It’s free, but what’s the price?

Over the last several months I’ve been involved in plenty of pitches for new business. A decent share have been successful but there have been occasions – probably half a dozen – in which the potential client has opted to go for a bit of DIY PR instead while times are tight.

In all these instances I’ve taken an active interest in the outcome, largely because they were almost all cases where I felt that there was a great opportunity and I could see the story working in the nationals or on TV. I was also interested to see what the result of the DIY efforts would be.

One worked reasonably well, but in all the other cases it was almost enough to make a grown man cry.

The stories that failed did so for two reasons:

1. Poor narrative. In all the unsuccessful cases the storytelling fell on the wrong side of my oft quoted Black and Decker analogy: “Do we sell drills or do we sell holes?” The wrong side is of course the “drills” side, because that is advertising; the right side is the “holes” side, because that’s where the stuff about what the product means to the punter – journalist or consumer – resides. That’s where the insights, topicality and general interest are – news in other words.

2. Free or low-cost distribution services. The internet is awash with all sorts of free or low cost offers for getting your story in front of “journalists” or onto “key blogging sites”. Pshaw to that. Mostly these services are rubbish. They may buy you a chance listing on a Kazakhstan gadget site for a day or two, but beyond that they yield little advantage and they kill what might otherwise be a very successful story.

What might sound like a piece of brilliant [insert appropriate buzzword] execution tends to be nothing of the sort. The services work in the main on the basis that if you throw a story out widely enough you’ll find someone who is prepared to cut and paste it into their blog or their site. It’s mostly a terrible waste of effort and opportunity, especially if you’re charged for it.

One of the (surprisingly) all-too-often overlooked keys to getting a story talked about, passed around and spread online is to place it in a national, especially a national with a massive online following. Many of the websites of the nationals attract more that 25 million unique visitors per month. A good show in the Telegraph or a page lead in the Daily Mail will pretty much guarantee you a healthy online conversation about your brand or your product – and is still in my view the most effective social media catalyst there is.

Getting into a national isn’t beyond the reach of most organisations, whatever their size. If there’s a decent story to tell, it doesn’t matter whether you’re working out of small shared office – it’s just a matter of knowing how to do it and who to get the story in front of.

What saddens me most is the opportunity cost of most DIY execution – the time taken on drafting, doing and worrying that might otherwise have been spent on better things, whilst leaving the work to an expert, after which there’s the opportunity to reap the rewards of the credibility enhancement that comes from national press coverage.