Ethical Companies and PR

Most companies don’t but it doesn’t stop them putting out PR, or hoping for PR.

And it is not impossible to get good PR even if you have no training, or contacts- its just, well more difficult, and takes longer.

The key question when doing PR is what is new about this, what does it change, who benefits, who is threatened?

So many PR releases I get are company X announced that it is changing to green energy, or company Y opens a new shop in backend of backofbeyondsville.

The point of when you are trying to write article to answer a cynical reader’s question- so what?

If the company that is slapping a solar panel on the roof is Natural Choices Media then it means a great deal to me as an individual but frankly not a fig to the rest of the world, if it happens to be the every office of the Green Party, well its hardly unexpected, the Conservative Party offices would raise a wry smirk and get onto the news as a greenwash story- however if the change is so big, say a huge Government department which increases the market sector by 25% than that is a big story .

So frankly don’t tell me you have moved to green energy my readers won’t care, so I don’t care.

However tell me a story about how you have gone through your entire supply chain from top to bottom, the issues you had to face- particularly if they were an ethical conundrum- any unusual choices you made and why, then the green energy switch becomes part of a much wider and more interesting story.

If company Y ‘s new organic cloths shop in backofbeyondsville is part of a revitalisation of a town centre that has been devastated by ring road supermarkets well there is a great story there, the story would be the revitalisation of the town centre, but the star of the story could be Company Y’s little old organic store.

In this case the individual actions of Company Y have been contextualised into something much bigger, but because it was Company Y thorough sheer cunning who raised the context first they get the story- the 15 other, equally deserving shops that opened before Company Y become background material and are buried in the trend.

If you are a small company just setting out set, you don’t have PR experience or VC backing to employ one then set your targets accordingly. Not your ultimate object, which can still be that full page in the nationals, just the target steps it will take you to get there.

Remember the following facts, and for this I probably will have the wrath of hacks descend on my shoulders for near and afar.

The biggest sin of journalism is plagiarism, they teach every budding hack that at journalism school. Like all sins it occurs all the time.

The thing is however to see it as a food chain, the big fish are always eating the little fish, the little fish are nimbler and faster, we have to be to survive, and the big fish are slower.

In English what I mean is that it is a very rarely does a story appear out of nowhere, national newspapers are awash with regional newspapers- why, because the regional have more hacks closer to events, so they get them first and then the big boys move in and take the story over.

Very few ethical business stories go from nowhere to the national press, ethical news sites and magazines, like the new consumer, the ecologist even www.naturalchoices.co.uk have often covered the story first, the bigger writers read these sources and pull in any interesting stories that may interest them.

So what I am saying unless your best mate work on a national don’t forget to get to know the press next to you, they know your sector, the story doesn’t have to be so big for them to cover it and with that base covered it is easier to start climbing the greasy pole to national fame.

Lord I have just realised I have rambled on for ages, sorry about that but I have hardly touched the surface.

It’s given me an idea for a series of articles though- how ethical companies can get PR and not pay for it, what they need to do and how to do it.