Brian Dolby: editors love comment, but you need to be big enough to be listened to

You can’t see news — you can’t touch it. You certainly don’t want to be the subject of bad news, yet getting your news across in a meaningful and consistent way remains the most powerful marketing tool in an organisation’s reputation armoury.

One of the most powerful things about news is that someone else is doing the job for you. Someone else is writing about your achievements and — if you have done your job properly in the first place — they are only too glad to use your words largely the way you wrote them in the first place. That someone is the editor, reporter, freelancer or blogger who receives your news.

The trick is to make the news relevant, timely and not too promotional. As an ex-newsroom journalist myself, I developed a sixth sense for marketing spin. Going “a claim too far” can ruin a reputation for ever. Today’s media people are rushed off their feet — don’t forget that the dotcom bubble burst and the recession hit them too — but the ones worth talking to know their subject and don’t suffer fools easily.

Despite everything you might think, effective public relations is about being honest with the media. Not every story will be the greatest on the planet — and the sooner you accept it the better. If you take this approach with your contact they will appreciate it and then when you do have front page news, they’ll believe you and listen.

So what makes news and where do you find it? It’s an easy question to ask but a complex one to answer. Whatever you might think, news is all around you — it just might take a news hound to find it. So, how do you start, and where do you look for the raw material you need?

Start with the sales people

The quick win route is obviously the sales department. This is hopefully where the new orders are flowing in and new contract announcements are the bread and butter of any campaign.

But it’s not as simple as it seems. Most sales people — no matter how sympathetic to the PR cause — are too busy moving from one sell, and its commission, to another and you will need to be wise enough to go beyond being told that “the customer isn’t interested”, or “the customer wants to see everything installed first”. Try and get direct access to the order book if you can.

Another strategy, which, I guess today would be termed “out of the box thinking”, once created a rich vein of material for me and the sadly departed Marconi, where I was media and public relations director. Instead of relying of sales staff, we went back to source, right back to the factory, for our news.

As a result, my best contact in the whole company was a little known fork-lift truck driver from Coventry, who reported to the PR department about every single box he loaded at goods outward. This meant we could track orders back to the sales team, rather than waiting for them to remember to tell us.

After sales, you have got the kit itself — the product. Anything new from product development is great material as any company needs to be seen as innovative and leading the market. The watchword here however is to be careful not to get the market too excited about buying Mark 3 when year end salvation depends on ongoing demand for Mark 2.

As with the fork-lift truck driver example, certain individuals can be key contacts for the news hungry PR department. A great one is the personal assistant to the CEO. This person not only has the ear of the leadership but he or she has their diary — and this can tell you who they are meeting and where they are visiting.

And staying with people, develop a contact in human resources or personnel. This department often gets a bad internal press within large organisations but once again they can help you raise the profile in so many ways. We all know that even in today’s high-tech world business is about people talking to people and trust needs building before anyone will sign on the dotted line.

Personnel deals with recruitment of staff and if your organisation has just head-hunted someone at the highest level from your rival, particularly from the market leader, you need to tell the world. Your customers will be impressed and your non-customers will start to make enquiries. You should also be praising your existing staff by highlighting qualifications they have gained or awards they have received.

Special achievement award

Without naming names, I know of a North American company which was running a news conference in Beijing in 2008 and needed to ensure an excellent turnout from the local media. We established that much of the R&D around their product announcement had actually been developed by a Chinese engineer based in the city. By an amazing coincidence his “special achievement” award was approved just in time to be presented at the press conference, where more than 50 journalists had arrived to witness the spectacle.

As always, this advice comes with a health warning. Praising individuals too regularly can actually lead to them being head-hunted by your rivals. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But qualifications are important. Highlighting that a very large percentage of their staff are technical graduates has always been a key message for ZTE of China, whose ongoing commitment to PR and ultimate success in the market I mentioned in my previous article.

Another tried and tested technique is to look for milestones and anniversaries. Journalists love using statistics and it’s very easy to make numbers into a story.

The 19th century British politician, Benjamin Disraeli, is believed to have talked of “lies, damned lies and statistics”, though the quote was later popularised by the US writer Mark Twain. A real life experience of mine in this regard came a few years ago at an overseas exhibition, where the first day involved a ceremonial opening and restricted tour by the incumbent operator and the minister of telecommunications of the host country.

My client was a small company and would not have been considered for a place on the schedule against the household names exhibiting. But by establishing the fact that we had just manufactured the ten millionth item they had ordered — dipping it in gold and framing it for presentation — how could the minister turn us down? He didn’t: we got the visit and with it wall-to-wall coverage and all the next day’s headlines.

Comment and opinion

And you don’t always have to make your own news. Industry reports and surveys by other organisations invite comment and opinion. Working for Zi of Canada, then the second largest company in the world developing and delivering SMS software, we were always anxious to see the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association regarding SMS statistics and commenting on them.

Editors too welcome reaction — but it’s health warning time again, because you need to be big enough to be listened to and you need to be quick to market with your comment — the next day or sooner.

An alternative is to conduct your own survey — perhaps from your own customer base. This can be very effective: it’s cheap and gives you a perfect opportunity to get into dialogue with the most important people in your business lives, your existing clients.

What I have highlighted in this article is really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in terms of stories and where to find them. In the space available, I cannot give you much detail in this issue about new office openings, how to “squeeze the sponge” of distributors and resellers — and put it to them as value-add marketing — and why awards are important or even the rich vein of local versions of news releases.

I can’t even tell you why everything you work on should start out as being a potential world first or how you can convince journalists that it’s your story they should be covering above all others.

And I can’t even scratch the surface on how to get the maximum return on investment out of those expensive, and highly competitive, exhibition and conference experiences. But I will. GTB

 This is the second in a regular series by Brian Dolby, managing director of BCS Public Relations

Other articles in this series: