A short YouTube episode by Bill Gallagher (the Scaling Coach) offering practical tips for getting attention and PR for businesses. He argues that novelty, shock, and tying novel ideas to influential people drive media attention more than moral worthiness, and illustrates with examples like Tesla's truck reveal, Singularity University, and the 'Eating Like Einstein' campaign. He encourages businesses to be bold, novel, and publicize their differences to gain publicity.
Oh, could you use a little more attention for your business? Do you feel like you'd like to get more attention, more eyeballs, more viewers, more impression, more awareness for your business, your product out there in the world? Well, I'm probably not alone like that and I think a lot of us go about it in ways that don't necessarily work. So I've got some tips for you in this realm. Hi everyone, my name is Bill Gallagher. I'm the Scaling coach, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. We bring topics and tips and ideas and case studies and things like this every week to you at the Scaling Up Business Podcast and on our website, scalingcoach.com so wherever you go to get your podcast or stories, that kind of thing, your video content, you should find us there everywhere. From YouTube to Spotify, Stitcher, et cetera. You're going to find us there with the Scaling Up Business podcast. But you can also go to our website and search that hold back catalog because we've done over 300 episodes of these now. By the time you hear this, probably more than that. So you find all that and more. Scalingcoach.com Anyway, so back to this at hand. You know, a lot of us are chugging along with and feeling like our company deserves attention. We've built a better mousetrap, we've got a great service. Why doesn't the media, why don't more people know about us? Why does other do other companies get attention? We do not. I think many times, especially if you've got some purpose centered thing about your business, there's some worthiness. You feel like this one is positive, this one makes a difference, this one is worthy of attention and the media doesn't give a crap about that. But there are some interesting things that I've done, some that I've worked on, some that we know about. So why is it that Elon Musk trots out the Tesla truck, the world sits up and takes notice. They get all kinds of attention and they take loads and loads of pre orders and they don't spend anything on their marketing. Why is that? Why is it that when my friend introduced silliness, Mail worked with Peter Dumatis and Kurzweil and they rolled out Singularity University, that got worldwide attention and more media mentions than possible. Why is that? Why did my friend years ago who wanted to create a campaign to promote vegetarianism, have a breakthrough when he launched a campaign entitled Eating Like Einstein? So there's some common elements to these things that we can see that gets a lot of attention, worthiness, merit. Value is of little interest. Like moral value or, you know, positive contribution to the planet is of very little interest to the media and in fact, to many listeners, viewers, readers, that kind of thing. What does make a difference are a few things. One of them is novelty. Novelty is one of the most important things, things that are brand new. Now, shock adds value, right? But shock is an aspect or a quality of novelty, if you think about it. So doing something in a new and fresh way that raises a question that gets ATT for being different is. Now, things that frighten people definitely get a lot of attention, like dramatic events building things around a pandemic. Those kinds of things can get an awful lot of attention because they trigger fear. Side. But it's possible to have a lot of attention on amusing things that are novel and engaging and entertaining. So let's break it down. A few of them, right? Eating like Einstein. Eating like Einstein was really great. He's just promoting vegetarianism with this campaign. But until I'd heard it right, I knew lots of people were vegetarian. I'd heard lots of arguments for vegetarianism and they all kind of just went away. I'm like, oh, I'm not a vegetarian. I've dabbled. I don't have anything against it, but, you know, but when I heard that title, it raised a question. I heard something new or novel. Eating like Einstein. Was Einstein really a vegetarian? I don't know. But it did make me think about what does that mean and does it have extra benefits and. Right. It got me to stop and think about something. It got my attention. I was willing to give my brain over to it for a minute. And he was pretty successful for a while with that. It's been many years now, so I don't know how that's continued, but I remember at the time it was quite a breakthrough. The Singularity University launch. Singularity is a novel kind of. Notice there's that word again. A novel kind of educational program to solve problems that affect a billion or more people in the world. If you're going to solve a problem that affects a billion people, that's going to be something interesting. And there's likely a business or a venture of some kind in that. And that creates an interesting thing. That's the intersection of problem solving on global scale. Business, technology, startups and all of that kind of thing. And their whole approach to it was novel. In addition, they tied in noteworthy, influential people. Right, if you will, celebrities in their field. Now, Saleem was very well known in certain business circles. But not to the degree that Peter Diamandis or Ray Kurzweil. So they got a lot of attention by tying in a novel thing with well known people and so on. Same thing with the Tesla truck. The Tesla truck made a completely new and different kind of car. I grew up watching one example of another after Detroit concept cars were trotted out. And I was amazed and in love with many of them. They looked fantastic, but I never saw a single one of them in a showroom, in a neighbor's driveway or anything like that. The first time I sat in a Tesla from a friend of mine, I noticed the whole way the dash was aligned, the way the doors opened and then he put his foot into the accelerator pedal and. And my head snapped back and I'm like, oh, this is no Prius. This is a whole different kind of fun thing. So they gave us a real concept kind of car and called it a production car and said they were going to actually sell the actual thing. Right? The Tesla truck was very much like that. It took that even further beyond the Model S, beyond the roadster. And they gave us this very futuristic space age looking thing that had very interesting, compelling stats and they started taking pre orders on it. That's dramatic, that's novel. That got enormous attention. Some of the best companies in the world do this, but you don't have to be big to do it. You could do something new and groundbreaking and different in your industry. This is core to strategy for us and it makes for great PR value as well. So do something new and different. Break the mold, stand out, take a risk, be bold. That will pay off in terrific pr if you're also willing to not be shy or secretive about it. Anyway, I hope that's helped. Helpful for you. Find all that and more@scalingcoach.com keep scaling up. We'll talk to you again next time.
