It’s easy to get caught up in the brilliant stories of startups going viral to gain awareness, and the simplicity and usability of certain websites turning into large revenue streams. How cool the actual product is, the fact that the founders just built it and the rest just happened. This is the veritable entrepreneurial myth.
Here’s a few things to think about:
How many sales and business development people do you think Google has? Answer = around 5000. And we all thought their non human automated adwords system did it all.
What investment has Twitter made in Public Relations? You think Oprah and Obama just happened upon it? No they were pitched to heavily with a large investment in leading PR firms.
How many Youtube videos were posted by company created accounts? Answer = Hundreds of thousands.
Who seeds the quirky auction items on ebay? Answer = ebay started the game very early on and let the media know.
Everything is not as it seems. Push marketing is alive wand well, just the tactics have changed. It feels very organic and community driven, but the often the community is created by it’s founders and leaders. Nothing wrong with that, it is the job of entrepreneurs to invent said communities. But it makes for better business articles to talk of such things occurring naturally, so the real story is rarely told.
The question for startups is – what tactics can we employ to garner the same momentum?
