How To Get $100,000 In Free Press For Your Startup This Week

Much of this information is taken from my new book Explosive Growth , which you can purchase on   Amazon .

In 2007, my company’s marketing efforts were, in a word, lackluster.

I ran a dating service called IAmFreeTonight.com (later known as AreYouInterested, and now, FirstMet), and in 2007, we’d launched the following marketing campaigns:

We dumped $50,000 into one Spring Break promotion involving helicopters, skywriting, and girls in bikinis. It netted us zero signups.We tested viral features that failed.We’d appeared in a few major media outlets — USA Today, Geraldo, etc. — which had driven some signups, but not nearly enough.

In short, we had nothing but a handful of good stories.

Dating apps do not work without a massive network — if someone logs on in Albuquerque, you need 100 other singles in Albuquerque to make them stay — and we needed to grow our user base fast if we wanted to stay around.

With these middling marketing results, we weren’t going to be able to stay afloat.

Our company managed to survive for one reason:

We figured out how to consistently generate thousands of dollars in free press .

In this article, I’m going to break down our strategy so that you can use it to generate free press.

How College Basketball And Wardrobe Malfunctions Saved My Company

Our strategy for generating free press was simple:

Take a hot button current event.Combine it with some data relevant to your industry.Arrive at a hypothesis that may or may not be crazy.Get massive publicity.

You might have heard this referred to as newsjacking.

The first time we put this idea to work and realized that we had something very useful was when the Duke Blue Devils lost in the opening round of the 2007 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

Although Duke was far from a powerhouse that year, it was still a shocking defeat, because they had a tradition of deep tournament runs. For them to lose in the opening round was quite the stunner, and more than depressing for the alumni and current student base.

Source: TodaysACCHeadlines

Seizing the opportunity to steal publicity, we piggybacked off this story and created controversy through our own press release that drove attention to our website.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Speed is key and the big boys can’t keep up. Have you contacted key writers to tell them you will provide any data and survey information they need within a tight timeframe?

The press release stated that the shocking tournament loss made Duke students so upset and depressed that they flocked to online dating sites to cure their depression (misery loves company), and we provided some data to back it up.

About a week later, we got an e-mail from the school newspaper, the Duke Chronicle, asking for some more data around the Duke’s students’ online dating activity. They ran a follow-up story on it, and it quickly became a hot-button issue on campus.

Source: The Chronicle

The story ended up getting republished all over the country, and the Chronicle ran another story on it a week later.

Source: The Chronicle

They interviewed a student who claimed she was in a statistics class, understood all about confounding factors, but found absolutely no correlation between the basketball team losing and online dating, which I thought was hilarious.

The story had gone so viral that I started thinking about how I could take it even further. I wanted to keep the positive momentum going, so I tried to speak to Duke’s Hall of Fame basketball coach (Coach K) to ask him if he noticed any depression among the players.

Unfortunately, (but not surprisingly) I never got a call back from him.

Nonetheless, the insane popularity of the topic made it very clear that we were on to something.

From Duke Basketball To Britney Spears’ Crotch

A couple of months later, we seized another opportunity for newsjacking: this time related to Britney Spears, right around the same time she broke up with K-Fed. All the entertainment sites were talking about an awards show scene where she was spotted coming out of her limo, and it was crystal clear to everyone that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

At the time, we’d been thinking about hiring a celebrity to become the face of IAmFreeTonight.com, so the timing was perfect. Our press release stated that we were offering Britney $500 to be our spokesperson, but we had a reputation to uphold and refused to relinquish any of our high moral standards.

Therefore, should she accept the offer, and have any other flashing incidents or momentary lapses of character, we would have no choice but to void the offer.

We pitched that to several news outlets, and TMZ absolutely loved it. In fact, they loved it so much that they interviewed me for an article about it where they said, “Lerner has decided that Britney wouldn’t be making any public appearances on behalf of his site. He says she’s too much of a loose cannon.”

Source: TMZ

#ExplosiveGrowthTip : Find a fun and positive way to include your targeted blogs or influencers into a data story. They just may connect with you on it!

What’s Happening Right Now That You Can Newsjack?

Remember the formula:

Take a hot button current event.Combine it with some data relevant to your product or industry.Arrive at a hypothesis that may or may not be crazy.Get massive publicity.

It doesn’t have to be an super risque, tabloid-esque story either. Just a story that people care about.

#ExplosiveGrowthTip: Anticipate newsjacking opportunities by identifying upcoming concerts, festivals, sporting events, conferences, annual events, elections, and trade shows. Do you have a list of at least three upcoming opportunities for newsjacking?

For example, some of our best PR was done around severe weather. Storms happen cyclically, and people are always reading the news about them.

Source: The Inquirer

So, whenever a snowstorm was predicted, we would immediately provide data to reporters that showed how users flock to dating sites during a storm, likely looking for a “cuddle buddy.”

We used data to show that messaging activity on our online dating app increased 340 percent during the prior year’s storm. Using this method, we were able to inject ourselves into a national news story about severe weather at least once per year:

Source: The Independent

Right now, what’s happening in the media that you can piggyback on to get massive attention for your company?

Two of the best books for entrepreneurs that I highly recommend about how to get your articles and ideas to spread virally are Contagious By Jonah Berger and Made To Stick by Chip Heath.

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