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.
As well as joining the local Chamber of Commerce and business groups like AmCham and others like the Leads Club and BNI, we were also encouraged to develop our 30-second pitch with the hypothetical situation that you are in a lift with Bill Gates and you have two floors to win the Microsoft account.
I must admit that I never quite believed that scenario as I always thought that Bill Gates would have said, ”Piss off”, but maybe that’s just my cynicism.
Well PR is a difficult subject to sell in 30-seconds so I thought long and hard before I came up with my ‘New is news’ approach, which concentrates on the potential news coverage that can be generated by PR which is really the popular belief that it is what we do anyway.
This is what my website says is the story:
“One of the most enduring clichés in public relations is that ‘new is news’. Newness is a promotional advantage that should be utilised to the utmost, while it’s still news. You only have your newness story for so long, so don’t waste it.”
And by the way it works, because something new, exciting and different is a great story and probably in the lifetime of your enterprise it is still the best you’ll have but it still can be applied to a new product, a new factory, a new CEO or just about anything else.