For years now, European media have reported breathlessly on every step of Silicon Valley tech giants like Uber, Tesla, Salesforce and Slack - and their founders Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, Stewart Butterfield and Marc Benioff. Why do they seem so endlessly fascinating to media - and what can we learn from them? Whether you're the founder of a European scale up or a corporate communication manager trying to find new ways to increase the reputation of your executive team in your industry, this webinar is sure to inspire you with insights, strategies and tactics.

1. #PR SECRETS OF TESLA,
SLACK, UBER, FACEBOOK,...

2. ELON MUSK
PAYPAL, TESLA, SPACEX, OPENAI

3. ELON MUSK – A MAN WITH VISION(S)

5. “So, in short, the master plan is:
• Build sports car
• Use that money to build an affordable car
• Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options.
Don't tell anyone.”
ELON MUSK, 02.08.2006

6. SPACE X

7. Because you need to be able to explain very clearly to media what your company
wants to achieve and why. The answer: “we just want to make money” is
generally not good enough (unless you launch a hedge fund).
A vision allows you to talk about all the great things that you will do in the
future, and allows you to explain how fast you are advancing towards that goal. A
vision is also a lot more exciting than talking about features.
WHY DO I NEED A VISION/MISSION AND VALUES?

8. All the better. The goal is not to create a cult around a person. The goal is to
create a cult around a vision and a mission – the founders are merely the faces of
that mission. Not the other way around.
“BUT I DON’T LIKE PERSONALITY CULTS”

9. THE MISSION

10. OR DO YOU
THINK IT’S A
COINCIDENCE
THAT “SLACK =
KILL E-MAIL”?

11. THE HATCH-
SCHULTZ MODEL:
IT STARTS FROM
THE VISION
THE LINK BETWEEN VISION AND CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

12. Key takeaway:
• Make your long term goals very clear to stakeholders
• Make your vision more operational
• Measure progress against the vision
• Use the vision to measure stakeholder alignment
• Is our vision known to employees & external world?
• Do stakeholders align with it or not?

13. STEWART BUTTERFIELD
SLACK
#2

14. STEWART BUTTERFIELD

15. “The big lesson here: don't underestimate the power of traditional media when
you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and
continuing for weeks afterward. Pull the strings you have. Work closely with
your PR firm to find your hook. It can be personalities on your team, impressive
customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc. But don't leave
it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together.”
Source
THE STORY

16. THE STORY

17. Often, your story will have one or more story elements in it. Actually, the more,
the better:
• Market opportunity
• Conflict (taking the fight to the taxi industry)
• Unusualness (rent out a room in your house)
• Newness (hoverboards)
• Human interest (bringing high speed internet to rural India)
• Investors
• Prominence (Ashton Kutcher invests in your startup)
• Significance (you know how everybody hates to shop groceries? Well, HelloFresh)
THE STORY

18. Every story element should be “charged”:
• Founders
• Human interest (a disabled veteran launches a prosthetics firm)
• Proximity (3 local college friends start a company that’s doing well)
• Human interest (Google employee #1 launches own startup)
• Funding event
• Significance (Magic Leap raises 700 million $...)
• Unusualness (…while still in stealth mode!)
• Technology
• Timeliness (VR!)
THE STORY

19. MARC BENIOFF, SALESFORCE
TRAVIS KALANICK, UBER
MIKE CANNON-BROOKES & SCOTT
FARQUHAR, ATLASSIAN

21. “TWENTY SIEBEL EXECUTIVES POURED OUT (...)
TO INVESTIGATE. A SIEBEL EXECUTIVE CALLED
THE POLICE, WHO IMMEDIATELY ARRIVED TO
PROTECT THE PROTESTERS!”

22. “We meticulously planned so that anyone looking for Siebel always found
salesforce.com. Eventually, when anyone thought about Siebel, he or she also
thought about salesforce.com. The reality was that we were still the gnat on the
back of an elephant, but our unusual tactics were making that elephant
dance.”
Source
BECOME PART OF THE INDUSTRY NARRATIVE BY PICKING A FIGHT

24. “MAKE SOMEONE COMPLAIN ABOUT YOU”

25. Inspiration:
• Pick a fight – or better, pick a cause
• You do not need to pick a fight with a company or a person. You can pick a fight
with any kind of injustice, imbalance and ever minor inconveniences.
• Salesforce: “No software!”
• Make the CEO the face of the cause
• Mark Benioff: “As the founder of this mission, it was my job to walk the talk. Many
CEOs are leery of getting too personal and are wary of inventing a mythical
persona.”
• Find creative ways to bring that cause to life

27. BE CAREFUL ABOUT THE DOSAGE, THOUGH

28. “At first, it can seem like your reputation won’t suffer too much by picking a
fight. The problem is, the second time, you are becoming a bore. The third
time, you’re like the kid who’s always in trouble. No one will listen to you, and
you now have the status “troublemaker”. People will kindly excuse themselves
from writing about you – and from doing business with you or work for you.”
Source
CAREFUL, THOUGH!

29. MARK ZUCKERBERG, FACEBOOK

30. F8: “ALMOST-YEARLY” STAKEHOLDER CONFERENCE

31. JASON LEMKIN, EX-ECHOSIGN

32. Inspiration:
• Don’t rely only on media (owned or earned) to align internal & external
stakeholders
• Create focused events to inform and engage stakeholders
• Share your long term plans – the FB 10 year roadmap shows technology that
doesn’t even exist yet
• Often heard excuse: “We’re listed, we can’t do that.”
• (Facebook and Tesla are also listed)

33. SATYA NADELLA, MICROSOFT
JEFF WEINER, LINKEDIN

34. 05.02.2016
LINKEDIN LOSES
43,6 PERCENT
MARKET CAP

35. COMPANY ALL HANDS MEETING ON SLIDESHARE

36. “YOU ARE THE SAME TEAM, EXECUTING THE
SAME MISSION”

37. FORBES

38. SATYA NADELLA, MICROSOFT

39. “FIRST, WE WILL OBSESS OVER OUR
CUSTOMERS.”
SATYA NADELLA, MICROSOFT

40. GEEKWIRE,
MASHABLE,
BUSINESS
INSIDER,…

41. Inspiration:
• The strict distinction between internal and external communication is no
longer useful
• The fact that journalists still use this distinction can be exploited tactically
• Sometimes it’s better not to send a press release – it’s more interesting if it’s an
“internal” memo
• Sometimes, you want to maximize message control and still go for big reach
(eg in times of crisis, issues,…)

42. STEVE JOBS, APPLE

43. IPHONE 7

44. IPHONE 5E

45. APPLE CAR

46. APPLE WATCH

47. “Over the years Steve Jobs would become the grand master of product launches.
Jobs found ways to ignite blasts of (press) publicity that were so powerful the
frenzy would feed on itself, like a chain reaction. (...) It was a phenomenon that
he would be able to replicate whenever there was a big product launch, from
the Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad in 2010. Like a conjurer, he could pull the trick
off over and over again, even after journalists had seen it happen.”
Source

48. Inspiration:
• Steve Jobs understood the power of exclusives
• Jobs had his own intuitive sense of how to stoke the excitement, manipulate the
competitive instincts of journalists, and trade exclusive access for lavish treatment.
• Apple understands the power of leaks
• By leaving out key information, you can generate 2x or more the amount of
coverage for a piece of news
• How to use: send out a generic press release about a key hire – then tip 1 journalist
about the significance of the hire (eg a new product launch!). Works like a charm.

49. DHARMESH SHAH, HUBSPOT

50. BLOG

52. BUILD AN ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR YOUR
STAKEHOLDERS
INBOUND.ORG: 159,823 MEMBERS (!)

53. STAY
ACCESSIBLE IN
TIMES OF ISSUE
MANAGEMENT
(IN “NEAR TIME”)

54. Inspiration:
• CEOs and founders are leaders, but can be wizards too
• In depth, technical knowledge about a subject inspires confidence about vision
and leadership
• Online communities are difficult to build, but once they exist and thrive, they
are like market places – hard to disrupt
• If you solve the chicken and egg problem of supply and demand in a community,
it’s very hard to take that community elsewhere

55. HILLEL FULD, Z-CAST
(TEL AVIV! NOT SILICON VALLEY)

56. CONSISTENCY
BRAND PROMISE

57. CONSISTENCY
BRAND PROMISE

58. CONSISTENCY
BRAND PROMISE

59. I have spent years on Twitter and other platforms generating and sharing tons of
content. Content of my own, content of others, and just general thoughts on a
variety of topics. I have dedicated endless time and resources to building
meaningful, not opportunistic, relationships with journalists of all kinds.
Friends, colleagues, not “journalists”.
Hillel Fuld

60. “Emailed tens of people telling them about the upcoming launch. Each email
was personal and real. NOT a template or a copy paste job! Do things that don’t
scale!”
Hillel Fuld

61. “I had already pitched The Next Web and I even did a ZCast the night before
with the great Martin Bryant but then, because ZCast was on Product Hunt,
another writer named Kirsty, who didn’t even know about the launch in advance,
found it on Product Hunt and was going to write about it. When I asked Martin
why they were about to publish it hours before the embargo, he rightfully
answered “How can you have an embargo if the product is already on Product
Hunt?”
To be fair, Headline Media told me NOT to hunt the product before the time, and
I didn’t listen.”

62. When Hillel launched his startup, it was covered in just about every tech
publication on the planet and got the #4 most upvotes on Product Hunt ever.
Forbes called it “a perfect launch” (here). Insights from Hillel here.
PERSONAL BRANDING & NETWORKING

63. Inspiration:
• “Slow PR”: build relationships over the course of the years
• It’s better to have meaningful connections with 10 influencers than superficial
contact with 1000s of semi-influencers
• Use social media to stay in touch with people you know, instead of
“collecting” new followers
• The best way to do social media marketing is to have coffee with people!

65. VIRALITY OF INFORMATION IN A NETWORK:
Q(I)XQ(R)=V
QUALITY OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP (R)
QUALITY OF YOUR INFORMATION (I)

66. “MAKE FRIENDS. BE INTERESTING.”

67. RANDY KOMISAR, KLEINER PERKINS

69. REMEMBER THE NETWORK WE TALKED ABOUT?
IT ALWAYS WINS

70. The world:
• Givers
• “other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them”, “a
relatively rare breed”
• Takers
• “tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them.”
• Matchers
• “operate on the principle of fairness: when they help others, they protect
themselves by seeking reciprocity.”

72. “GIVERS ARE THE MOST SUCCESSFUL. BECAUSE
OF THE IMPORTANCE OF NETWORKS.”
ADAM GRANT, “GIVE AND TAKE”

73. Givers are successful because matchers want them to be successful -- and
remember, most people are matchers. Givers tend to receive a lot of favors from
matchers, often without even realizing it, says Grant:
“Karmic moments can often be traced to the fact that matchers are on a mission
to make them happen. (...) they’ll go out of their way to reward givers who act
generously toward others.”
More on giving vs. taking: here

75. “IT’S EASIER TO WIN IF EVERYBODY WANTS
YOU TO WIN”
RANDY KOMISAR, VC, KLEINER PERKINS

76. PING ME HERE:
RAF WEVERBERGH
CO-FOUNDER FINN
TWITTER: @RAFWEVERBERGH, @FINNBE, @KRIS10VERMOESEN
SKYPE: RAFWEVERBERGH
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR BLOG: HTTP://FINNPR.COM
QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? FEEDBACK?