SezWho’s Apparent Desperation and Why Startups Should Space Out News Releases

This afternoon comment reputation service SezWho announced three new partnerships. We covered the news along with several other sites.

On the Entrecard side, JoeTech put together 10 reasons why the SezWho/Entrecard partnership is important for bloggers. In the Entrecard community, the SezWho service seems to be well received so far.

Frederic at ReadWriteWeb has a different perspective on the announcements. His article title suggests that SezWho is in desperation mode and signed these deals to try to catchup with Disqus. Frederic notes, "Overall, this is an interesting, yet somewhat desperate, move by SezWho. In terms of publicity, it has been in the shadow of similar ventures like Disqus and Intense Debate." and concludes by noting that Izea is deceptive, Creative Blogging is spammy and Entrecard is niche. I’d like to share my thoughts on his post.

Never once when I read the news did I think that these were moves that signal desperation. Distribution is key for a service like SezWho and while many tech bloggers hate Izea and CEO Ted Murphy, he has access to a large number of bloggers. That’s a smart business move because if any of the Izea bloggers take the SezWho service and subsequently leave Izea, they keep SezWho. And note that I am not a big fan of what Izea is doing either, but having been on the corporate marketing side for nearly 10 years, I get what they are offering. Using Izea as a middleman to get to their set of bloggers for distribution makes sense.

Frederic also notes that "SezWho is under a lot of stress from Disqus and Intense Debate…" I’d love to see concrete proof of why SezWho is under a lot of stress from Disqus? Both Disqus and Intense Debate are building strong products but because SezWho isn’t a valley darling, does that mean they are facing pressure and stress? In fact, I guess Intense Debate must also be under a lot of stress from Disqus as well since they aren’t written about or discussed as often.

We see over and over where one company in an category is a valley darling and gets constant hype (no matter their results) while another company continues to build a product without the hype.

The hypothetical question for Frederic is, if Disqus made the exact same deals today, would you have said that Disqus was in a desperate situation against JS-Kit, Intense Debate and SezWho?

I’d also like to add that I think it was a mistake for SezWho and FutureWorks (the PR agency) to go out with all three releases at one time. I’ve written about the news flow topic before but knowing that many Web tech bloggers find Izea’s services to run on the other side of the fine line, splitting Izea out into a seperate release would have made sense. This would have allowed Entrecard and Creative Blogging to not lose the spotlight over the Izea discussion.

Even more importantly, by splitting up these releases by a few weeks, this would help to keep SezWho top of mind. By sending out three at once, now we may run into a "cold" period for SezWho news. I am sure Brian and his team at FutureWorks have a plan but I wanted to share my thoughts for other startups that don’t have a PR firm. Space out your news and keep your brand top of mind.