A CEO Moment…

Ok, no surprise, I'm a first time CEO. I have been around the block, but I never sat in the big chair. Today, I had one of those "CEO Moments". While not huge, it gave me pause as what was the right thing to do.

We have a press release coming out tomorrow (Tuesday) that talks about an acquisition that Lijit made last week. We don't do tons of press releases, but we do a few and always want them to represent significant events in our company's history. This met that bar, so we spent a fair amount of time getting it ready last week.

This weekend I sat down and decided to own the propagation of this release. I wanted to "see" what was possible if I just went "full on". I sent the release on to two local papers, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable (who have covered us before), ReadWriteWeb (friends of ours), and eWeek. I exchanged emails with Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, and Clint Boulton from eWeek, etc.. On Sunday I had a nice conversation with Clint at eWeek – Damn I like a dude that will do a call on a Sunday!

Today, I got an email from ReadWriteWeb that they were interested in running the story. Wow, great, I love it. They are a great publisher and I love to read their stuff. Problem is - they ran it today (Monday) the day before our release goes out. Hmmm… That's a problem…

We aren't a public company so it's not really a disclosure issue.. Most of the conversations I had over the weekend with various writers asked "you want me to embargo this till Tuesday, right?" and I would answer "yes" as that's the day of the release. With RWW, the question was never asked, and I didn't answer.. As a result, I got what I got – Monday at noon, people calling me asking about the acquisition.

Now, before I go on, I have to say RWW's piece is one of the best every written on the company and the product. So – I'm happy about that.

But, now this left me in an awkward place. Here, was the CEO Moment.. TechCrunch, the holy grail of the online tech space, was hanging out there. I really want to foster a good relationship with them and in fact Arrington and I talked about that a bit in our emails. But, if they ran the story – it would be an also ran.. F*$K!

After some thought….some more thought…. A littttttle more thought….tonight I emailed Arrington that RWW broke the story . I also told him I understood if they didn't run the story and that I was after a more long term relationship. He told me no problem, it happens all the time, and they weren't going to run the story.

So.. I'm stuck with the "I had a TechCrunch Moment, but all I got was this blog post" tee-shirt.

Arrington and I are going to get together in a few weeks and I'm going to take him through Lijit and what we are up to. I was after the long term relationship so I threw myself under the bus. Dude, It hurts under the bus.

Comments

[Micah Baldwin]

hence my quote "Sometimes the best way to learn to duck, is get punched in the face."

What is inherent in that quote is putting yourself in a position to get punched in the face. I would rather work for a guy that spends his time thinking about how to push forward, than someone who is too worried about the impending cliff.

It sucks that we wont be on TechCrunch as an article, but its good to know its because of the early RRW post, rather than the quality of the content.

[lux]

I'd be lying if I said that TechCrunch coverage wasn't important. But still, this particular hiccough is not going to be the thing that makes or breaks your company.

[Jim Turner]

There is plenty of room under the bus for all of us. The next story is the cool stuff that Lijit is doing with the purchase. Perhaps that is the real breaking story that TechCrunch will feature.

[DisMonkey]

Ouch. Been there, seen that.

Being an old-timer at PR, I fondly recall the days when you _faxed_ press releases to people, because then "NOT FOR RELEASE BEFORE XXXXX" would be in big bold letters stamped across the top.

Moving forward, you really have two things to consider:

1) How important is Techcrunch coverage for your business (not the same as "how badly do you want it")

2) How much preferential treatment would you give to TC over other news outlets?

At the end of the day, all media outlets like an exclusive and there simply aren't enough to go around. So you have to figure out if you can create an interesting exclusive that will appeal to TC and also decide if you're willing to give it only to them...

Maybe you should add an "Arrington" button to your widget. That should get his attention :-)

[ventureblogalist]

good call. I am sure you will be rewarded later down the line. You officially have good TC karma.

Quick question. BigSwerve had my favorite internet app that I never got to fully exhaust with my opml. I was wondering if Lijit will expose the BigS front-end search tools to the web?

I was using one of those tools to find new bloggers by getting a list of all commenters on my favorite blogs. For example, tell me the URLs of every commenter on techcrunch. This is a great source for finding new blogs but currently is too manual a process to research..I would guess 50% of commenters on techrunch link to their own blog in their comment.