Find the Story – PR Tip #18

One of the hardest jobs we have in PR is to find the story. Sometimes, the story is right there for everyone to see, other times it’s elusive. Sometimes we forget to look. We have all had times when we’re under deadline and a release has to get written and we just crank it out headline, subhead, quotes and boilerplate. But that’s not our job. Our job is to find the story.

Part of this is developing the story arc and helping readers easily navigate from beginning (the problem or trend addressed), the middle (the value proposition and how this announcement fits) and the end (how the market, customer and company benefits).  Most companies start looking for the story in the wrong place, though. They start with what they have made. Problem is, that’s like telling a story from the middle. The truth is, the story starts way before that and it starts with what the customer needs and the problem they are trying to solve. 

When looking for the story, start by finding what about the announcement appeals to you or--even better--to the person you hope will read it. Remember, people buy things (consumer goods, business technology, apps, etc.) because it has perceived value to them. It makes their life better, easier or more productive. If you can hone in on the “why this matters” to a specific person you will be way ahead of more press releases and other PR materials are written.

The story, or at least a compelling version of it, can be elusive. As mentioned above, we’ve had lots of clients that believed that the story started and stopped with the products they’ve made. They think that the world will know exactly why this technology matters and how it will change lives to their target customers. They are wrong. Often very, very wrong and then are baffled when a reporter isn’t as excited about their news as they are or the story comes out and it’s very vanilla.

We recently had a client announce a bit of new technology that was interesting from a purely technology perspective. We could have written the release and the pitch to focus solely on the technology and it would have been good. However, there was so much more that it could be and, as we peeled away the layers, we found a really interesting story about how retail stores were using the technology to help lure customers offline and back into the brick-and-mortar locations during the holiday shopping season by creating a better in-store shopping experience and helping to keep the retail store’s network secure. The technology was still a big part of the story, but now we’re focusing on the problem the customer needed to solve and how they are solving it.

Even if the story can’t be tied directly to a problem or challenge a customer faces, it can often be written to talk about how a new product or technology can change the market. It can be the first time customers can combine products to do something, or how it’s the first implementation of a new standard or even how it’s the first product to allow the market to better leverage a developing trend.  When telling a good story, a developing trend or market shift can be your best friend so take the time to understand what these trends are so you can tell a more compelling story. 

Remember, when telling a story, you can’t just say “innovative new technology will reshape the economics of blah blah blah.” You have to walk the reader through a compelling narrative that helps them understand why the story you are telling is important to them personally and professionally.  When writing your next press release, blog, contributed article or any other PR writing, you'll make it much easier for your client and the target reader to connect if you tell a good story. And if you find yourself, or your company in the wrong story, then get out of it. We've all been part of interviews that go sideways because the reporter has an agenda or your spokesperson says something they shouldn't. In this case, it's your job to try can get the story back on track or find a way out. This is my story and I’m sticking to it.  

Be About More Than What You Make – Tip #15

Most companies focus their communication efforts on the products they make and the services they offer. That makes sense as it’s these things that drive revenue and growth. However, in PR, that’s only part of the story that can be told. In my last blog, I wrote about creating a story telling engine. What I’m going to cover with this blog is creating a story line fueled by a different type of gas. 

At every major business publication (Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Financial Times, New York Times, Fortune, etc.) there is at least one reporter covering management and leadership. Often times, this same reporter also covers HR, employee issues, recruiting and compensation. If your company is public, or in an interesting or hot market, there is a good chance you can get them to talk to the CEO of your company. You’ll need to figure out a hook, something that the reporter can latch onto, but this is often a very good way to showcase a smart company leader and get a placement in a top tier publication. If this is a thread you’d like to pursue, spend some time with the CEO and talk to them about their management style, how they view leadership and cultivate development internally. Also ask them about groups they are involved with outside of their corporate role and how they see those positions as relevant to their job as your company’s chief executive. 

Next, read about the latest trends in management and then interview your CEO on their views so you can craft an intelligent pitch. Finally, read what the reporters at these publications (and dozens more) are writing about so you can fine tune the pitch to help them tell a story they are interested in telling.

Let’s say the CEO angle won’t work for you. Maybe you’re company is too small or your CEO isn’t interested in talking with the media. There are still plenty of other story lines that can be created that showcase your company’s path to market and the reasons you are likely to win in the marketplace. These story lines could center on your manufacturing process or channel programs, your social media strategies or community leadership.

We have a client that makes these amazing videos that help tell their corporate story, the value of what they bring to market and the challenges faced by the industry they are in. Their videos are one of the company’s primary lead-generation methods—creating awareness in the videos and driving traffic to them is a priority. To help raise the visibility of these videos, we’ve submitted them for, and they have won, numerous industry awards. These awards, and the announcements announcing the wins, have driven traffic to their YouTube channel and their website.

Another client has built a really interesting campaign called Enabling Communities, Connecting Lives that allows its customers to tell stories about how technology is having an impact on their community. We’ll look into this strategy of using customers to tell your story in the next blog of this series.

Using different types of fuel to get your story engine running means you’ll cover more miles on your journey.  And yes, I know that’s a corny way to end this blog but hey, it’s my story.

52 Tips for Strong PR – A 2014 Users Guide Tip 10: Forget the Formula

One of the worst traps a PR person can fall into is getting stuck using the same formula for PR campaigns. This is true for people just entering the field and for folks like me that have been at it for 20+ years. We develop habits, make assumptions based on past campaigns, get comfortable with a certain set of tactics, and believe that because something worked once (or a hundred times), it will work again. Sometimes it does, so the habit continues to become engrained.

The danger is that you become stale as a PR practitioner and fail to leverage new techniques, opportunities or tactics that can help you achieve more than you were able to before. A primary example is how press releases are written. Many press releases are still written in the inverted pyramid style, even when the news is too minor to be of interest to the media. The rise in social media and news aggregation sites makes this type of announcement more important though, and enhances your ability to talk directly to the end customer, partner, investor or anyone else that you are trying to influence. Because you know the media won’t care, you can free up the way the release is written, providing a more feature-like reading experience for anyone that reads it on Yahoo!, WSJ.com, LightReading.com, etc. Because you’re not relying on telling the story through the journalist, you can talk directly to the audience, tell a deeper story and put the news into the right context. It also allows you to tell more stories about a company’s development as it evolves, showcasing how each move or change fits into a master plan.

Events are another staple in the PR world and helping the sales team plan another customer event or plan a product launch party can be tedious when everyone else involved would rather be doing something else. It’s easy to do what has been done before, mostly because you know the potential roadblocks that might exist and can navigate them through to a successful completion. But this is an opportunity to bring a fresh perspective to an event that has become tired. Think about ways for the customers to interact with each other and your team in a new and exciting way, make customer gifts original and thought provoking, find a speaker that doesn’t fit the normal profile or host a dinner somewhere unexpected. The value with this approach is if you do it right, you create a special memory for the customer that is tied specifically to your company’s brand so that every time they remember it, they think fondly of your company.

The final area to cover, and I know there are hundreds more that could be explored, is pitching. The standard pitch process has become so mundane that many press don’t even read 1/3 of what comes into their e-mail inbox. That’s because the formula most often used is something like this:

Dear Reporter:

I hope this e-mail finds you well. I wanted to see if I could get time on your calendar for a conversation with XXX Company to talk about their new XXXX product. The product is designed to help customers achieve outstanding results with their internal management operations, saving them from now unneeded capital costs and reducing operational burn…

If you’d like to schedule a call, please let me know if Tuesday or Wednesday of next week work.

Best,

            PR Person

There is nothing inherently wrong with the pitch above, but I’m willing to bet that it looks a lot like hundreds of other pitches a reporter sees every day. So how can you break the formula? It can be as simple as a start that mentions a recent story the reporter wrote and why it made you think that the reporter would be interested in what your company or client wants to talk about. The pitch above is also positioned as a one-way conversation with the reporter in a passive listening voice, instead of inviting the journalists to a conversation about a topic that is driving  the market, a topic that they are clearly interested in based on the stories they’ve been writing.

I once pitched Doug Gross at CNN with a subject that read “So I see you’re writing about porn…” because I read on twitter that he was writing about how Twitter was looking to hide 6-second Vine sex tapes from unsuspecting users. The pitch got an almost immediate response from Doug, who called it the best pitch he’d gotten all year, and started a dialog about a client that most likely wouldn’t have happened if I’d used a formulaic pitch.

If you have ideas of other ways, or other areas, where PR folks could forget the formula and try something new and fresh, please post them in the comments section.