What to do when your release flops? Learn how a 4X4 pulled us out of a ditch and how you can lift y

Hello, my name is Jim James and I am your host on the Speak PR Podcast. On this podcast, I'd like to help you to unlock the value in your business with free and effective communications advice. I do this by sharing my own personal experience of over 25 years as an entrepreneur and at the same time a PR agency owner. So I've served over 500 clients large and small. So the tools and the thoughts that I like to share on this podcast, I know will work for you. So today I'm going to talk about what you can do when your press release doesn't really get any traction and how you can piggyback off a bigger story in order to get covered. Now, a couple of weeks ago, I sent out a press release of my own to announce The 25th anniversary of East West PR. This is an agency that I founded in Singapore when I left England at the age of 28. And of course, I thought that this was a, you know, a good story that I've come back and I entitled my headline, after 25 years of running an agency, Jim James returns to England to not open an office. I thought it was a little bit quirky because the idea is that I'm talking about how I'm building a virtual company now with offices around the world, but those actually staffed by people who are on demand. They're people who want to use the platform but want to be self-employed. Now, actually, we didn't really get much pickup for that story. And of course, the truth is that it's my— it's important to me But it's not really a big industry story. So as much as I would like to have used that and leveraged that to get famous, the reality is that for the editors of the publications in public relations and marketing, that my 25-year odyssey of starting offices in Singapore and China and India and now in the UK, it may be an interesting lifestyle story, but it's not really an interesting business story. So we put our heads down, and this week we launched the Ineos Grenadier. Ineos is a new utility 4x4 has been launched by James Radcliffe, the founder of Ineos. And the Ineos story, of course, has been fantastic. It's been put together in some speed by a network of agencies, not one global agency, but a network of independent agencies like EastWest Public Relations. And in one day, the team at INEOS created a number of virtual press briefings we hosted in Singapore at 9 o'clock in the morning for some 14 journalists from Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. On the on the press briefing, there were no cars. So unlike the normal press launch that we've done or that I did for Morgan Motor Company in China when I owned the business of importing cars there, we would in the past have a vehicle and the journalists and people would get in. But actually on this occasion, it was showing of videos of graphics, videos of the designers talking about the evolution of the car and showing the the graphics. And the origination of the cars, followed by a press release, of course. Now, it seems as though this INEOS launch has been wildly successful, and it has been wildly inexpensive by comparison to the traditional launches that take place. And I've seen some statistics which I, I can share only in part, which is that the, the coverage being obtained by the INEOS launch is some twice that of the Land Rover launch that was taking place in the same week where they had physical product being driven and being shown. So we're in an era where the media are now expecting to have interaction and information provided, but are not expecting to see the physical product. That's a, that's really a land shift for everybody in the industry. And I think it's going to show how it's possible to create a global marketing campaign at a fraction of the cost of the traditional product launches. Now, what the byproduct of the INEOS launch was, and this is where I think the opportunity for us as business owners comes in, is that the INEOS launch was fantastic for many reasons, and one of them was that the INEOS client was happy for all the agencies to announce that we were working on the INEOS project. Normally agencies are not allowed to say this in the media, but it's a smart move on behalf of the INEOS PR team because they understand that if each agency can then mention that they are working on the INEOS brand, of course we've all got our networks, we've all got our promotional ploys, and as a result a number of agencies around the world all promoted the fact they were working on the INEOS launch and put it through their own social media channels as well. We, of course, put it on our social media channels in Asia and in Europe. For example, Campaign Asia, PR Week, Marketing Interactive all picked up the story that EastWest PR was working on the public relations for this new utility 4x4. As a result of carrying these amazing photographs of the new product, They wrapped up the fact that we were now celebrating our 25th anniversary. In the piece announcing that we had picked up the Ineos, then the journalists were saying, "Well, who is East West?" And the next story, of course, was East West was an agency started 25 years ago by an Englishman who has set up agencies in Singapore. China and the UK and India. From that then, one of our team in Singapore, Prad Niesh, uh, was pretty opportunistic and wonderful and reached out to the people at Everything PR and said, well, now you see that East West is a credible agency because we're managing something on a global scale and with the local partners for that. Would you like to talk about the the journey to setting up the agency? Now, I had originally sent out a press release saying how jumping out of an aeroplane at the age of 18 led me to start a PR firm in Singapore. I thought it was a pretty catchy headline for a press release, but I got knocked back by the people at the EIN, which is an international news network, saying that they felt my headline. Wasn't really a news headline. It was more of an editorial article headline. And of course, this is really what it was. And I thought that I would take a risk on that, but I got pushed back by the by the news distribution service. But for the pitch for a one-on-one interview, this is an ideal headline because it's a little bit quirky, a little bit of a story behind it. Actually did jump out of an aeroplane at the age of 18 if anyone's interested. And what I learned from that opportunity was that I could raise more money in an afternoon jumping out of an aeroplane than I could working for a whole month selling toys in a department store. I was also able to get coverage in my local newspaper called the Kentish Gazette in Canterbury, and as a result of that, was able to get sponsorship in the form of discounted equipment from a local shop. And that shop then enabled me to get more coverage because I was able to explain that this, this local shop had taken an interest in the young man going to Australia to put waterworks into tribal lands in northern Australia. So the whole narrative then around my journey became an opportunity for Pradesh in Singapore to pitch to Everything PR about how the company has been started And I was able then to author a 5-question Q&A, which then appeared at the end of the week for East West Public Relations. So a very busy week, starting off on a Monday with some disappointment that my news about launching my agency in the UK wasn't really being picked up by the media. But by the end of the week, having just got our heads down and done the work of launching this amazing-looking 4x4 Grenadier, we were able to use the halo effect in order to get coverage. And I raise this because what we often do as companies is we are, in fact, almost always part of a bigger story. We often like to think of PR as our own story, but in reality, it can be reframed in order to be of interest to a journalist or an outlet, or even within our own social media. Because as often people say, you know, we're, we're not as interesting as we are as when we're being interested. So we are often thinking about ourselves, but it's when we ask questions about others that people start to take notice. And if we think about that from a PR point of view, when I stopped thinking about why I'm interesting and got on with why INEOS is interesting, my own role in the INEOS story became of interest to somebody else. So letting go of our own ego to some degree, not worrying so much about how we're interesting, but how what we're working on for others is sometimes more interesting and can be a bigger article or TV story or social media piece or case study than our own part of the story. And in doing that, if we do this in an ongoing way, what we're also doing, of course, is showing the narrative of our company. Because I talk about in Speak PR, the 5 stages. And the first is storification, the second is personalization, the third is engagement, the fourth is amplification, and the fifth is to know. But in storification, what I, what I explain and what I illustrate is the importance of creating our own story in chapters. Our business and ourselves as business owners are part of a story that has chapters, because chapters mean the information can be broken down and made into manageable amounts of information for people to, to take on board. So for us, if you like, this week has been another chapter in the East West story. An earlier chapter, setting up the business, wasn't so interesting to the media, but this chapter, working with a group of people who who were all freelancers to deliver on a global contract for an innovative new 4x4. That was a new chapter that was of interest to many media. So perhaps if we think about our own story, do we have any things that we're doing that we're working on as a company for a client for a guest, for a member of the staff, for an investor that we can repurpose and think about as part of a bigger story? Can we see ourselves through the lens of the journalist and the audience and say, well, that company is only part of a story? It's an interesting and maybe a mission-critical part of the story, but it's not the entire story. How can we think about our own businesses and our own people within those businesses and reframe them? Because as I found this week, jumping out of a plane when I was 18 was interesting to me and started off a sequence of events that led me some 30-odd years later to be promoting a British automotive brand in Asia with a team of people. The narrative itself then becomes interesting, but we have to think about our role in it. The lesson I'd like to leave with you then for today, in a short Friday afternoon, is that there's news in everything, but it isn't necessarily the story that we think we're going to tell that people want to listen to. Sometimes the story that we've got is bigger than us, but we just have to see the role that we play in this story. And we may not always be the hero. Sometimes we're in the supporting cast. But as with any good book or any good movie, all the characters are important. And what's important from a PR point of view is that we keep on playing a role and that we keep on somehow getting listed in the credits. Because if we get noticed in the credits, the next time there may be a bigger part for us, a bigger opportunity to play a role in the spotlight. So with that, I'd like to wish you all a profitable business, terrific health, and that you keep on participating and communicating.