The first and arguably only rule of PR has never changed and almost certainly never will: be interesting.
Absolutely everything else is detail, and for the most part unimportant detail.
As a young pup newly arrived in a B2C marketing team from the world of tech, I can still recall tentatively suggesting to a PR colleague that he might want to check his press releases for typos more carefully.
His response was short and sweet: “nobody cares”.
Turns out that colleague was pretty much the finest PR person I’ve ever worked with and probably ever will. Largely because he understood that being interesting matters, and that if you are interesting, all obstacles are overcome.
If you are boring, on the other hand, it doesn’t matter how many journalists you take to lunch or how well crafted your releases are. Even if by some miracle they make it to print nobody will bother reading the relevant article.
And here's the thing. Companies are fantastic at being boring.
It is a difficult thing for many companies to accept, but accept it they must: the default setting for the wider world is “I don’t care”.
Attention is limited. Your product may fascinate you, but it is probably of limited interest for your own customers, never mind the rest of us. So you must go looking for ways to be interesting.
I’m going to discuss how to do that at the end of this piece, but first a digression and a warning about the current state of the PR industry.
The Death Of (Traditional) PR
It is not necessary for me to go over recent media history. Internet, move to digital media, paywalls, Google News, layoffs, closure etc. Most of us know that story.
The reasonably well understood end result of this process has been fewer titles and fewer readers, meaning harder work for PR agencies who were essentially selling access to those titles in a roundabout way.
That’s not all. New commercial realities mean that in many cases, particularly in the tech press, a huge amount of coverage is on a ‘pay to play’ basis. This isn’t a state secret, most titles are absolutely above board in selling ‘sponsored content’ to vendors. And why would you give away for free with one hand what you are selling with the other?
Whenever a change like this happens that undermines a particular industry, there is always a sizeable time-lag during which those agencies that built their business on one reality attempt to continue convincing themselves and others that nothing has changed.
See also, with multiple caveats that we can talk about another time, SEO.
So it pays to be wary of PR agencies promising miracles, and it certainly pays to be extremely careful before spending any money in this area at all. But all is not entirely lost. Let’s look at how to make the new reality work for you.
How To Be Interesting
After all the negativity above it might be worth reminding ourselves of a few eternal truths that will help us look at PR in a more favourable light.
Firstly, a core job of marketing is to get people to believe something, usually by telling your side of a particular story.
Second, it is awfully helpful if you can get other people to do that for you.
That, in a nutshell, is why PR exists. But the net result of the decline of traditional media, the growth of social media, and the never-ending proliferation of ‘influencers’ is that getting other people to tell your story by building personal relationships with them is hard. Really hard.
The alternative is to be interesting. Interesting people and companies get talked about - naturally. In fact they get talked about so much they sometimes have to employ people to stop other people talking about them. Nice.
When you are interesting, you don’t have to painstakingly cultivate individual relationships with every new influencer on the block. The magic of the internet does the job for you.
Hopefully the lesson is clear. If you want to be successful from a PR perspective, being interesting is pretty much all that matters.
So how can you be interesting? There are probably four main methods out there:
Be so big that you are intrinsically interesting, because what you do impacts on lots of people’s lives. Not an option for most of us.
Have strongly held controversial opinions on something that you are unafraid to talk about
Share knowledge that you have and others do not, that other people are interested in
Deliver truly groundbreaking, revolutionary product or service
We can rule out option 1 for most of us.
Option 2 is effective but dangerous. But it can certainly work. To some extent I am employing this strategy right now. If you can think of an unorthodox opinion that you can consistently hold that is likely to be newsworthy, by all means broadcast it.
Do make sure that it ties in with your central brand promise and what you want people to believe about your company though. Michael O’Leary can gain column inches by suggesting passengers stand up on flights or pay to use the bathroom because each of those opinions reinforces the perception that Ryanair is committed to cheap flights. This in turn is why none of the usual criticism he receives is ‘bad publicity’.
Option 3 is where many of us can operate. My client Swrve has an excellent product in the mobile marketing space. But excellent products do not generate coverage. What they also had was knowledge, and in particular they had knowledge about how users behaved in mobile games - because they record that activity.
By finding the right headline (over 50% of all revenue from mobile games comes from just 0.2% of players) Swrve was suddenly in the news. And we’re not talking a few tech blogs here. We’re talking Forbes, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, the BBC, Vox and so on.
They didn’t talk about Swrve because we spent time wining and dining the relevant journalists. They talked about us because we told the world something interesting that it didn’t know already.
In fact the research is still being quoted today. If you want the same effect, you need to ask yourself the same question. What do we know, or what can we talk about, that is new, different, illuminating and people care about? If you can answer that question, you are half way there.
If you aren’t sure whether Option 4 will work for you, then you can take if from me that it won’t. Only in a vanishingly small number of cases is product alone enough to interest anyone. The iPhone? Yes. A revolutionary Saas-based product for small business accounting? Not so much.
So unless you are absolutely convinced, stick to establishing what you know or can know that the world would care about. If you can find something, PR can work for you.
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