KickstarterForum.org

If they are a PR firm that targets kickstarter project I would strongly advise that you be live and learn in terms of Crowd PR, their website is known as www.crowd.pr. PR in general is immoral, companies all over the earth have been known to pay large monthly retainers to firms and receive unearned results. A PR firm is honestly the equivalent of a something you shouldn't do, so I don't advise using Crowd PR or anyone else.

You don’t need Crowd PR, PR firms are all immoral, they do nothing good. Even if you get media coverage how does that help your campaign at all? What you need is sales, not publicity. So what if you get published in a large media outlet, you won’t get a single backer as a result I can assure you of that.

Even prestigous venture capital firms advise against using PR firms because of the improper production of it all, First Round did a post on their company blog about it -- (http://firstround.com/review/Heres-What ... 0-PR-Firms).

Well there you have it. You don’t need to know about any particular PR firm to know if they are good or not. Crowd PR, and PR itself is just smoke and mirrors. Coverage is worthless unless you care about your personal image or brand image. That is the only legitimate use for Public Relations, it is not meant as a means to make money. Only Fortune 500 companies get any real benefit from Public Relations.

Just keep it simple and stick to social media you don't need a pr firm and you don't need Crowd PR.

You’ll see a 1% conversion rate on your social media ads and its guaranteed. The big campaigns you see on kickstarter are spending enormous amounts of money on facebook in order to raise such lofty amounts. But they all started small, and that’s why you need to do about 10 small campaigns successfully before you can do a big one.

With each campaign you run you are able to spend a little more each time on ads. Slowly but surely you will grow into a large campaign. With each success you take your earnings and reinvest them into another new product.

There are not shortcuts to success, and despite what Crowd PR may say - getting a conversion rate above 1% is not possible. If you really want to raise over 100,000 on kickstarter then you need to be prepared to spend at least 60,000 on ads that’s just the way it is.

Bribing a journalist is perfectly legal, and a great strategy if you can pull it off. Smaller blogs will post about your for anywhere from $50 - $500 per article. The amount of bacers you receive as a result will vary of course.

I’d say stuff on the tier of the new york times or cnn is not open to be bribed about your product. Maybe the tech section of the nyt, but that would cost an enormous amount. I have no doubts that Fortune 500 companies regularly do this, as well as politicians.

I speculate that as a PR agency, Crowd PR is actively doing this as we speak. I do not like Crowd PR for forcing this issue in the media.

It’s great for small bogs if you’re a product. But it makes me kind of sad in general, this business of bribery of journalists at a large scale.

In communist china the government controls what the media prints with an iron fist. And now in america I guess it’s not that different, but instead of the government it is corporation and the mega rich, and instead of forcing coverage by force they control the coverage using money.

It’s a sad time to be alive and these are dark days we are living in.

This is fascinating and I found some more big articles on the matter. The Outline has made allegations that Mashable, Business Insider, Forbes, and Entrepreneur have journalists who admit to accepting bribes:

article title: HOW BRANDS SECRETLY BUY THEIR WAY INTO FORBES, FAST COMPANY, AND HUFFPOST STORIES
byline: An Outline investigation found that contributors to prominent publications have taken payments in exchange for positive coverage.
article link: https://theoutline.com/post/2563/how-br ... i=xenbmzj2

QUOTE:

“... quietly pay off journalists to promote their clients in articles that make no mention of the financial arrangement. People involved with the payoffs are extremely reluctant to discuss them, but four contributing writers to prominent publications including Mashable, Inc, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur told me they have personally accepted payments in exchange for weaving promotional references to brands into their work on those sites.”

WOW… I honestly feel cheated. The article even goes on to describe that this practice may be the new normal:

“... a brand paying a journalist — or hiring a PR firm which then pays journalists on its behalf — represents a total breakdown of journalistic independence. It abuses the trust the public holds in the media. It violates the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. It’s a bribe, and it’s mortifying to talk with contributors who see it as the new normal.”

We now live in a world where all ads are blocked by adblockers, and all media coverage must be paid for in cash? Media coverage is the new Advertisement then, which means that the media is now dead (just ads everywhere).

As an entrepreneur I think this is awesome, but as someone who reads alot of media everyday I think this really sucks. Last year I was really getting kind of a crap vibe from Mashable, I saw so many just god awful products getting written about by them, and now it all makes sense.

As far as Forbes goes, not surprised one bit. Literally anyone can become a Forbes contributor, they don’t pay them, and there seems to be no oversight. I quit reading Forbes about 5 years ago, and I am surprised to see that they still have over 40 million monthly uniques. Seriously WTF who would read Forbes? It is just a ton of garbage they spew out, their website is not navigable, and half the stuff they post is straight up content marketing.

Same with Huffington Post, but I think we all know that. I doubt blogs like TechCrunch or Wired are caught up in this stuff as they seem pretty readable still, but the way the economy is going I wouldn’t be surprised if paying for media coverage becomes totally common place.

This is BS! Public Relations used to be one of the ways people could actually market their project without having a huge budget to spend. You used to just be able to pitch a journalist your product, and if they liked it they would write about it.

And I think this article is truly accurate - because if you see the crap tech blogs cover everyday, it all makes sense. Someone must be paying them for that coverage.

Look at this for example https://mashable.com/2018/02/15/best-sm ... hCwhfA2Oqf

That article contains 5 light bulbs that you can buy at your local grocery store. You expect us to honestly believe that those light bulbs were cool enough to warrant articles being written about them??

The Mashable article contains this as a disclaimer too:

“Heads up: All products featured here are selected by Mashable's commerce team and meet our rigorous standards for awesomeness. If you buy something, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.”

Not only are they charging companies an upfront fee for covering their products, they are also taking a commission from whatever sells as a result. Those light bulbs were all produced by giant corporations, so the fee they are charging for coverage must be large and expensive.

I’m kind of freaking out here. I have relied on PR for many of my campaigns to make up for a lack of Ad budget. If this practice takes over, it will ruin me and ruin my company.

Calm down for now. Yes many media outlets are heading in this direction and more and more of them by the day. But there are still quality media outlets who still produce honest content.

What you are seeing is the slow death of traditional media. They can’t make enough money off of Ads and they are now getting desperate to stay afloat.

But keep in mind that media is not dying, it is only changing. There are tons and tons of quality blogs with each niche, and if you follow any of them you will see that they have spectacular content with serious editorial coverage of products. Journalism is becoming decentralized. Youtube Vloggers are getting huge now. There is no such thing as fashion blogs anymore, fashion bloggers simply use Instagram in place of a website. This trend is going to continue until there are no media outlets left - only well known influencers who use a chosen social media account to distribute their content.

You don’t need hundreds of journalists to run a blog, but these big media outlets do have hundreds of journalists on staff and that is why they are failing. It’s always darkest before the dawn, and things will change sooner rather than later.

Their facebook page links to yet another scam ring they have going on
https://www.facebook.com/pg/NinjaCrowdf ... e_internal

Links to:
http://www.kinshipmarketing.com

And now things get interesting. There are at least 5 scam reports against Kinship Marketing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments ... company_on

The reviews are piling up against them. It’s only a matter of time before they rebrand, and when they do I assure you I will be there to report.

Oh my god it looks like they are running another website at the same time called “The CrowdFunding Ninja”
ninjacrowdfunding.com

Everyone be sure to black list them and block them if you get spammed.

Ninja, Guru, and their other names they go by are just the same scammers dressed up in a new brand.

They were previously crowdprguru.com (https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/10 ... am-1414446) and countless other names before this.

Same scam as always. They are a known scam. They aren't located in San Francisco (actually based in Florida)

Watch out for the fake Fiverr reviews on Google as well. I see hundreds of fake reviews they purchased on Fiverr on google.

A known scam outfit and are doing their best to prop up this new name online. The truth doesn't lie and they are getting caught just like they were caught countless other times all over online.