I remember staying in a New South Wales country town a few years ago with a friend who was the local GP. When he faced the prospect of going around the street to pick up the Sunday night fish and chips, he asked me to go into the shop as the proprietor always wanted a free consultation about his bad back.
I sometimes feel like that when I am cornered at a social function with the question ‘How do I start a PR program for my business?’
I am an Internet wanderer on subjects that interest me and this heading caught my attention as I can’t understand why anaerobic digestion is not widely used in Australia in the same way that it is in other countries around the world.
A few weeks ago the New South Wales Environment Minister Matt Keen announced that the National Parks will build areas within some parks that would be fenced off so that feral cats and foxes could be excluded and the small Australian native animals inside would be able to thrive and proliferate.
I immediately thought of John Wamsley and the old aphorism that I’ve used as the heading of this blog.
I’ve been wearing my heart on my sleeve as a climate change believer since about 2005, when a friend introduced me to the Tim Flannery book, the Weather Makers.
The friend is Murray Hogarth who was the Environment Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald for many years and we used to have the occasional chatty lunch.
Murray asked me if I accepted the concept that mankind had had a negative impact on the environment (and climate) and that unless we all collectively do something the temperature of the plant would continue to rise to the point where it will eventually be uninhabitable.
This is a media release I wrote for then client Trina Solar back in October 2015. I spent two happy years working with Trina and some great people, but like a lot of businesses, times changed at the Head Office in China and a switch of the main APAC office to Singapore as well as a decision to concentrate on India as their major market direction.
One aspect of the PR work I did for Trina was to research and write case history stories of where their solar panels had been used and the performance impact of those products in cutting energy costs or, as in this case, provide a unique solution to an operational problem. I researched and wrote about a story a month for more than two years, but this one has always stood out for me.
A few years ago the big thing in generating new business leads was networking and experts emerged to tell all of us unsuspecting small business people, how to do it.
If the whole movement had have been started by the printing industry I would have thought it was a very clever promotion as it must have moved millions of business cards.