I once worked with a guy who was boasting about winning blanket international publicity for a new product, the first  British-designed-and-built sports car for 30 years. I think his success had more to do with the quality of the story than his personal involvement. Rarely do we get the chance to work with story material of such obvious appeal; the rest of the time we have to get seriously creative.

For example, years ago I was asked to make recommendations to launch a new range of corrugated steel cladding panels, the kind you see wrapped around industrial warehouses and some retail stores. The target audience was architects. The client wanted a big, high-profile press event and I knew we’d have to pull a rabbit out of a hat to deliver that. Here’s what happened. Seeking inspiration, I visited a retrospective of world-renowned architect Sir Richard Rogers, designer of the iconic Lloyds of London building.

As I wandered around peering at the models and display panels, one thing caught my eye. It was an image of Rogers posing with business partner Mike Davies.  What intrigued me was that every item of clothing Mike Davies was wearing happened to be red. I got talking to a fellow visitor and he told me Davies was renowned for only ever wearing red. That sparked an idea and I rushed back to the office to research it. As you can see from the photo here and in a recent interview in The Independent newspaper, red is Mike Davies’ favourite colour. Among other advantages, dressing this way saves him time choosing what to wear each day. Now what’s all this got to do with painted steel cladding panels?

Well that one photo started a chain of events that led to what the client described later as the most successful product launch event his company had ever seen.  After I’d tested out my idea on a couple of people, I called the hugely impressive Mary Spillane, who I knew was an expert on personal image-building and invited her to present at our event. The idea was to pick ten leading architects and explain what the colour of their clothes said about them (contrary to popular myth, architects don’t always wear black).

Our other guest speaker was the late Professor Tom Porter whose quirky insights made him a delight to work with. We turned the event into something much more fun and interesting, using lighting effects in the event rooms and even colour-coding the food and drinks. Colour was, of course, the link between all of this and the new product being launched. The client’s presentation, which could easily have been dry and boring, centred on how the colours for its new product range were chosen and the challenges of finding paint formulations that were up the technical task, while also being visually attractive.

The audience of architects and media loved it; all the reporters left with a great angle for talking about a potentially dull and boring product and the client enjoyed great media exposure. Not as much as the all-new British sports car, of course, but enough to remind the client he was working with a fun, creative agency that knew how to coax a rabbit out of its hat.

This post was inspired by the closing remarks of Harry, the ‘difficult client’ in this clip from Absolute Power, a BBC comedy series about a public relations firm starring Stephen Fry. I’ve posted the entire clip but the salient comments are towards the end. Most people, I’d hope, would be starting from a stronger position than Harry and with a few pointers should be able to give a good media interview. There are lots of variables to consider in each individual case but, for starters, here are ten general points that should serve anyone well. I’ll provide a few more soon.

1. Be prepared and be helpful: anticipate the likely questions in advance and how you will answer them concisely
2. Gather supporting material such as useful, credible facts and figures on the subject in question
3. If time permits, read the publication/watch the programme and find out what the journalist has written in the past on the same subject. A useful site for this is www.journalisted.com
4. Be very clear who the end audience is. Make sure you speak through the interviewer to them, and in terms they will understand
5. Think of no more than three points you want to get across and stick to them. If a natural way to bring these into the conversation doesn’t happen, then create one: “Of course that’s interesting, but the really important thing is…….”
6. A useful aide-memoire is the four C’s: be credible, clear, concise and confident.  Think before you speak, speak in short sentences and with authority. Avoid jargon
7. Don’t get bogged down in detail, give the main points then offer to expand if the journalist appears interested
8. Try to deploy a memorable ‘soundbite’. For example: Politician Ken Clarke on the BBC talking about prison policy said the opposition party (Blunkett & Reid) had a “cheque book in one hand and a copy of The Daily Mail in the other”
9. Tone down the selling: journalists do not write advertisements for your company
10. Be interesting and memorable: what stories, anecdotes or case studies can you offer that liven up the conversation?

Do you agree? What would you add? Let me know using the comments box below.

If you find yourself having to explain something important but potentially boring, it can be tough to find the right language and keep people listening. It gets worse when the subject also happens to be abstract and complex. And the pinnacle is when you’re called upon to do it live, in front of many of the country’s most influential people. So it was interesting to hear the approach of a guest commentator on this morning’s Today programme (BBC Radio’s flagship current affairs show). The guest was Jerome Booth, head of research at London-based Ashmore, an investment management advisory firm. Booth was invited on to the show to discuss the reactions of individual countries to the ongoing financial crisis.

Presenter Adam Shaw’s introduction to the interview began with the notion that countries were reacting in a similar way to individuals when presented with catastrophic personal loss (death of a close  relative, a job, income, freedom). He cited the Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as The Five Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. He then invited Booth to comment and this is what he said:

“I’d like to offer an analogy and it’s a rather vivid one. We have dead bodies. The dead body in the UK is very messy, there’s blood all over the kitchen floor. We know it’s there and we are trying to clear it up. In the Euro zone, the German part of the kitchen floor is spotless but the dead body is in pieces elsewhere; it’s all around the edges. Our approach to dealing with it is to cover it with a sheet, which doesn’t solve anything in the long term and we keep having to replace the sheet with a bigger one. In the US, they’ve taken the dead body, propped it up in a chair, put a cup of coffee in its hand and are trying to have a conversation with it. The level of denial really does differ.”

Anyone invited to do media interviews on business subjects can use this as a consummate example of how to paint vivid word pictures to keep audiences engaged and entertained. Booth could easily have droned on about economic history (he’s an economist) and lost his audience in five seconds flat. Instead, with this analogy he provided a simple to understand and powerful way of explaining what’s going on. What examples can you think of that do the same?

Most business people are understandably wary of talking to journalists because they know they don’t control the outcome. They worry about looking stupid, being misquoted or misunderstood. There are techniques you can deploy to minimise all of these possibilities but for this posting I want to talk about another danger: finding you’ve ended up offering the unintended ‘contrarian’ viewpoint.

This happened recently to a university professor who was invited alongside myself and three other very experienced PR professionals to offer his views on the importance of selling in public relations. He was first to be interviewed and gave his view that selling wasn’t very important, saying he’d never been asked by employers to include selling in a course syllabus and that it wasn’t necessary. Everyone else, including me, said it was a key skill and that it was vitally important to be good at selling to do the job well. Here’s the resulting article. Judge for yourself but I think the academic ended up looking out of touch.

One of the key things I teach people in media training sessions is this: before you begin a discussion, ask the reporter who else is being/has been interviewed and where you sit in the planned interview sequence. That allows you to think more carefully about what to say, plus it gives you the chance to politely ask the reporter to interview you last of all (when you can ask what others have already said and add value to/take issue with/correct/balance previous comments), or request that they come back to you to review what you’ve said in the light of other comments. It’s not always practical but can make a very big difference to the end result.

Photo courtesy of gabemac http://bit.ly/mDAMPF

Some people find this Youtube video of a mock-plaintive junior at PR agency Ten Yetis amusing. Maybe it did the trick but it left me feeling a little embarrassed for her. If I was her client, I’d be wondering if that’s all there is to pitching journalists – and wondering if I didn’t need a little more marketing savvy injecting into my PR efforts.

Why, for example, was there not one single good reason offered up to the journalist to write about the product in that video? Why do readers need to know about it, why is it better than similar apps? It’s not like there wasn’t enough time – she had plenty to plug the product name (three times I counted). Maybe it’s a pile of crap and maybe that’s why, as a pitch attempt, this PR flack’s effort was pretty lame. Just my view of course, based on the information available at the time of writing. Am I right or am I being too harsh?

Note: a couple of days after writing this post, I was directed via a Twitter follower to this blog entry about other ‘quality’ output from Ten Yetis PR. And today, a very experienced trade magazine editor read my post and told me “they do the kind of PR that makes you want to kill out their emails before you even read them.”

There was a good illustration recently of why it’s so important to think carefully about the subject line when pitching story ideas by email to journalists. It arose at a recent breakfast briefing organised by media information firm Gorkana with The Independent on Sunday’s Julian Knight. Knight edits the newspaper’s money and property section. He’s got ten pages to fill each Sunday on his own, so it quickly becomes apparent that his week is a constant stream of commissioning, writing and editing – all done to fit in with a conveyor belt of various deadlines. At the same time he’s got to keep an eye on his emails, all 3,000 of them each week. Assuming he receives roughly 40 emails on his screen, that’s 75 pages in all. Gorkana reckons it would take about three minutes to flick through a page of emails, opening them up and deciding whether to keep them or not. On that basis, Knight could spend nearly four hours a week going through his emails and that’s before he’s read any through, opened attachments or chosen to reply. You can see why so many judgements are made on those few words within the subject line, and why it’s vital to spend time thinking about them when pitching stories to busy newspaper journalists.

Whether or not you’re a fan of Tony Blair, one of the welcome things that came into being under his watch was the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) in 2000. This gave UK citizens a legal right to information held by most public authorities. American citizens have had this right for some time, of course, and the UK is now one of about 85 countries that have introduced similar rights. Now, back to this post’s subject: how can you use FOI as part of your organisation’s PR activities? There is no universal answer as it depends on what your organisation does and what it’s aims are, but here’s an example I orchestrated a few years ago, which might prompt some ideas.

Pre-recession (and a change in government), I was working with a trade association of large construction companies. It wanted to put pressure on central government to maintain its promises to increase capital spending on public hospitals, transport, housing and schools. Part of this campaign was an annual monitoring report on the subject and I was asked for ideas to make the report a little more newsworthy. Among my suggestions was to make Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the facilities management departments of the top 20 NHS Health Trusts, asking them about the size of their respective repairs backlog, and in particular, the amount of work still outstanding to meet basic hospital fire safety regulations (these had recently been tightened).

From the answers we were able to compile a Top 20 worst-to-best league table for hospital fire safety. Releasing this alongside the usual annual report gave a potent illustration of the scale of outstanding repairs in UK hospitals and an attractive talking point for journalists. It also gave us a story angle for local media. The whole thing cost very little and worked very well indeed, providing a platform around which the trade association’s chief executive could make his key points. He was able to do so in The Financial Times and numerous other national and regional media outlets.

As a tactic worth considering, I don’t think it matters whether you sell to the public sector or not. All you need is an issue that you want to be associated with and a little imagination. Plus there are now websites geared around making multiple FOI requests easier to administer, such as www.whatdotheyknow.com. A little time spent browsing the requests and responses made should soon provide lots of ideas. It will also produce some fascinating trivia. For example, I just found out that Royal Mail used a staggering 870 million elastic bands in f/y 2007-8. If your company supplies these and Royal Mail is not on your sales prospects list, it’s time to correct that situation quickly.

Are PR agency founders on a mission to outdo each other when it comes to naming their firms? In striving to be memorable and achieve standout, I think we’ve now crossed the line between clever, creative branding and plain silliness. Here’s the evidence and all of them, except one, are genuine business names. A few are good, many bad and others just downright bizarre. What do you think? Can you spot the made up one?

First up are the agencies named after animals. Here we have Buffalo, Porcupine, Moose and Cow. Note that ruminants dominate, perhaps in recognition of the bullshit you get from these firms? Then again, I’ve heard a Porcupine is capable of delivering a nasty prick. If one animal isn’t enough, then go plural as 3 Monkeys and PR Dogs did. How about plural fictitious animals? You think I’m joking but there’s an agency called 10 Yetis. Throw in some emotion: Happy Giraffe or Laughing Cow perhaps? What about sea creatures? Octopus and Seal are already taken.

Flying creatures are represented too: we have Owl, Ptarmigan and Firefly. Colours are a good way of achieving brand stand-out but don’t choose Purple or Red. Need something better? Go for a colour that’s also a food. But not Tangerine or Mustard, as these too are already chosen. Or just food on its own? Fine, so long as it’s not Marmalade. That’s also taken, but disappointingly not by design agency Toast, which would surely have been a corporate marriage made in heaven. One agency has adopted an entire country as its name: Brazil. That must make calling up strangers interesting:

“Hello, this is Samantha calling from Brazil.”
“Oh really, isn’t it the middle of the night there?”

Others have gone for the slightly esoteric, such as Blue Rubicon (but at least there’s a story behind that one). But our final two examples stand out for different reasons. First we have Yellow Lorry Red Lorry. Choosing a tongue-twister as a business name must rank very highly in terms of silliness. Then we have Ireland’s Hopscotch Europe in One, which manages to be both silly and parochial for a firm that promises to take your message to the far corners of the EMEA region. Finally, this agency is either distinctly unimaginative or brilliantly simple and no nonsense: it’s called PRCo.

Photo courtesy of ~C4Chaos at Flickr

This is a story that will ring plenty of bells, and should be encouraging, for those who spend most of their time pitching stories to media. It might also be revealing to those who pay their salaries.

A couple of years ago I worked for a management consultancy. The firm specialised in the corporate finance function, helping CFOs of medium to large corporations improve operating efficiencies, and generally improving the ability of their finance functions to serve the business strategically. It was all very sober stuff and, as might be expected, the firm’s employees were smart and switched on. That’s the background, here’s the story. I got talking to one of the firm’s principals about ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) and how it seemed to be gaining some traction beyond the early hype. He presented a compelling case about why finance directors were the best people to lead a company’s CSR strategy. In a nutshell, it was all to do with their knowledge about data, its collection and its presentation. I was convinced. After a bit of digging around, it became clear that no one else had really talked about this.

Now, The Financial Times has a weekly accountancy column that’s occasionally opened up to outside contributors. Knowing this, I did my preparation, called up the column editor and pitched the idea of an opinion editorial for my client, timed around a topical industry event. He quickly rebuffed the idea, doubting accountants were interested in CSR and telling me that, in his opinion, it was a flaky subject anyway. At that point, most in my situation would have given up and reported the rejection back to their client. But I was bemused. A well-developed instinct for stories told me this was still a good idea. So, a few weeks later when the section editor was replaced by someone else, I tried exactly the same pitch again. Her reaction was the diametric opposite of the first and produced this article.

The lesson here is twofold: trust your instincts and be (selectively) persistent when pitching media stories. I said there was something in this for the PR team paymasters and here it is: a good media result often takes time, skill and effort. Please set your budgets accordingly.

Andy Turner always exceeds expectations and this is rare in my 25 years experience of the PR world. He has a proactive approach to managing client relationships, constantly challenging clients to be more creative in their approach. During my time at Management Consulting Group Plc, this resulted in a significant increase in quality media coverage and some great national press and TV exposure. He constantly produced ideas and opportunities we could act on.

People often underestimate the need for a clear and concise writing style. Andy’s writing, editing and suggestions on direction helped us produce better in-house publications and client magazines. His knowledge of the media ensured the work we produced reflected the messages we wanted to convey in a way the media could pick up easily. Andy also worked well with our own consultants to produce articles and points of view clearly aligned with our brand messaging. A small part of me would prefer not to recommend Andy, as I want to keep him a secret!