Global Grind Launches w/TechCrunch Coverage

Global Grind (globalgrind.com) launched today with one of the greatest endorsements in tech blogging, attention from TechCrunch.

I'll get back to you on this one but I do want to point out that hip hop magazines and news sites that added groups of bloggers could have had a chance at coverage from high traffic blogs like TechCrunch and they passed it up with stealth launches or simple ignorance of the marketing possibilities.

It does seem like the other hip hop 2.0 projects, especially the social networks, are aware of and seeking out tech web coverage while blog-based projects have missed out.  This split is possibly related to blogging being taken up by publishers who treat it as an informal content management challenge while other 2.0 projects are more fundamentally a tech challenge.

Previous ProHipHop Coverage:
Global Grind Raises $4.5 Million VC Round

Update:
Here's the press release plus additional tech blog coverage at Portfolio.com with President and CEO Navarrow Wright's smiling face.

Wait a minute, you mean if I reached out to tech bloggers, I could end up with coverage at Conde Nast Portfolio.com?  Say what?

Comments

The launch of a new site with backing from a major VC and a hip-hop icon > the launch of a section on a website.

Landing Techcrunch coverage and attention from other tech blogs is not as easy as you may think. Where's the Techcrunch review of Blocksavvy?

Even with that said, places like SOHH now have a PR firm repping them, so now notable feature launches will get some type of press attention.

[Hashim]

that comment up above is from me, Hashim

[Clyde Smith]

TechCrunch is considered one of the toughest to crack and I'm not trying to make it sound like whoever's responsible for this campaign had an easy time.

Blocksavvy did get covered in Mashable, for instance:
http://mashable.com/2006/10/11/blocksavvy-cyworld-for-grown-ups/

"The launch of a new site with backing from a major VC and a hip-hop icon > the launch of a section on a website."

You're right and the VC part is what's getting a lot of the attention, not the hip hop 2.0 part though that provides a nice hook as well, but the first hip hop website to add dedicated blog features or the first magazine to do so could have gotten attention for being the first at that time.

You can do something relatively small on a website and get huge amounts of attention if the timing makes it unique. You can also get small but substantial amounts of attention that help build a solid base for growth.

So I'm not talking about hiring "PR firms" to announce "site features". I'm talking about taking advantage of the moments when one's business moves can create outsize attention when communicating with the right folks.

That doesn't require a PR pro and many such professionals will actually get in the way if they haven't figured out that this terrain is different.