A Good Story is a Good Story

‘What?’ said my colleague. ‘You got all that interest in a morning?’

He was talking to me yesterday about my ability to generate mass interest in a new asian authoress who had published her story about trying to find a man on the internet, not to mention getting quite a few major publishers keen on the paperback rights too.

After fifteen years as a publicist and sometimes journalist, I know how to craft a story and construct a hook. I joke with my friends that it took me the best part of ten years to understand my job and another five to become really good at it. There is no replacement for experience and never was that more true than in the world of PR where, thanks to the wonders of the internet, most journalists are receiving upwards of 150 press releases a day via email or down the PR wires. Getting their attention starts with the subject line. Fudge that and the release goes straight into trash.

My most successful emails to journos have been no more than three lines long. If I can’t get all the info into three, snappy lines than again I know I’m straight into trash again. This has nothing to do with repeating the brand message ad infinitum but getting across the hook that is going to grab a journalist’s attention. It’s part science, part luck. Most times I strike gold the first time but occasionally I don’t and then it’s back to the drawing board to work out another angle. I enjoy the process for its immediacy.

Straightforward PR and news creation is one of the few jobs where results are instantaneous. Get a story right and you can have nationwide publicity, often within 24-48 hours. At the end of day, despite the diversity of media and the huge amount of competition to get space in national media, a good story is a good story. That’s all there is to it.

Universal Indicator Unveiled

The cliche goes, ‘All good things come to those who wait.’  Those who may have dropped into this blog from time to time may have wondered if whitelabelworld had gone on an extended holiday, packed up or taken an sabbatical. Actually, we’ve been moving offices (now in cool EC1), working on developing our products and generally defining the whitelabelworld proposition.

We’ve come up with ‘Digital Marketing Strategists’ and although that doesn’t encompass the whole pie, it occupies quite a big slice of our interests and expertise. With 80% of all consumers now going online for information on everything from booking a restaurant to buying a car, the web is no longer the poorer relative to press, tv and radio advertising.

At the same time, traditional demographics just aren’t relevant anymore. With the growth of social networking comes the realisation that the guy buying a Will Young record is as likely to be the CEO of a major corporation as a 14 year old school girl, just as the same CEO may pick up News of the World and The Sunday Times as his/her weekend paper of choice. That’s why we’ve created Universal Indicator.

It’s a survey tool with a difference. With access to 150,000 users and able to poll anywhere between 2-5,000 users often within 24 hours, it allows us to drill down a consumer’s interests even going so far as to tell you the type of person who would suck a mint versus the kind who would bite into one. With the ability to incorporate video, audio and interactive feeds and to ask both open ended, multiple choice and yes/no questions, it’s infinitely flexible. What’s more, once we’ve outputted the results, we’ll produce a quality, visual report that can be utilised for any number of purposes – from helping to shape a creative campaign, define your brand’s audience, test your website’s effectiveness and much more.

For a full presentation of how Universal Indicator works, click here.

That Burger Stunt

Considering that I have worked in the media for about 20 years, I am remarkably immune to most publicity stunts. Most guerilla or what they now call ‘experiential’ marketing passes me by. I drive most places and so the only medium that works for me most of the time is the good, old fashioned radio. I get most of my news from the radio, find out the latest hit records, celebrity gossip. But even I was deeply impressed with the latest publicity stunt for a certain burger chain that managed to hit every medium with a story about a £95 burger.

The fact that the burger was only available in one outlet and on one day made the story even more ludicrous than it really was but that didn’t stop every news medium picking it up. When Marketing magazine ran an Op Ed asking if it was an example of good marketing, they completely missed the point. The point was to get the languishing burger chain’s name into the papers. Of course we all knew that the likelihood of them selling even one single £95 burger when most customers went in for the £4.99 lunchtime special, was extremely slim. This was not the stunt’s intention. Nor did it matter that the ‘Development Chef’ was probably someone who worked in Head Office and had been recruited for the day to produce the one burger used for media purposes. None of this mattered. What mattered was gaining column inches over their rivals and they accomplished this in spades.

I guess the competition must be reeling, otherwise why would they push out the story on Saturday that the Queen has her own private burger restaurant (and not the one that makes the £95 burger either).

What next? Will this be the summer of burger wars? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. As for me, I’m waiting for the completely fat-free burger.

Making News

There’s nothing new about ‘new’ conversations. You have a conversation with an author. You get the story. You write the story. You distribute the story. Then it becomes another, bigger, conversation.

It’s a joy to work with a company like Beautiful Books, who understand the impact of ‘direct news’ PR – ie working on a story that serves TWO masters – themselves, obviously, but also the UK national newspapers. It is not enough to say a book is coming out, however great it is (this doesn’t apply to JK Rowling, but more of that later). Better that there is a STORY behind the book – the AUTHOR can often be that story.

See what happened for Marina Fiorato – we presented the story in a way that we knew would appeal to the nation’s copy-tasters – and distributed it direct, to the people who put the news pages together.

Written in THEIR language – not the language of press releases.

One story – global conversation.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1316009.ece

http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/books/article.html?in_article_id=184045&in_page_id=28

http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20080620/882/twl-rowling-s-coffee-shop-writing-spurs.html

http://news.webindia123.com/news/articles/World/20080620/979560.html

http://www.dollymix.tv/2008/06/lady_writers.html

http://www.thecheers.org/news/World-news/news_28409_Rowlings-coffee-shop-writing-spurs-Brit-author-towards-best-seller-status-.html

This is an exciting pubishing house. Stay tuned for more.

Celebrity for a Day

In my guise of PR supremo, I was asked earlier this week to help out an author with political aspirations.  He sent me a press release and I sent it out to the media.  A few hours later stories started appearing on websites, the phone began to ring and a couple of national newspapers picked up it.  That’s what tends to happen when a good story is sent to the right media contacts .

Later in the afternoon, I rang my client to see how it was all going.

‘A bit shell shocked,’ he said.  ‘I wasn’t expecting such a reaction.’

‘Why not?’ I said, genuinely surprised that someone who had paid me to do my job was now surprised that I had.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.  ‘All the interest.  Some people have been critical.  I wasn’t prepared for all the attention.’

‘But you’re running for MP,’ I said.  ‘That’s what happens.  Didn’t you realise that?’

‘No,’ he said.  ‘I guess I didn’t.’

‘Well,’ I said.  ‘Not to worry.  It will all be over soon.  Unless you win, of course!’

Maybe he should start watching Big Brother and reading the tabloids.  Then again, maybe not.

The Lost Art of Conversation

Today, while wandering down Brick Lane with my dear friend Ms. R, I happened to glance in a cafe window. Rather predictably, virtually everyone was under 30 and virtually everyone had a Mac on their lap. Both Ms. R and I agreed that it was rather sad to see people on a lovely summer Sunday sitting on their Mac in a dark cafe, rather than wandering down the street and enjoying the sunshine.

Then I picked up this post on Redeye VC about conversation and dialog and it all kind of made sense. It’s an interesting post about how people are connecting with each other but in new and different ways. Anyway, who I am to talk, sitting here and writing a blog post on a Sunday night?!

Blogging for Beginners

Is blog the new black?  It sure feels that way.  I started blogging way back in 2003 on a subscription only website called ‘Blogging Network’ that turned into ‘Blogit.’  I just clicked on the link to see if it’s still there.  It is and still a subscription site although I don’t know why anyone would pay $9.95/mth when they can get zillions of blogs on Blogspot for free.

When I first started blogging it was because I was in a pretty insane relationship that I felt I wanted to document.  I didn’t consider my readers and I remember feeling chuffed as hell the day someone in the blogging network nominated me as their favourite blog of the week.  After that I started checking out other people’s blogs and leaving comments and gradually my readership grew.  After a year or so I had had about 3,500 hits which at the time I thought was astounding and quite credible.

Fast forward 5 years and now it seems that the people that don’t blog are in the minority.  Kids are blogging, grannies are blogging, big and small companies are blogging.  We can get news firsthand from bloggers, track down our favourite chocolate chip recipes from them, find out the best places to eat, read the intimate details of a person’s sex life.  It’s all there.   But just because it’s there doesn’t mean we want it or it’s necessarily going to be read.  I still believe there are good reasons to blog and then there is just blogging for blogging’s sake, ie. a complete waste of time.

When we set up whitelabelworld, we talked about having a blog.  David said, ‘The problem is that it will be the first thing that people will find when people do a google search.   Do we want that?’

I said, ‘Sure, but I want to talk about what we’re up to, new technological developments, changes in marketing.  I want somewhere I can rant.’

Jay said, ‘I’ve never had a blog before.  Will you guys show me what I need to do.  Is it like MySpace?’

That pretty much defines our team.  There’s David – he’s the strategic thinker.  Me – the impulsive, I want to get it all done now type and Jay – the news guy who would still phone his stories in if he could find someone that could take dictation.  Together we make a good team.  Creative, strategic, with an overwhelming enthusiasm to do things differently than most of the run-of-the-mill agencies.

Which leads me back to blogging.  I’ve been hearing it a lot from corporate clients.  As if somehow by adding a blog to their website or starting a blog that will make them stand-out from their competitors.  But blogs don’t make you stand out unless they’re good.  And most of my favourite industry blogs such as PSFK have full-time staff trawling the web picking up stories.   Good blogs just don’t happen.  They require a committment and the willingness to be criticised, to be cross-examined and sometimes to defend one’s self in a way that a normal corporate website would never be asked to do.  Blog readers are harsh judges. We’ll have to wait and see how this blog pans out.  Today is the first day of our new look.  Hope you like it.

Something a Bit Different

I know it hasn’t caught on yet in the UK, well not amongst the folks I know here, but all my friends in New York use Twitter and I really like it. There’s something almost poetic in trying to fit what I’m doing right now into 160 characters, something my geeky/creative brain thinks of as a challenge. Now I’ve just heard from Russell Davies about Dawdler, a kind of piss take on Twitter that asks us to send what we doing generally on a postcard to their office on Beak Street, London W1. So, of course, I had to grab one of the multitude of empty postcards that I’ve got lying around my house and fill one in. I’ll put it through my franking machine at work today and send it off, then wait and see what happens.

Like alot of stuff on the web I can never work out if there’s ultimately a commercial angle to sites like Dawdler or just a bit of fun for the people involved. Either way, it makes a change actually writing something down on paper and posting it and then watching it appear on the web later. We’re so used to everything being so immediate that the process of waiting seems old fashioned. I wonder if in a few years time my kids will be saying to me, ‘Waiting? What’s that?’ like they do now about LPs or electric typewriters.

Real Personal Trainers vs. Virtual Personal Trainers

Wi Fit, fitbug, MiLife, it seems the latest word in fitness is virtual fitness. As someone who has seen the benefit of having a personal trainer for almost fifteen years, I don’t know if a computer could ever replace a hunky guy shouting at me, ‘Only five more to go. Yes, five more. No stopping or you’ll be doing another five.’ I’ve often said that computers are great for booking holidays/concert tickets, keeping in touch with friends, buying music/movies and generally wasting time but when it comes to fitness I can’t see it. My own personal trainer, Mark Anthony, tried going virtual with a range of online training programmes a couple of years ago but said, ‘At the end of the day, people really wanted the one-on-one experience.’

Surely one of the benefits of going to the gym is to socialise and to spy on the person sweating next to you on the treadmill. The benefit of a personal trainer is having someone that will motivate you to push your body further than you would on your own. The benefit of a virtual training system is what? Admittedly, the Wi looks like a lot of fun and I might even try it if I could rent or borrow it for a couple of days. I may be wrong but I think that until the computer finds a way to make training truly interactive, it’s an experiment that is bound to fail. Training via webcam anyone?

Biba Goes Bust

This just in from PSFK.

Biba Goes POP!

by Simon King in Fashion
Laura Weir from Drapers Record tells us that Ironic (sorry, Iconic) brand Biba’s main licencee Biba International has gone into administration.

I remember Biba from my youth. A big, dark, fabulous department store in the Derry & Tom’s building on Kensington High Street, I spent many a Saturday there as a kid, pretending to be much cooler than I actually was at the time. It was the most wonderful place, full of great hats, gorgeous, flowery dresses, platform shoes – imagine the best dressing up box in the world and that was Biba. It was one of the first department stores that really understood the importance of the retail environment. Everything else at the time was drab and boring.

Then, a few years ago it sprung up again as a designer clothing brand. I saw a couple of seasons and I wasn’t all that impressed. The price tags were well beyond the reach of most people. It was unaccessible, unlike the old Biba. I suppose the clothes were expensive back in the 1970’s too but there always seemed to be something in the old shop that anyone could afford.

I’m not half as cynical as the folks at PSFK but I’m not surprised either. The new Biba never really seemed to capitalise on the goodwill so many of us had towards the old Biba. Now, if only someone would relaunch Ossie Clark, updating some of their classic dresses, that really would be something…