Here is my favorite excerpt of the panel on getting PR. I was dying to find out: “does PR 2.0 really work?”. Listen to the panel answer. I’m hearing a strong “NO”.

The panelists (from left to right):

• Anthony Ha, VentureBeat
• Ryan Singel, Wired
• Chris O’Brien, San Jose Mercury News
• Hooman Khalili, Alice FM

I’ll give you the conclusion first: FaceBook rocks. Google was completely useless, managing to generate a grand total of one click in two weeks.

How can this be? For my purpose, FaceBook ads had two killer features:

• The allowed text is long enough to put the key benefits of the conference. With Google AdWords, I just couldn’t find a way to make a compelling case with its meager two lines.
• Targeting is laser-focused, when Google is keyword-based (as in, 20th century technology). On Facebook, you can put an ad that will only be displayed if someone is a current Grad student at Stanford, less than 30 years old and likes Techcrunch. On Google AdWords, you can specify that your ad runs for the US. After looking around a lot, I finally discovered that you can target a city or region by using one of the advanced and unintuitive features.

So here I am: with Google AdWords, no matter how much budget I specify, I can’t get any clicks. FaceBook brings me a steady stream of people who are nicely targeted and often register for the conference. Exactly what I wanted.

Privacy concerns? Sure. But very impressive.

I used to think that way too.

When I was an R&D engineer, I wrote the code. I made the product. I thought that sales and marketing were basically overhead.

Then I switched sides, worked with sales people for a while, and witnessed how hard it is to sell a product.

Those sales people had the same attitude: without them, there would be no customers and no money. Therefore, they were the ones really making the product come to life.

Reality is somewhere in between: Without sales, you don’t have a product, you have a prototype. Steve Blank makes an excellent case.

The Microsoft vs. Linux war didn’t help with the disdain toward marketing among software geeks, hackers and slashdotters. It feels good to believe that Windows succeeded mostly because of marketing and money spent by the mega-corporation.

If Linux had the marketing muscle of Windows, it would rule the world.

That’s beside the point.

Marketing Matters

You may have the most robust operating system, the best wiki or a twitter-killer, it doesn’t matter if no one knows about it and no one likes it.

You must design something that people want (market research), in a way that they can understand (usability) and make sure they can find it (market communication and public relations).

These are not overhead. If you get any of them wrong, you’ll have frustrated users at best, or no users at all. Not a fun situation.

Four Step Recovery Program

Here are four steps to help recovering programmers. They won’t turn a hard core hacker into Steve Jobs, but it’s a start:

1. Users are good: Whether you are trying to pay your bills or you code for the fun of it, recognize that you have an audience. It’s no fun writing code that no one uses. It’s so much more exciting to receive praise for your work from real people.
   So you will eventually have to open up and start listening and care about your users. They won’t be perfect. They may be clueless about programming. They’ll ask for features that sound basic to you, but they are your users. You will learn to love them.
2. Meet people face to face: There is so much you can do online. Sometimes, face to face interaction is more powerful than the best crafted tweet. Set yourself a target to attend at least one developer or entrepreneur meeting each month.
   Once you get into that habit, increase to two meetings per month. Be open, discuss your vision as well as your immediate problems and you’ll be surprised by the results.
3. Set aside one hour daily for active marketing: Software developers love to spend days and nights coding great stuff. Focusing on marketing, sales and customer activities is not quite as exciting. Put some discipline in place. A good starting point is to devote one hour per day of your time to work exclusively on marketing. And I don’t mean read the Web to learn about SEO.
   Spend one full, active hour contributing to forums, pitching to people, e-mailing journalists and other key influencers that may be interested in what you do.
   Does your web site have a success story from a real customer? Did you follow-up with the people you met at those meetings?
   The first week, send at least two e-mails a day to people you have never met. By the third week, your goal is to receive one e-mail a day from people you don’t know. Once you figured it out, just scale.
4. Chat with 3 Users: Geeks are particularly good at imagining what their ideal customer wants. Stop!
   Go and actually chat with a handful of your potential users. Listen to their interests, their concerns, why they would use your product, etc. You’ll be amazed every time. Just make sure that you talk to more than one or two. Does the target or three customers sound low? That’s because you haven’t done it yet.

There are many resources out there about SEO, A/B testing, how to write a press release (or not), create buzz, etc. Start paying attention. Because if you don’t, someone else will.

To get there, web 2.0 experts will tell you that your traffic will increase over time as you keep working hard. It’s true, but this also suggests that the road to the top is through small, incremental steps, grinding your way through continuous improvements.

Wrong. Critical mass matters. I call this the elevator effect. Traffic can snowball.

Two weeks ago, Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur of Dallas Mavericks fame, put out an “open source funding” request. He would consider funding anyone who would post a business plan publicly on his blog. I’ll leave a discussion on the rationale for such a contest to another time. What matters is that you could smell the potential publicity that Mark’s visibility combined with his initiative could generate.

I was the first one to post a business plan (it was 10pm by then). I posted the slides on slideshare for all to see.

The next morning, I was interviewed by Rachel Metz from AP. The story got on the wire later in the afternoon and we were prominently mentioned. AP stories reach very far: some friends I had not heard from in years called me to tell me they read it.

It doesn’t stop there. Because of the extra exposure, the presentation on slideshare generated a lot of traffic and it made it to the home page a few days later. Which gave it even more exposure, since every visitor to slideshare (20,000+/day) could see it.

That’s the elevator effect. Once you have momentum, it keeps going up and up exponentially. It’s beyond viral.

FairSoftware benefited from the same elevator effect when we were selected as a TechCrunch50 Finalist last year. Instead of suffering through months of slow traffic growth, we signed up thousands of users instantly.

In conclusion, you do need to keep making small steps toward your dream, whatever it is. But keep on the look-out for the elevator. It rarely stops at your floor, but if the door opens, make sure to jump in!