A lot of web startups have interesting data but they don’t make good (or any) use of it. That’s a big mistake. If you have data – flaunt it! Releasing some interesting piece of data, ideally something unexpected, is a wonderful way to attract attention. With a nod to Caterina’s Biz Dev 2.0, I think of this as PR 2.0. My friend Alan Gould, the founder of IAG Research (now part of Nielsen) was a master of this. IAG does advertising effectiveness research and to this day, when you go to their site, it launches with a video of the most recalled ad from the last week and give away a bunch of interesting data right on the home page. But when Alan was first getting going, he would look for the most unexpected bit of advertising data and then feed that out. The net result was that IAG and Alan quickly became established a source which provided lots of attention whenever a story about advertising effectiveness was written.
Now one might say that IAG is in a data business and so this was an obvious strategy. But take Indeed as another example. They are not in the data business per se, but rather in the job search business. But that spews forth a ton of interesting data, such as salary ranges and what is happening in the economy. Rony and Paul have done a terrific job leveraging that data for attention. For instance, a google search for “VP of Engineering Salary” produces a link to Indeed as the third major result (as of this writing) right below links from sites that are specifically about salaries. Similarly they have had terrific success with other sites picking up their analyses of economic activity. For instance, this recent article from the WSJ title “Job Openings Fell to a Record Low in July” cites Indeed data (more Indeed coverage here).
So next time when you wonder how you get others to talk and write about your startup, think data. What data do you have about user behavior that might be interesting? Don’t sit on it. Get it out there instead. Flaunt your data!
