Anatomy of blekko's press launch

<i>The Mashable piece alone received more than 1,400 retweets.</i><p>How many of those 1400 retweets are just bots automatically retweeting anything coming from Mashable? The dark secret of twitter marketing is that the number of tweets can be so misleading because of the bot activity. You'll also see a ton of twitter bots when you get coverage on RWW, and I'm sure others.<p>And yes, I've actually watched live coverage of articles I'm interested in (e.g. covering my sites) spread and checked out most tweets that came up. It's quite easy for a human to spot a bot vs real user tweeting once you look at their twitter stream. Most are bots.

btw, when the WSJ broke our embargo, I was on my way into the office. We were planning to get there around 3-4pm for the 9pm PT launch. Some folks were already there and turned the site live since the first press had gone up.<p>But techcrunch has a policy of not posting their story if an embargo is broken, so we didn't get the TC story that we had briefed them on.

Interesting that he specifically calls out their PR firm as being good. Seems that most of the advice I've seen lately goes in the other direction, eschewing a PR firm entirely in favor of more guerrilla-style marketing.<p>I think in the end, like most other things, it depends on the type of company you're trying to build. In Blekko's case they're trying to build a search engine, so they want to get as much mainstream press as possible. Someone like GitHub, for example, with a much more technical and focused user base, did just fine by going to conferences and buying developers free drinks.

Did you actually have a specific written agreement with the WSJ not to publish until Monday?<p>Because they (admirably, IMHO) have a policy of disregarding these ridiculous one-sided embargo agreements. If you want them to hold back on a story, you have to ask them FIRST. You can't just spam them a press release that says pretty please don't publish this yet on the top.<p>Typically the only exception is if you're giving them an exclusive (and, again, you need to get that in writing <i>before</i> you send them your top secret press release)

Really excellent article. A launch is way more than just pushing a site from dev to production.

why do search engine launches get such enormous press attention?

Who was their PR agency and what is the ballpark fee to coordinate a launch like this?