
PR Advice from Facebook’s Head of Tech Communications - zt
http://firstround.com/article/The-Best-PR-Advice-Youve-Never-Heard-from-Facebooks-Head-of-Tech-Communications
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bfe
The whole last section of the article on "seven virtuous habits" corresponds
1:1 without attribution to Steven Covey's "seven habits of highly effective
people."

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jamesbrownuhh
It never ceases to amaze me how many people and self-help practitioners borrow
shamelessly from the seven habits and never once expect that any of their
audience might just recognise where the material comes from.

~~~
mdokas
I agree completely. I recognized it instantly and wondered how many people
wouldn't.

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higherpurpose
Facebook PR? Like this?

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/12/facebook-loses-much-face-
in...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/12/facebook-loses-much-face-in-secret-
smear-on-google/)

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/17/we-will-fight-in-the-
shade/](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/17/we-will-fight-in-the-shade/)

~~~
trevoragilbert
More like this: [http://techcrunch.com/author/josh-
constine/](http://techcrunch.com/author/josh-constine/)

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jobu
This is funny and I've seen startups do it as well as product managers at
bigger companies:

 _One of the biggest mistakes startups make is treating launch like the be all
end all. "It's like if you just launched, dropped the mic, and said peace out,
we’re done," Marooney says._

And I really like this analogy: _Launching is like the opening move in a chess
game._ So true. You need to have next steps planned out with different options
depending on how customers or competitors react.

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shawn-furyan
This article is a rambling, formulaic mess of non-information. I mean, the "7
deadly sins"/"virtuous habits"... didn't BuzzFeed teach us the inherent
dubiousness of that framework? If you're adding or removing items to match a
nice number, then you're not choosing which content to present based on its
usefulness.

All writing on business and/or productivity flirts with the prospect of being
a negative ROI time investment since it keeps you from doing business and
being productive. This one offers no game changing incites, so falls squarely
in the negative ROI pile (which is much larger than the positive ROI pile,
incidentally).

It also falls into the winner worship category of business lit. To
dismissively paraphrase, "These things are the right thing, because it's what
winners did". Luck goes unacknowledged. Unfortunately, you, the reader,
despite any other similarities the two of you may have, are despairingly
unlikely to have Mark Zuckerberg's luck.

~~~
gohrt
> All writing on business and/or productivity flirts with the prospect of
> being a negative ROI time investment since it keeps you from doing business
> and being productive.

You seem to have overlooked that this writing was posted by a _PR flack_ , and
got Facebook on the front page of a popular website.

~~~
shawn-furyan
I'm speaking of ROI to the reader. Of course the business/self-
help/productivity literature industry extracts a lot of return for its
authors/publishers/distributors without necessarily providing equal value to
its customers. This is not what I'm commenting on, nor is it interesting to
me. So I didn't overlook the point so much as not give a shit about the
undeserved return that the author got from writing this drivel.

There are a lot of self-proclaimed gurus that will come up with numbered steps
and claim that they are broadly generalize-able, but are in fact just too
vague to easily disprove. I think that this is a destructive act on balance,
for various reasons, and so it is worthy of derision. In fact, it's kind of
funny that this article specifically claims to be "actionable" when it's
anything but. It's a collection of vague and unoriginal principles. And like
so many of its ilk, not worthy of anyone's time.

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danielrhodes
I think the advice is great and actionable. However, Facebook does not follow
this advice. Haven't heard anything about Paper, Poke, or Home since they
launched.

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agibsonccc
Celery recently launched a PR guide for startups. It gives some great advice I
think:

[https://www.trycelery.com/pr-guide-ebook](https://www.trycelery.com/pr-guide-
ebook)

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bowlofpetunias
tl;dr: Use buzzword bingo. A lot.

