Ep. #2, Developing Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

Malia Powers: Welcome to The Pitch Room. I am Malia Powers with Heavybit. On this show, we regularly talk about all things PR, including current events, crisis comms, PR tools and tips, reputation management. All with a special focus on developer communications.

Each episode will bring you actionable tactics and strategies that you can implement today for real business results. If you are interested in being a guest or have a subject that you would like to hear about, email us at press at heavybit.com.

Hi all, and welcome to The Pitch Room. I am Malia Powers with Heavybit, and I am joined today with Cameron Peron. I'm excited to have Cameron with us today, as he has extensive experience helping young companies that are facing developers grow quickly, and he is here to talk about his experiences and offer advice.

Cameron Peron: Thank you, Malia. My name is Cameron. I'm an expert in marketing to developers. I've spent the last three years in helping companies grow from either C to A or from A to Series B rounds.

That would be two companies. One is Newvem, which was acquired by Datapipe in 2013. And most recently Redis Labs, which is a company which provides a fully managed Redis for developers.

Malia: It's great to have you here today, Cameron. A quick background for our listeners, Cameron recently did a speaker series with us on Creating Killer Trend Stories. So be sure to check that out in our Heavybit library.

And with that, I'm going to go ahead and kick off our program with our first question.

Why Coverage Matters

Now this may sound like a really simple question, but why is getting coverage important to a business?

Cameron: That is a good question. You see a lot of companies getting coverage on sites like TechCrunch, or they make very big investments into blogging.

I think the goal that any kind of founder should be looking at is you really need to surround the IT organization with content related to the problems that your end users are suffering from and possible solutions. You really need to be a part of that discussion.

So I think, as most of the listeners of this podcast are, they're probably in very early stage companies. And it's very difficult to get your name out, but in order to be part of the discussion that an end user or an influencer or the decision maker will have about your offering, you really need to surround that organization with content about your offering and the problems that you are solving. And PR is a very good way to do that.

If you are able to engage with the right types of influencers and bloggers and analysts, you can cover quite a bit of ground that would otherwise be very expensive or take a long time to do.

Malia: Great. And do you have a media hit that you're particularly proud of?

Cameron: Fortunately, quite a few. I can talk about a few, actually. Newvem is a company that was analyzing Amazon cost and usage. And we were found in 2013.

And we're based in Tel Aviv in Israel, and it's startup nation, all that stuff, but we're so disconnected physically from the market that it was very hard for us to really be part of a discussion, because we're just so far away, and we're like ten hours ahead, so when I would show up at like eleven o'clock in the morning, which over there is kind of early, there's no one up. So the day really wouldn't begin until like four or five o'clock in the afternoon.

So, I mean, fortunately when we launched Newvem, we did the funding announcements and the beta announcement, we timed it right, and this is really important to share: if you are a startup and you've already raised your funds but you haven't come out to market with that yet, the funding announcements are like gold. They're like easy kills. They're great one-offs. That's a very easy way to show credibility for your offering, and you only have one of those once every two or three years, if you're lucky. So timing that is really important.

Just engaging tier A bloggers and letting them know that you raise funds, you have a certain embargo date, and working together with them to kind of time your beta announcement before the funded announcement is very helpful. That will help you to get an initial waterfall. So I'm talking, assuming that they link to you and that you time it right and you've got the right bloggers writing about you, that's actually a great way to get a great one-off and lots of traffic to your site and lots of discussions about what you're doing.

But the real problem is, what happens after that funding announcement, right? What do you do? You have a few thousands of users, if you're lucky. How can you consistently be part of the discussion with the most influential people that are engaging this developer audience?

The way that we solved that at that time is, we're this scrappy startup at the time. I just looked at what we were doing, and I realized that the data that we were collecting behind the scenes was very valuable. I mean, we were analyzing the cost and usage of some of the hottest startups and even a few enterprises that were actually using Amazon Cloud.

And I looked at the most influential bloggers that were engaging in this community, and I realized that there's so much speculation on what was happening behind the scenes that no one really knew.

So I understood there that we could actually be a source of news, whereby we could counter gossip or opinions or speculation with hard data.

So what I did is I just reached out, identified a few up and coming bloggers that were covering the Amazon cloud, and I said, look, we compiled a report covering a statistically relevant sample of Amazon users, and here's what we found. 30% of them are spending X amounts over what they should be spending because they just happen to leave servers on, or X amount of Amazon users that we've sampled have significant security vulnerabilities that could be solved just by a few clicks. And this was awesome material.

When we came out with these, we call them cloud reports at the time, and I would come out with them once every quarter, and we would segment and kind of slice and dice the reports based on different KPIs like security, cost, and usage, and bloggers just love them, and they just kept on coming back for more.

Becoming a Source of News

Malia: Yeah, and you talked a little bit about the importance of being a credible news source and making your organization a go-to for news. Why is this important for media relations and strengthening media relationships?

Cameron: This is a good question.

Unfortunately, bloggers, analysts, and influencers, they don't care about you. They don't care about your founders. They don't care about your product. They don't care about any of this stuff.

Because there's tons of startups are doing the exact same thing. So what I found was useful in making us not just some kind of trendy feature, but being a credible source of news is we took the effort to sample what our users wanted and what our users were doing. We quantified that data and anonymized it. And we found that these kinds of reports were very valuable.

And if you look at any successful startup, they tend to do that. Both Redis Labs and Newvem are differently classified in that.

So at the end of the day, when you are engaging with a blogger or with an analyst or with an influencer, the goal there is you want them to come back to you to ask you about, I just heard that, for example, that Amazon is launching a new... I can give you a real example. Amazon came out with this, I think it was called the Dedicated Instance, in 2000, I think it was like 13.

And lots of speculation, but four different bloggers that email me saying, "Cameron, Amazon's making this announcement, or they made this announcement. I need to get your opinion on this."

So we had established this level of credibility where anytime that Amazon was coming out with an announcement, we proved ourselves because we had the data and we had the experts, and they would always come to us to kind of counter this speculation with hard data.

So actually it's more than just becoming a news source. It's also becoming an expert in the category that you are attempting to dominate.

You can actually see that, like Peter Thiel talks about this a little bit as well, whereby he says, when he speaks about capitalist versus competition and uses the example of the San Francisco restaurant scene. You don't want to go into a space where there's lots of competition. You want to try to establish yourself as a capitalist and monopolize that category. So I think that thesis that he says applies very well in this space.

So you need to understand how you are an expert in the space that you're covering. It could be Amazon Cloud, it could be security, it could be monitoring some kind of an application, whatever it is, you actually already are an expert in that if you are succeeding to get people to use your offering on a regular basis and that user base is growing.

If you look at that data and you see how it changes over time and what is important to your end users, you can utilize this data as almost like an analyst warehouse, because you are an expert in that space. And if you identify the right types of trends and buzz that's in the scene that bloggers and analysts are looking for, this is gold for them.

They want it. And if you take a look at how they're solving this now, you'll just see talking heads writing self-serving guest posts about their perception of things. Hey, who cares? If you come with hard data and an expert opinion on that, it's a total game changer to just finding someone's kind of talking head opinion.

Engaging Bloggers and Analysts

Malia: So I'm now excited about securing coverage for my business. I realize the value of being a news source and being an expert. But my next question is, how do I go about securing coverage in the right channels, and what should my engagement strategy be?

Cameron: There's a few ground rules for that. So one, you need to be following the bloggers and analysts and influencers that are covering your specific section. This is a must. You've gotta engage them. And we can kind of break that off into two different levels.

One is, if you are working with a PR firm that is gonna bring a Rolodex and can map that out for you, that's great. I would assume you probably aren't. And you have to do it on your own. So you need to do that exercise.

You need to map out. I mean, I've always mapped out every single person that I could find that was covering space X. So for Newvem, it was covering Amazon Web Services. For Redis Labs, it was covering Redis.

And I would find as many bloggers as I could. I would segment them by the types of outlets that they are working with. So obviously someone who's working at, that's right in column, let's say at TechCrunch or VentureBeat, will have a higher priority than some other blog which I never heard of before.

But it's really important to look at how big their audience base is and what kind of audience is following that.

Number two, you need to let them know that you are reading what they are saying and that you are able to voice an opinion about that. And the best way to do this, and probably what I found is one of the most underutilized ones, is to follow them on Twitter.

So even PR firms, average PR firms will just email them, right? And they don't really establish that kind of interest with them.

Follow them on Twitter, follow them on LinkedIn, or add them on LinkedIn, but look at what they're writing on Twitter, especially your top ten most influential bloggers and analysts. Follow them, open discussions with them, retweet what they're saying, be active in the social space, because it's a great opportunity for them to speak more about what topics they might be contributing on a blog. It gives them also carte blanche to speak about anything.

This is actually a super useful way. I've built really great relationships.

Another kind of tactic that's really fun is if you go to a event like at Amazon Summit or Amazon re:Invent, a lot of times those bloggers and analysts, they are not there at those keynotes, because the internet sucks, right? So a lot of guys are in the hotel room or they're off-sites.

And that is a great place to talk to them about what's going on, because everyone that wants to be heard is talking at those events. And there's nothing better than getting pinged in real time about what they just wrote and knowing that there's another question around the corner. It's a great way to build reciprocity and to strengthen some of the relationships that you have.

I've built great relationships with bloggers and analysts doing that. It's great. And even better, you can invite them for beers afterwards too. It's really cool.

Malia: Yeah, and can you talk a little bit about what kind of pressures journalists are under in this two-way street between a vendor or a member of any organization and the media?

Cameron: That's a good question. So bloggers that are working for some of the more well-known tech journals or developer-facing journals, where they're actually working for a company, they're under pressure to write high quality content, but also content that's read, and they have their own metrics for that. So it can be a challenge for them.

So I think the way to look at that is you may not get coverage for whatever you're trying to write about, especially if it's a feature announcement or something like this. The goal there is you want to get a response. You want to start a discussion with the bloggers.

So for example, if you email the blogger and the guy's just saying, "Oh, now's not a good time," it doesn't need to be taken personally so much, because the pressure that they're under is, there are so many different influences that dictate what they can write about and what they can't.

Malia: And let's say you've put in all this hard work, developed a great relationship with a reporter. He is on deadline, you get a mention in an article. Great hit to your company, but it doesn't link back to your homepage.

Increasingly, we're seeing that nowadays. With no link backs. How can you garner greater hits with no link back?

Cameron: Yeah, so I think the expectation there is the days of looking at Google Analytics after you're on some site and looking at this crazy spike are kinda over.

The right way to look at that is your goal is, and it's difficult to measure that, is you really want to be part of that discussion that developers have about the problems that they are trying to solve. And that all goes back to surrounding the IT organization with content about those problems. There isn't that much that you can do in many cases, like even in TechCrunch and other sites, they usually just link back to Crunchbase and other places like this.

But the fact is you got the coverage, and this in itself is a great goal, because you are there. And it's also a great piece of content for you to broadcast over your social channels and even over your lists.

So the effect is not something that you're ever going to be able to measure, especially if it was released on an external site. You're not gonna know it. But there are ways that you can amplify that effect.

So one is taking that content and syndicating it over your own blog and giving a reference to that. This is great because you got the coverage. This is number one. And promoting that to all of your social channels, through your newsletter, to all of your leads, referencing it on your site, it gives you great credibility as well.

There is a major difference, I would say, between getting, I mean, even if you're part of the discussion from a great blogger, this is great. If it's a discussion from an analyst, this is a different kind of credibility that you can share even to other bloggers.

So I think the focus there is looking to get the coverage in order to be part of this discussion. And if it's not going to link back, it's not that much of a problem, because the eyeballs are still there. It's just a matter of what you can do with that content once it's published.

Malia: So would you say it's less about increasing sales and more about increasing buzz and public awareness?

Cameron: Oh yeah. It's all funnel, right? So you can look at it from like, I am getting coverage, therefore I should be getting sales, right? There are many steps between that.

So in my past two startups, we looked at that. Back in Newvem days, it was very easy to get linked backed, because we would link back, for example, to a report. So we would mention, "This report is gonna go live on our blog. Here's the URL to get the full report." So this would motivate the blogger to actually link back to that blog post.

It's actually a very important thing to distinguish: when you made the decision that you're going to be a news source, you're also making the decision that you're not focused on bringing traffic to your glorious homepage in order to convert users.

So as a news source, most of your news will eventually be distributed through your blog. And in many cases, just saying, "Dear blogger, here's a brief of the report that we're gonna publish. Full report is gonna be published in X hour on this day. Here's the URL." Now you're linking to your blog, and it makes everybody happy, because suddenly you're not like, "Oh, here's another vendor again with their stupid homepage."

Like, here's a great report. The full report's right here. You can see it on their blog. It's like, there's no decision there, right?

Influencer Marketing

Malia: Sure. Bloggers are increasingly becoming very important influencers, which is a great segue into influencer marketing, which I know, Cameron, you have extensive experience in that realm. I'd love for you to tell us about influencer marketing and why companies should have an influencer marketing strategy in place.

Cameron: Influencer marketing, I mean, by its definition, is when you have a well-defined audience of people that you're trying to engage, there are certain people that have a great sway via their opinions and how they broadcast content to that community.

So for example, a good example is open source. If you take a look at open source communities on Twitter, you have influencers that are leading open source projects. You can also see this in the vendor realm, where some companies that enable their developers to have personas, for example, Netflix. Many of the developers have personas, and those guys are very active as influencers in the community of developers on the Amazon Cloud.

Same goes for Werner Vogels, for example. I mean, this guy is a great persona, an influencer. And obviously there's several layers down with that.

When engaging influencers, the great news about that is you have a very focused audience that they can communicate with. And they generally have one channel, which is usually Twitter, or they might have a newsletter base. The good news is that it's very easy to share content with them and to engage them.

So I'd say the right way to approach that is to first find the most, the biggest ones that engage the widest net that you want to engage, which would be developers, and to also look at the other extreme, which are, you may be, if you're in security or in monitoring, there might be specific community leaders that are very influential in those communities.

You have to develop relationships with them in the same kind of ways I've discussed with bloggers, like follow them, create discussions with them, and then slowly share with them content about what you're doing, or just open up discussions generally about the problems that you're trying to solve. And with that discussion, and when they've established some layer of trust with you, you can begin to be a little bit more proactive and sharing them embargoed content or reports, webinars, this sort of thing.

Malia: Sure. And opening up content on public facing material can be a really scary thing. We've had member companies come to us and say that the drawback that they see from influencer marketing is that it isn't as controllable as traditional marketing. What is your advice? Do you agree with this statement?

Cameron: I love that, actually. It sounds kind of crazy, but sometimes the best news is bad news. Because generally, this applies to a blogger, applies to an analyst, also applies to an influencer. So if you share with them some announcement or some content or report, and they shine it as if this is the best thing since sliced bread, it's usually not like, it's great, but you won't get much of a discussion about that. Generally the discussions happen when there's a controversy or a debate about something.

So what would separate, from my experience, a well-written article to an awesome article, or even a tweet for that matter, or content of any kind from any kind of third party is when they pivot that to speak about risks, competitors, or problems that you might actually have.

Because this opens up a great discussion, which, for example, if it's in a blog post, you can continue this discussion and respond to it on Twitter. It's great. If an influencer is doing this on Twitter, you've got the same opportunity. But generally these are the necessities to create a lot of discussions with that influencer's audience.

It's almost expected. And I would say, if you are going back to this thesis of being an expert and a news source, you've got to welcome that as well.

Oh, one more thing that is important to look at is there might be vulnerabilities that you have to address at some point. So rather than keeping those vulnerabilities or those weaknesses to deal with later, you may as well know about them now. So the sooner that they're exposed and the sooner that you have the opportunity to respond to them and remedy them, the better it is for you.

Getting Through to a Target

Malia: All this sounds great, Cameron. We've gone over how to identify the right channels and engage with the media and the importance of media relationships. But what happens if I have this main target that I need to get in front of? He covers my beat every single day, and it's like an endless pit of emails. It's a one-way relationship, and every day I get shot down with zero response.

Cameron: Oh yeah, this is a good question. So there's two ways I would say you should look at that. One is you never know what's going on in that person's life. So I've always learned, don't take this stuff personally.

So especially if you're just trying to start this relationship and you're going through the process, following them on Twitter and adding them on LinkedIn, and you're engaging them over email, is you have to continue to alert them and just let them know what you're doing, with very short emails.

They may not be responsive, but generally speaking, you have a kind of quantity versus quality play. So one is, if you're giving them good stuff, they know it and they're gonna be responsive. If it takes you a few times to do it, just keep on soldiering on, is what I would say.

I think another thing to look at is, even if you've been able to reach out to a blogger that has covered you once in a while but just doesn't feel like covering it, or you worked really hard on this piece and no one is taking it, this can be detrimental, because especially if you are a marketing person, you invested the time to say, we've got a great store, we have great data on Amazon or monitoring or something like this, but no one's taking it. The question is, what do you do with it, right?

So a few things to think about. One is, set very specific time frames of when you're gonna do this. Give it three days.

Pick a few tier A bloggers that you want to engage with and just reach out to one. If one takes it, bingo, do it. If the person is not responsive or doesn't want to take it forward, then reach out to someone else. But just ensure that scarcity is understood here.

So email that blogger and say, look, we're gonna release this announcement in 24 hours on our blog post. State the embargo date on that. And if they respond to you, awesome. If they don't, go to the next person. If no one covers it at all, it's okay.

Place it on your blog anyway and follow up with all of them and say, hey, just want to update you, we shared this on our blog, it would be great to get your opinion on this, or if you would, it's very valuable to developers in this space. Feel free to share this on Twitter, and paste the link to the tweet that you wrote about the report.

In many cases, I've seen that bloggers that would not cover me would do that. And also influencers. It happens all the time.

They love this because they have much more freedom to broadcast whatever they want, looking for additional content to spark a discussion with their end users, and it's easy. It's just copy paste few lines and you push tweet, right? It's not like you have to go into WordPress and think about going to a manager or something like this, or to an editor.

Malia: I'm curious to hear your thoughts. When is it appropriate to pick up the phone and dial a reporter direct?

Cameron: Ooh, that is a good question. I think that you have to kind of sense how good you are on the phones and how willing you are to be hung up on, potentially. Also depends on how well you know the person.

I believe that most bloggers, from my experience, are most responsive over email. Phone calls can be extremely interruptive. And you don't know if they're in the middle of writing an article or picking up their kids or something like this. So I would always say, try it out.

Because at the end of the day, it isn't about you, it's about the message that you're bringing.

So if you're going back to this thesis that you are a source of good stuff, then they're gonna take the phone call or they're gonna be responsive to the email. If you're not doing that, then I wouldn't expect much response from the phone, but I would definitely be respective to that. I mean, if they're asking you not to talk to them on the phone, don't do it ever again.

But I found in general the best way is to just continuously float the email on top of the inbox. I would do that a lot. I would respond to the email if I wasn't getting a response and say, "I'm just filling this on top of your inbox. Let me know if you're interested."

Fill this on top of your inbox, one of the line, like, I'm gonna probably launch this on the blog in the next 12 hours. I'll give you an exclusive, let me know. That's in the case of working with our bloggers.

And I think it's okay, because it's set an expectation for both of us. So I let the blogger know, look, I value what you can do, but this is awesome content for your readers.

I'm taking this out to print on my blog. If you're down to participate, I'm giving you an opportunity to do so. Let me know if you're interested, and I can push it back or not.

If not, I'm not waiting. I'm pushing this out of my blog, and it's gonna be made available to as many eyeballs as I can get. So it's either you or it's my blog.

Malia: It's likely also important to understand how a newsroom works. For example, if you're pitching a tech earnings reporter, you're likely not going to be wanting to pitch at 2 p.m. Pacific time during earnings season.

Cameron: Oh yeah. That is a good point. I think you can look at it on a very micro level. You need to think about when they're most responsive to emails.

So for my test, I would do it as early in the morning as possible, so that they don't wake up and see an inbox of unread emails. I mean, who wants to go through that? I want to be the first one that's on the inbox.

So I would follow them on Twitter. I have the ones that I'm working with on Hootsuite, and when I see them tweeting, that's what I'm emailing.

Malia: So you know when they're awake.

Cameron: Oh yeah, but I also know that they're not in the middle of doing something else. They're not cooking breakfast, they're not dropping the kids off to school, they're not writing anything. They're on Twitter, right? So they're probably better engaged or more responsive to content.

It's a psychological practice. It's not a hack or anything. It's just simple psychology. There are times where people are more active in creating content and reading emails, responding to things, considering and thinking about things.

So I really try to get as much as I can into the workflow of not only the developer audience, but the people that are engaging that audience. So I would look and see when they're, okay, probably reading an article or looking at something, and they're posting this on Twitter.

Press Releases

Malia: Interesting. And when you do get these reporters on the line, do you feel like reporters have a validation of the importance of the news if there is a press release involved, rather than going the route of a blog post link?

Cameron: Ugh. I think that press release is, it's kinda like a fax machine. It's something that everyone does and you have to do it, but generally speaking, just put yourself in the shoes of a blogger and a professional writer.

I mean, when you get a press release, it's essentially, the news is already over, everyone already knows about it. So it also says that, I'm giving an invitation to whoever wants to read it. Doesn't really take advantage of this great relationship that I have with the blogger.

So as many times as possible, I would stay away from producing press releases until the news was broken, because no one reads press releases anyway. It's old stuff, right? You put it on the wire. No, put a press release on the wire.

No one's gonna cover that. There might be some people that will cover it, but probably not. You're not gonna get the high quality influencer and blogger eyeballs on that press release. It's old news once it's already on the wire.

So you gotta engage. I've always found, I wanna package the offering as a present to each blogger that I know. So I'll do it one at a time.

And I'll let them have the opportunity to take it forward. If they want it, they can take it. If they don't want it, then I'll decide if I'll take it to somebody else or if I'll put it on my blog. But I don't produce it and then put it on the wire.

In many cases, press releases are great just as a way to broadcast content that wasn't as popular in some cases. So this is a tactic to try, which is, I'm putting out a press release just about a report that we did and no one covered that. And it could be even after you've made your blog post and you've even used your own internal processes to broadcast that.

But I've just found, when you're at such an early stage, the value of a press release in many cases, I don't think warrants the priority that many people put on it.

Producing a press release is not success. Getting coverage is success. And it's a means to an end.

So you can put it, you can create it, and you can put it in the press release section. It's cool and everything, but I found that the output of what it does is not as valuable as engaging with the writer and the blogger and giving him his own personalized awesome piece of content, which he can share with his readers.

Launches in the Age of Continuous Delivery

Malia: Cool. So Cameron, another question that we get a lot from our member companies is around continuous delivery. In the age of continuous delivery, dev tools are being updated daily, almost hourly, and now businesses really need to be real time. While this is great, this rapid iteration to their products, how do you plan for a concrete launch?

Cameron: Yeah, this is an important question to ask. So I think that the days of glorious launches and feature announcements are effectively over. Unless you're, I don't know, a huge company or you're in Series D, E or F financing, you're gonna get coverage like this.

So there's a few different ways to look at this. First, a few facts. Number one is, once this feature's in place, it's doubtful that a lot of people, especially your end users, even know about it unless you've told them about it. This is really important. The external community probably doesn't know anything about it at all.

That's number one. Number two is, these kinds of features and launches, they're not particularly attractive for bloggers and influencers to cover unless they latch on to a trend or a controversial topic.

I'll go back to an example at Newvem. We had created a solution that was creating a visual dashboard of utilization within Amazon. And it was really cool. It was a utilization heat map. And we had it in the product, and we had great feedback from this.

And I shared it with a really influential blogger. And what I thought was a kind of interesting feature, for him was like, "Wow, this is so amazing. There's nothing out there that visualizes your Amazon utilization. This is awesome. I want to go out with this tomorrow." Alright, go for it.

So I mean, that really goes back to, we were able to, without really knowing it, pinpoint with a very specific trend and need that was out there. So it goes back to the problem.

Having said that, the way that I would look at that is, with continuous delivery, it's a technical term, but the application is still that you are still interfacing and making your improved offerings available to your end users. So it is great content and material to share with bloggers and with analysts and with influencers, because it keeps you on the radar map.

You gotta make it very tight with the problems that you're solving, so that they see that and you're really connecting with a specific trend. So for example, if it's an open source technology or if it's a monitoring technology, and you align yourself with that need and you mentioned how this feature is solving that, keeps yourself on the radar. They may not cover it, they probably won't cover it.

Probably the best way to get coverage for these is not by explicitly speaking about the feature. It's more about letting your customers speak about you.

So find those lighthouse, awesome, well-known customers that are using your offering and reach out to them, and work with them to see if they understand what their success is with your offering, what problems they had that you solved. And if they're using this feature, it's a great byline.

So generally the story is, this customer is using X offering to solve this kind of problem, right? And articles about that. And then by the way, there's this really cool feature within the solution which really helped them to solve this kind of problem. That's generally the best way that I've seen these types of feature announcements being particularly interesting to bloggers and influencers.

Malia: So what do you do when some of your great customers are not willing to speak to the media on your behalf? For example, some of our member companies are in the security space. And they are doing some amazing things for the clients, but clients aren't wanting to publicly speak because it's gonna be exposing their own vulnerabilities.

Cameron: Yeah, that's a great question. So I don't have experience in security, but I can see how that could be a problem.

I really believe it's all in your pitch, because if you look at IT services, it's already saying you cannot solve this problem, therefore our solution is better, right? So you're already tapping into vulnerabilities and things that people cannot solve.

So the pitch should always follow a few ground rules, I found, and the first one is you've gotta find how you made a negative into a positive or how you made a neutral into a positive. Not about how you put out a fire. So I would search for those kinds of use cases. This is number one. Number two is you have to hone in on the needs and interests of the IT department.

And there are some common needs, which are, I need to evangelize my own offering in order to showcase the value that it has to the developer community. And number two, I want to put my offering in front of talented developers because I'm probably hiring as well. If you hold on to those two things, you generally can get a decent discussion.

Because those guys are so poor in PR currency, but they really need it. They really need someone to say, the infrastructure behind this company is crazy awesome and they're using really cool new technologies. Therefore, the IP value of this technology is high, and this is a really cool place to work.

So I've always found that following those two rules is a great way to at least get a discussion. And from there on, it's just a matter of your own relationship and looking at the specifics of the vulnerabilities that they have and trying to find a way to solve that.

Malia: Okay, great, great explanation. Well, thank you everyone for joining today. Thank you, Cameron.

Cameron: Yeah, thank you very much. If you have any questions, or if you want to participate in the discussion, anything that you want to say about this, please follow me on Twitter. It's @cameronperon. You can see it in the page of this podcast is hosted.

Feel free to follow me, open up a discussion. Happy to answer questions.

Malia: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Pitch Room, brought to you by Heavybit.

Announcer: Heavybit is a nine-month program and community for developer-facing startups. For more information, visit heavybit.com.