a result, spread more bad advice that I feel the need to either contextualize or altogether debunk.
Let’s review:
PR is useless in a world of social media.
I know that depth exceeds the medium of Twitter, but this was an immediate signal that unserious analysis was sure to follow. Critics have been using this drive-by canard for more than two decades now. It’s a favorite of C-tier pundits, so I was surprised to see the well-regarded Balaji deploy it.
Arguably, it was the admittedly slow-but-inevitable mastery of social media that drove the PR industry’s phenomenal growth. Most certainly, it wasn’t due to increasing numbers of flacks chasing decreasing numbers of reporters.
You want creators, not public relators.
If there’s one way to scream “I’m totally focused on the wrong things,” it’s by trying to drag me through the perceived differences and nuances of marcomm roles. As the CCMO of an intentionally thin marketing team, I just have very little patience for that conversation — one can either do the job, show an interest in learning, or not. As Heinlein once observed, “Specialization is for insects.”
Increasingly, the difference between “creator” and “public ‘relator’” is disappearing. It has to. Any firm or in-house practitioner that is more in the media-relations business than a content-creation one is pursuing a forlorn model for their career or enterprise.
Does this content creation include, say, work-for-hire and ghostwriting? Most certainly. But, as an investor, exactly how much time do you want your founders to be engaged in content creation? In the very early stages, I imagine they have other priorities.
First, tech founders should themselves be creators or have them on the founding team.
This is certainly helpful and it’s amazing when it happens, but few founders have the time or the temperament. And, to tell you the truth, I shudder to think about what many would produce on their own, unedited. (I have stories.)
In fact, if you aren’t making your own content, it’s like not writing your own code.
Later in his diatribe, Balaji basically says “Just use A.I.!” People are happily using A.I. for both content and coding. But, in his mind, A.I. is “doing it on your own.” This is perhaps a debate for another time.
Second, tech founders shouldn’t be giving their precious content to journos for free, as PR will advise you to do.
Four problems here:
Not sure what he means by “for free.” Is the alternative, “Hey, buddy. Wanna buy a scoop?”
Balaji is making the classic — and very Silicon Valley — mistake of conflating “PR” with “media relations.”
This statement assumes that journalists are starving for stories to write about. They aren’t. Newsrooms are thin enough as it is.
On balance, many tech founders are entirely too confident that what they have to say, particularly in raw form, is “precious” or even broadly relevant. Absent counsel, they often hold unreasonable expectations in terms of what an audience wants or can be convinced of.
A PR person — or any marketing or communications employee — who cares more about their personal brand as a “creator” than that of the company they work for is almost certain to choose the former over the latter.
Just look at the numbers — even an interview in the Atlantic is a vanity metric. It doesn’t have the scale to move sales.
Two more problems:
Despite some noteworthy case studies, media relations is not a very good demand-generation vehicle. It just isn’t. Few will claim that it is. This is a strawman coming from Balaji, likely informed by peers who also don’t know what they are talking about.
At the core of public relations is reputation. A B2B buyer’s mind has been mostly made up before they make contact or otherwise execute a purchase. Everything that leads up to the attribution-capable click — word-of-mouth, conference participation, content marketing, and, yes, even media relations — affects search. Search and reputation are inseparable. (Incidentally, The Atlantic has a domain authority of 93/100 according to Moz and a fairly well-heeled audience. Were any such placement on-strategy, I’d take it.)
This is because PR is mostly composed of ex-journos that still haven’t updated their mental models of the world.
This is absolutely untrue — PR is not thusly composed. But it gets worse.
They’ll advise you to reply to journalists, to give them exclusives, and to generally live in the past — because they are optimizing for status amongst their journo friends, rather than optimizing for conversions of your product.
In twenty-eight years, I can count on one hand the number of journalists-turned-flacks who have tried this, that is, focused on their journalist relationships versus their employer’s reputation needs. They didn’t last long.
But, also, “conversion” isn’t typically the PR person’s remit.
Instead, hire creators who built their own audience and are aligned with what you’re doing.
The skills that are involved in building an audience for oneself are not quite the same as those required to build an audience for a company. For reasons I describe latter, it’s unwise to conflate the two.
Or just use AI and do it all yourself.
Heh. There it is. My own thoughts on this topic, as well as how I use A.I. day-to-day.
Add value for your audience in an authentic way, don’t try to plant a story. In short: focus on creation, not public relations.
Again, Balaji has a very narrow, blinkered view on what public relations is, one that I suspect is rooted in circa-1990s software marketing based on what I’ve read. (I should know: It’s the milieu in which my career began.)
The best PR folks are creating. And doing so much else besides.
In fact, like Elon did, you should probably fire all your PR people and hire creators instead.
Ah, yes. How many PR folks have had a boss gleefully forward this gem to them?
The only exception to this are PR people who’ve reinvented themselves as creators in their own right. Otherwise, hiring a PR person without a following is like hiring an engineer who doesn’t know how to code. They can’t advise you.
Let me tell you from closely observed experience: A PR person — or any marketing or communications employee — who cares more about their personal brand as a “creator” than that of the company they work for is almost certain to choose the former over the latter. They will convince themselves that their success is the company’s success. They’ll find a leadership team bush-league enough to believe them. But it’s a classic conflict-of-interest. When the game is up, they’ll take that following to their next gig and leave the previous company wondering where-they-went-wrong.
I close with Gomes’s First Two Laws of Marketing & Communications:
Never mistake visibility for leadership.
Take the fullest possible advantage of the fact that no one else actually understands the First Law.
Tchau, Pennyheads.
Phil: This is the beginning of a great piece. I read it eagerly, hungry to learn. But just when you were about to start teaching, the piece ended. Would you consider writing the second half of this piece?