Press releases in the Rails world?

[Pete Forde]

Last night I was having some voyeuristic fun with Google Insight and
decided to pit all of the [subjective|arbitrary] "Tier 1" Rails dev
shops against each other; instead of the RMM, I wanted to see who had
the largest PR presence according to Google.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Unspace%2CHashrocket%2CThoughtbot%2CNew%20Bamboo&cmpt=q

Clearly, New Bamboo releases traditional Press Releases. This seems to
fly in the face of the typical web/social media perspective on classic
PR... specifically that it's irrelevant and uncool.

I have lots of questions for New Bamboo and Rails dev shops in
general:

- how do you file press releases? do you pay a newswire service?
- do you write your own releases, or do you retain a PR agency?
- how do you decide what news is worthy of a press release?
- do you get inquiries from media in response to releases?
- do you get client inquiries that pan out into paid engagements in
response to releases?

As a partner at Unspace who is primarily focused on developing
business, I'm trying to decide if New Bamboo's releases are a red
herring. It's unclear to me how much time/money/effort goes into these
releases, and whether their formal PR presence on Google actually
factors into their bottom line. There's no question that it looks
impressive, but I'd rather have 5 future clients learn about Unspace
than have 5000 random journalists habitually discard my release.

For example, our newest client (as of last week) is the United
Nations. Do we call Reuters or just add a logo to our clients page?
It's a real question, folks.

[Christopher Bailey]

It's kind of funny to see this, because I've never even heard of New Bamboo, yet I've heard of and am quite familiar with the others.  No offense to New Bamboo, and maybe that's simply an indicator that I'm a developer and not someone looking to hire a firm.  

--
Christopher Bailey
Cobalt Edge LLC
http://cobaltedge.com

[Robby Russell]

This just means that the community is much bigger than it was a few years ago. New Bamboo have been around for quite a while... but I've never heard of Cobalt Edge LLC. ;-)

--
Robby Russell
Chief Evangelist, Partner

PLANET ARGON, LLC
design // development // hosting w/Ruby on Rails

http://planetargon.com/
http://robbyonrails.com/
http://twitter.com/planetargon
aim: planetargon

+1 503 445 2457
+1 877 55 ARGON [toll free]
+1 815 642 4068 [fax]

[Christopher Bailey]

For sure - if anyone has heard of Cobalt Edge, I'd be fairly stunned - I don't do any promotion, only really was active for a year (I keep it around as my personal business entity (for side projects and just to keep a business in hand), but am now fully employed by DealBase.com), etc.  I was responding to the notion that that list of 5 or so "Tier 1" companies, and again, I meant no disservice to New Bamboo.  It was more a comment/response on the interesting difference in perception given their high ranking on that Google search/analysis vs. what one developer (me) sees on a daily basis, as per the question of whether those press releases are effective marketing, etc.  I likely should have elaborated that, the blogging, tweets, discussions on this list, and so on are more effective in my view.

I do know of Planet Argon :)  And, I like to keep track of the prominent Ruby and/or Rails shops (in case I need them, or when folks ask me for recommendations).  One bias may be that New Bamboo is based in the UK, so that may be one reason I haven't heard of them.  There are of course many shops I haven't heard of, but given the rest on the list and the mention of (admittedly subjective) "Tier 1", I was surprised.  If anything, now I know of them :)

[Giles Bowkett]

I think the methodology's flawed. It's useful to control what people
see when they google you, sure, but if you've got them googling you,
A) you've already won, and B) you want them to read the links they
discover. So the B problem is that nobody reads press releases, but
the A problem is the bigger problem. Cross-checking Google hits for
company names just tells you what people will encounter when they
google your name. If you're googling Rails shops by name, you're
probably googling *several* Rails shops by name, and finding a ton of
BS PR for one shop and a bunch of valuable content for another shop
puts the valuable content shop in the lead. But the real question is
how people find you in the first place. None of the first few of those
press-release links for New Bamboo led to anything but a boilerplate
press-release copy-paste page on some web site that nobody with any
sense would ever read or regard with any seriousness.

Google Trends is useless here. What you really need is something like
Alexa. Except you can do Alexa in your head with this one, at least as
far as New Bamboo is concerned. Everybody knows the Thoughtbot and
Hashrocket blogs. Not enough people know the Unspace blog (sorry). And
nobody's ever heard of New Bamboo. The press release edge does not
exist for them where it counts. They also fail at Twitter search.
Twitter search for every other name gets people discussing the
companies. Hashrocket does especially well at Twitter search, because
everybody's talking about Hashrocket vim today. Twitter search for New
Bamboo has people discussing their chopsticks and trying to sell you
spoons.

However, even among Thoughtbot and Hashrocket, the two leaders as far
as blogging and Twitter go, neither one offers anything for business
people on their blogs that I've ever seen. There's nothing about how
to choose a Rails shop, how to hire good developers, how to organize a
great event (hint hint Unspace, you own this knowledge and nobody can
compete with you there, *ever*, and one thing that means to a business
reader is you have great **project management** skills, which means
you're going to come in on time and under budget), etc. As far as I
can tell, none of you guys are promoting this kind of information on
your blogs, which, to state the obvious, is the **only information**
that a businessperson looking to hire a Rails shop would want to read.
It's good to share your knowledge with other developers but what is a
business person with no technical skills going to learn from a
discussion of the minutiae of testing libraries? It's especially silly
in the case of Hashrocket - you guys are organizing a business
conference, but what is there on your site for a businessperson to
read? I'm sure RMM is an attempt at solving that problem, or could be,
but a much simpler solution is a blog post called "How To Hire A Rails
Developer" or "What To Look For When You Hire A Rails Shop." That's
going to make you a lot more money than a video of your developers
doing push-ups.

Seriously, 37 Signals seems to be the only Rails business that blogs
about business as well as Rails. Shouldn't that be a sign?

I just realized I'm way too hungry (in other words: dickish) at this
time in the morning to write posts criticizing other people's
businesses. Hope nobody took it personally. Especially Hashrocket,
3-2-1 Launch is one of the greatest web dev marketing ideas I've ever
seen. I'm going to go make breakfast. But keep something in mind - you
know who I am. That's because I decided you would. I worked in
marketing before I became a programmer. Pardon my ego but Web
marketing is for me as easy as tying my shoes, and my personal opinion
is that press releases are a *VERY* bad idea.

Take a look at the sites that New Bamboo's links in Google Trends take
you to. The sites are just inches away from being spamblogs. That
means New Bamboo is **one** tiny little unfair overgeneralization away
from being spammers. Look at New Bamboo's site, you'd never think
these nice, Amnesty International-promoting people were spammers; but
look at those almost-spamblogs, and you might. That's a terrible thing
to do to your own brand. New Bamboo shouldn't just fire their PR
people, they should have them KILLED.

On Aug 19, 9:46 am, Christopher Bailey <ch...@cobaltedge.com> wrote:
> It's kind of funny to see this, because I've never even heard of New Bamboo,
> yet I've heard of and am quite familiar with the others.  No offense to New
> Bamboo, and maybe that's simply an indicator that I'm a developer and not
> someone looking to hire a firm.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 9:41 AM, Pete Forde <p...@unspace.ca> wrote:
>
> > Last night I was having some voyeuristic fun with Google Insight and
> > decided to pit all of the [subjective|arbitrary] "Tier 1" Rails dev
> > shops against each other; instead of the RMM, I wanted to see who had
> > the largest PR presence according to Google.
>

> >http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Unspace%2CHashrocket%2CThoug...

[Obie Fernandez]

What do people think of the confirmed listing at
https://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/search

I think it matches my mental listing of the prominent Rails shops
pretty closely, with some notable ommisions such as Pivotal Labs.

Cheers,
Obie

PS: I've wanted to do more traditional PR stuff such as press
releases, but haven't found time to look into it (and don't really
know where to start)

[Chad Pytel]

Pete,

I could be wrong, but I think you want quotes around "New Bamboo" in
the search in order to get better results.

-Chad

---
Chad Pytel, Founder and CEO
thoughtbot, inc.
t: 617-482-1300 x113
f: 866-217-5992
http://www.thoughtbot.com
http://www.twitter.com/thoughtbot

[Pete Forde]

Thanks for that link, Obie!

I've not seen that site previously, and only heard of about half of
the home page contenders. It's also worth mentioning that Unspace
isn't even in their directory, so different people are clearly
functioning on different definitions of "Tier 1". :)

Giles, you never fail to make me giggle like schoolgirl.

I came to know about New Bamboo through mentions by Peter Cooper, who
considers them a player. I am reasonably confident that geography is a
large factor in this conversation, as us North American types are more
likely to know => than the Belorussian outsourcers that own the Google
adwords for Rails consulting.

My current leaning is towards supporting the complete demise of the
traditional press release. My biggest asset is time, and the last
thing on earth I want is to spend a whack of time on the phone with
professional time wasters.

As for blogging, as much as I still actively dislike Twitter, it's
really hard to argue that it hasn't seriously displaced the value of
blogs. I wish I had more time to post, but the honest truth is that
I'm confident none of our clients found us through our blog.

Pete

On Aug 19, 2:36 pm, Obie Fernandez <obiefernan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What do people think of the confirmed listing athttps://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/search

[Robby Russell]

I've only been part of a few press releases... one of which was just
last week when we sold off a portion of our business.

* http://planetargon.com/news/2009/8/12/rails-boxcar-acquired-by-blue-box-group
(link to press release there)

Having a few people work on the Press Release helped (in our case, it
was a joint effort between two companies). I was responsible for
getting the thing posted online and found services that charge
anywhere from $20 to $400 to send it out. In the end, I found
PRLog[1], which allows you to do it for free!

One thing we learned through this process was that a lot of local news
sites and blogs will pickup this and write about you, which helps
increase your exposure to different audiences. We've since had a
handful of local prospects give us a call to inquire about our
services... some of which don't know much about Rails, but need a web
application built. I'm not convinced that this is the best use of my
time (writing press releases), but it did generate some leads, which
I'm not going to complain about.

Anyhow, that's just my two cents based on a recent experience with
press releases.

[1] http://www.prlog.org/

Cheers,
Robby

[Chris Parsons]

On Aug 19, 2:36 pm, Obie Fernandez <obiefernan...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What do people think of the confirmed listing athttps://www.railsdevelopment.com/developers/search

>
> I think it matches my mental listing of the prominent Rails shops
> pretty closely, with some notable ommisions such as Pivotal Labs.

Perhaps, if you're only looking for US companies. There are plenty of
"prominent rails companies" (whatever that means) in other regions
that could be included.

Chris

[Chris Parsons]

On Aug 19, 2:18 pm, Giles Bowkett <gil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Seriously, 37 Signals seems to be the only Rails business that blogs
> about business as well as Rails. Shouldn't that be a sign?

Not true - perhaps it's just not easy to get noticed :-) Risking the
self-promotion label to prove a point: http://blog.edendevelopment.co.uk/category/business

I've done one traditional press release a few years ago, which did
have actual content in it and therefore was picked up by a bunch of
blogs. Served us well, but I think I'd only ever really use them again
for significant announcements.

Chris

[Robert Dempsey]

> Seriously, 37 Signals seems to be the only Rails business that blogs
> about business as well as Rails. Shouldn't that be a sign?

We have some businessey stuff on our blog: http://blog.adsdevshop.com.

We've also used press releases in the past, for instance, when
launching a new application. We haven't used them for quite sometime,
though when we did we did get traffic, and it led to other
opportunities. If you are going to do a press release, get someone
that understands "traditional" media and how to make your news
relevant to them.

Robert Dempsey
http://www.adsdevshop.com

[Ginny Hendry]

What bothers me about www.railsdevelopment.com is that it never says
anything about how the list was compiled.

Is it US Rails shops that Engine Yard has heard of?
Rails shops that Engine Yard has worked with?
Rails shops that Engine Yard recommends?
Rails shops that have applied to be listed?
Rails shops that have paid to be listed?
or what?

They really need an About page explaining that.

[James Adam]

You can register your company on it - there's a signup link at the top.

- James

2009/8/20 Ginny Hendry <con...@ghendry.com>:

[Mark Stephan]

Well I added my Rails company  "Calcedon" to the search term and we still beat out Hashrocket and Unspace. So I'm skeptical. Calcedon hasn't done any concerted effort in advertising and press releases. Though, maybe we should. :-)

----------

Mark E. Stephan

Managing Partner / Founder 

Ruby On Rails Web Application Development Services
Austin, Texas

Http://www.calcedon.com 

Austin Office: +01-512-961-6059

Email: mste...@calcedon.com 

IM: markestephan (Skype)

IM: markes...@yahoo.com (MSN/YAHOO)

IM: markestephan (AIM)

IM: markes...@gmail.com (Gtalk)

IM: 63071782 (ICQ)

Twitter (Personal): http://twitter.com/mstephan

Twitter (Corporate): http://twitter.com/calcedon

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[dctanner]

I will agree that the 'raking' insight gives us is pretty meaningless.
A while ago when we started getting some more prominent clients we
decided to try out some more traditional PR.

We worked with a great freelance PR person and made several releases.
A few of these were placed in some well known dead tree publications
in the UK like .net magazine and we've probably received a few good
contacts from these. When you publish a press release you also publish
it on the wire. Unless it's some breaking world news, all this really
means is that a whole load of random sites republish the article for
you which is where insight is getting all the links from. I do feel
the things that were actually placed in publications have helped our
reputation though, and although blogging/twitter is a million times
cheaper and more awesome, our core clients wouldn't consider those
sources when choosing a development partner.

The process was really a learning experience for us, and it soon
became apparent that it wasn't providing much value for money to do it
on a monthly basis, so we decided stick to it for one off things. I
imagine we will probably make around 1-2 releases a year now when we
have a big win for a big client with a story behind it that a
publication will want to write about.

Kind Regards,
Damien Tanner
Co-Founder and Director, New Bamboo

Creating fresh, flexible and fast-growing web applications is our
passion.

+44 (0)78 6312 7999
+44 (0)20 7099 7486
http://www.new-bamboo.co.uk

On Aug 20, 8:55 pm, James Adam <ja...@lazyatom.com> wrote:
> You can register your company on it - there's a signup link at the top.
>
> - James
>

> 2009/8/20 Ginny Hendry <cont...@ghendry.com>:
>
>
>
>
>
> > What bothers me aboutwww.railsdevelopment.comis that it never says

[Damien Tanner]

I will agree that the 'raking' insight gives us is pretty meaningless. A while ago when we started getting some more prominent clients we decided to try out some more traditional PR.

We worked with a great freelance PR person and made several releases. A few of these were placed in some well known dead tree publications in the UK like .net magazine and we've probably received a few good contacts from these. When you publish a press release you also publish it on the wire. Unless it's some breaking world news, all this really means is that a whole load of random sites republish the article for you which is where insight is getting all the links from. I do feel the things that were actually placed in publications have helped our reputation though, and although blogging/twitter is a million times cheaper and more awesome, our core clients wouldn't consider those sources when choosing a development partner.

The process was really a learning experience for us, and it soon became apparent that it wasn't providing much value for money to do it on a monthly basis, so we decided stick to it for one off things. I imagine we will probably make around 1-2 releases a year now when we have a big win for a big client with a story behind it that a publication will want to write about. 

Kind Regards,
Damien Tanner
Co-Founder and Director, New Bamboo

Creating fresh, flexible and fast-growing web applications is our passion.

3rd Floor, Gensurco House, 46A Rosebery Avenue, London, EC1R 4RP

+44 (0)78 6312 7999
+44 (0)20 7099 7486
http://www.new-bamboo.co.uk

On 19 Aug 2009, at 17:52, Mark Stephan <mste...@calcedon.com> wrote:

Well I added my Rails company  "Calcedon" to the search term and we still beat out Hashrocket and Unspace. So I'm skeptical. Calcedon hasn't done any concerted effort in advertising and press releases. Though, maybe we should. :-)

----------

Mark E. Stephan

Managing Partner / Founder 

<Calcedon logo sig.jpg>

[John]

As Robby says, whilst it's true that press releases may be considered
irrelevant to a whole load of folk, surely anything that makes anyone
more aware of your business is a good thing? And as Damien says, that
can really improve your reputation and lead onto other things, I
guess.

I find the area of modern marketing really intriguing. There are so
many opportunities today to put yourself out there in fresh and
interesting ways that I feel like we've only just scratched the
surface of how we can promote our businesses. Of course, it's all
about the client - where they hang out, who they speak to, what they
read and do etc. But I think there's a huge potential in, for example,
video on the internet to provide something clients would find
valuable.

Although I'm not a Rails shop, I was amazed at the reaction I got when
I posted a video of me giving a presentation on my blog. The tone of
the conversation between me and potential customers really changed
once people could see my passion for what I'm trying to do. I think
there's something really powerful about seeing other people in the
flesh that blogging, although great, doesn't provide. Just look at
someone like Gary Vaynerchuk. Of course, his market is consumers, but
I think there's still huge untapped potential there for business to
business. I wonder how we could all use that power of video to market
our businesses more effectively, (aside from posting talks we've given
at Rails conferences).

On a final note, the guys at Mi.te (a time tracking app) let me know
about a free marketing ebook that I've found really helpful in shaking
up my thinking in terms of marketing. You can download it at
http://www.fortyideas.com/

Hope people find this helpful,

John

http://www.synapticmishap.co.uk
The excitable chap who's making a time tracking app.

> +44 (0)20 7099 7486http://www.new-bamboo.co.uk

>
> On 19 Aug 2009, at 17:52, Mark Stephan <mstep...@calcedon.com> wrote:
>
> > Well I added my Rails company  "Calcedon" to the search term and we  
> > still beat out Hashrocket and Unspace. So I'm skeptical. Calcedon  
> > hasn't done any concerted effort in advertising and press releases.  
> > Though, maybe we should. :-)
>
> > ----------
> > Mark E. Stephan
>
> > Managing Partner / Founder
>
> > <Calcedon logo sig.jpg>
>
> > Ruby On Rails Web Application Development Services
> > Austin, Texas
>
> > Http://www.calcedon.com
>
> > Austin Office: +01-512-961-6059
>

> > Email: mstep...@calcedon.com
>
> > IM: markestephan (Skype)
> > IM: markestep...@yahoo.com (MSN/YAHOO)
> > IM: markestephan (AIM)
> > IM: markestep...@gmail.com (Gtalk)

> > IM: 63071782 (ICQ)
> > Twitter (Personal):http://twitter.com/mstephan
> > Twitter (Corporate):http://twitter.com/calcedon
>
> > On Aug 19, 2009, at 11:46 AM, Christopher Bailey wrote:
>
> >> It's kind of funny to see this, because I've never even heard of  
> >> New Bamboo, yet I've heard of and am quite familiar with the  
> >> others.  No offense to New Bamboo, and maybe that's simply an  
> >> indicator that I'm a developer and not someone looking to hire a  
> >> firm.
>

> >> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 9:41 AM, Pete Forde <p...@unspace.ca> wrote:
>
> >> Last night I was having some voyeuristic fun with Google Insight and
> >> decided to pit all of the [subjective|arbitrary] "Tier 1" Rails dev
> >> shops against each other; instead of the RMM, I wanted to see who had
> >> the largest PR presence according to Google.
>

> >>http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Unspace%2CHashrocket%2CThoug...

[Michael Slater]

Press releases remain very relevant, in fact more than ever, in the
"new world" of social media and Internet searching. The chances that a
traditional publication is going to run your release is small, but
that is not the point. You may get some pickup, and it may be helpful,
but if you really want press coverage, you should be making personal
contact with reporters who you know cover your area.

The strongest reason to create press releases is that, in this age of
Google Alerts and all sorts of other filters, press releases get read
by many, many people who are not the press.

Using a service such as PRWeb gets your release onto lots of sites, as
well as into traditional media. You need to pay them $200 per release
for this service, but it is well worth it. This not only brings you
some direct traffic, it can significantly improve your search engine
rankings for your targeted keyword phrases if done well and
consistently, because it generates a lot of backlinks to your site
that have the exact anchor text that you want them to have.

Ranking on the name of your company is generally useless (and should
be very easy if your name is distinctive). The key is to figure out
what phrases your potential customers are searching on, and to rank on
those terms. One you've figured that out, you should issue press
releases at every opportunity that have your targeted keyword phrases
linked to your site.

It's important that the press release focus not on your company and
your achievements, but on the problems that your prospective customers
have and how you solve them.

An excellent book on this topic is "The New Rules of Marketing and
PR", by David M. Scott.

Michael Slater
www.webvanta.com