Building Brand One Story at a Time: Why Your Organization Needs PR

Yesterday was a prime example of how an enterprising PR person can help your organization build brand and market share.

Media across the country and (thanks to the Internet) around the world were buzzing with a story about how Tuesday was going to be the busiest day ever for FedEx. CNN had a reporter riding along on a FedEx delivery truck; the AP called it the “pre-game show for Santa.” The same news cycle, the national media carried a quirky feature about the Top 10 Quotes of the Year, which are compiled annually by an associate librarian named Fred Shapiro at Yale University. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the Quote of the Year was U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s “I’m not a witch” quip.

Both of these cases are excellent examples of why it is so important to have PR people inside your organization watching and listening for stories. I can imagine the FedEx story starting with a routine traffic report by a vice president at a management meeting at FedEx headquarters. It took a PR person, however, to identify it as a major story, package it and sell it to the media. The annual quotations story from Yale is a no-brainer: It’s quirky, timely and interesting, and you can sell it over and over every December. Keep your eyes and ears open for other PR-generated year-in-review stories in the coming weeks.

The point is, there are newsworthy stories everywhere inside of every type of organization. You just need a seasoned PR person to identify them and help you sell them. Ordinary consumers don’t realize that much of what you see and hear every day in the media are stories that started with a press release or phone call to a reporter from a PR person. Some of the biggest brands in America – Google and Starbucks, for instance – have been built almost exclusively through the relentless use of PR. It’s much cheaper than advertising and people assign it more credibility because it is filtered through the media prism. (If you read it in the newspaper, it must be true, right?)

If you are looking to build brand, defend your brand, reinvent your brand, rehabilitate your public image or establish yourself as an authority in your field, forget advertising. PR is the way to go.