- You take a large cup of timely topic.
- Add two spoons of factual data
- Mix it with a pinch of credential
- Let it cook for a day and you’re done.
I used that recipe recently to generate coverage on how KDS helps its clients cut costs in today’s turbulent economical time. I quickly drafted a survey using my favourite online pooling system, Surveymonkey and sent it to our customers.
I had designed an open text field for people to leave comments. These came handy to bring flesh to the story and to make it more human.
After two days I closed the survey (you will notice the either people answer at once or they don’t). I asked KDS client Airbus for a quote and dispatched the press release to our media mailing list.
Results were instantaneous and above expectation:
- The Telegraph in the UK
- The USA Today
- Le Journal du Net, in France
- And numerous trade publication round the world
Surveys are always a winner. Last summer, I worked on an international study on how people cheat on their expense reports. There the topic was not so much timely but it had a human element in it, everyone hates filling expenses… The study compared how different countries scored in term of cheating. I had pulled a few anecdotes from respondent’s comments to make the study more interesting and to tell the story of office worker doing overtime to fill-in their expenses. These snap-bits made it to many publications. They helped bring the story home.
Again I got coverage in national financial press (Les Echos), business publication, dailies (Le Parisien); national radios, etc.
The study generated directly hundreds of leads as people filled forms to download it from our website. These were automatically tracked on associated to a Campaign on Salesforce.com (another of my favourite online marketing toy) enabling me to measuring ROI).
So my PR advices are: use figures, credentials, stick to the news, tell a story and be timely.