LATCH ON TO CURRENT RUNNING STORIES

You may gain quite a lot of mileage by latching on to a big story that’s running in the press at the moment. Here’s an example. Some years ago one of our clients, a small and somewhat insignificant engineering company, managed to increase its turnover by about 30 per cent during a period when the national news pages were dominated by doom-and-gloom stories about the failing economy, depression, corporate failures, etc. We put out a simple news story announcing the 30 per cent increase. A small company doing better than the big boys in a recession was a happy story amidst the almost universally bad news, and the media started to beat a path to our client’s door. Our only problem was how to fend off journalists who wanted to come and interview the client face to face, because we didn’t want them to see just how small the company really was! The telephone can be a great blessing sometimes...

Similar things happened during the wars in the Falklands and the Gulf. The press contracted sustained bouts of war fever, and any alert PR person whose company had a product or service that was in any way connected with the Army, Navy or Air Force found an excuse to mention it in a press release. We know of one company that made a small computer device which was used in army tanks and, er, just happened to develop a fairly minor enhancement to it during the Falklands War. Good thinking, Batman, and the story deserved the good take-up it received.

So keep alert! Wars, floods, economic ups and downs, Olympic Games, general elections, flights to Mars, whatever’s making headline news on the front pages – if you can find a way of latching on to it with a related story of your own, it may well be PR bonus time for you.