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Dear Tech Press: Let’s Cut Through The Nonsense And Focus On Active Users. The technology press can be a strange beast sometimes. We’ll quibble over facts and quotes that were mentioned in jest or passing (oftentimes in less than 140 characters). But, inexplicably, we’re willing to regurgitate statistics that are nebulous at best and sometimes just plain misleading — usually because they sound good in a headline.

Today, I’m going to single out what’s probably the most frequently abused statistic: the cumulative user count. You see it all the time. Hell, I’ve probably written hundreds of posts that mention the total number of users a startup has without batting an eye. This often refers to the number people to ever register for a site or the number of total downloads of an app. But in reality this number doesn’t say much because it fails to take into account how many people have stopped using a service. The total user count can be meaningful for a startup’s first few months of life, but the older a startup is, the more useless it becomes.

How to make friends and influence bloggers! Here at Jam, we pride ourselves on caring about bloggers, generating content that's genuinely of interest to them and in return doing a great job for our clients. Whilst we could write about best practice from an agency perspective until the cows come home (that's a long time, trust me), we thought it would be interesting to get input from the other side of the fence. Martin Bryant of The Next Web kindly offered to give his candid views. So without further ado, grab a cuppa and enjoy... Hey PR people, here's how to work with bloggers without really annoying them I love PR people. That said, every day, flacks lose out on any chance of winning coverage for their clients by approaching journalists and bloggers in a way that puts us right off. While I'm using examples from the tech world here, these tips should apply to any area of the media that you may be pitching to.

Be personal but not creepy In most cases, generic emails are bad. It's easy to go overboard on this though. Be relevant. PR people: 10 ways to screw up @techcrunch’s embargo policy. TechCrunch is famous for not accepting PR people’s embargoes. I’m always shocked that PR people care in any way about this, because there are so many ways to force TechCrunch (and anyone, really) to abide by embargoes. Here’s my favorite ways: 1. Copy Evan Williams (CEO/Co-founder of Twitter).

Twitter didn’t launch in a tech blog. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. What are some other ways you can mess with Arrington’s embargo policy? UPDATE: since one of these really was just giving up, I’ll give you an 11th one. 11. go to a place a lot of Twitterers and bloggers hang out (like the Twitter Conference that ended today) and tell everyone you like the news and see how it leaks out. Just how much Traffic Does Techcrunch send to your website or bl.

One thing that bugs me is that when people build cool apps or launch web based services their marketing plan doesn't really extend past trying everything in their powers to get on Techcrunch. It is the world's biggest tech blog with nearly 4 million RSS subscribers alone but we wanted to take a look and see how that translated in pure traffic terms after we got featured on the there on Wednesday. Just remember that this is just from the 24 hours the article was featured on the site and there is still plenty of traffic coming even today... Overall As you can see the traffic numbers are fairly small. I say they are small yet the article was popular by Techcrunch standards with over 400 Re tweets yet as you can see the referral traffic is not massive. It's clear that the majority of people read the site through RSS and very few click through to the actual source of the story. Geographic Spread Referring Sites RSS Readers Facebook Interaction Summary You should try and get covered on Techcrunch.

PRepguide. RP 2.0. Tech startups, exclusivity and our competitors (some thoughts) -