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| "Oooo, part-time clerk at Toys-R-Us! That sounds fun, daddy!!" |
I discovered
the secret to effective online communication before Mark Zuckerberg lost all
his milk teeth.
It was in
the mid-1990s and my new boss, Rick Berman, was not pleased with my progress in
generating media coverage of an economic study entitled, “Effects of Minimum
Wages on Teenage Employment, Enrollment and Idleness.” I just couldn’t seem to
craft a press release that made that topic interesting to reporters. Imagine
that.
Following
yet another of his increasingly menacing pep-threats, I locked myself in my
office, thought back to my days as a reporter at The Red Bank Register, and
tried to imagine what might make me pick up the phone and call the guy flacking
this report. Then I drew my “press release.”
It was a
mock-up of the faux resume of one “Les Likely,” an unremarkable teenager with a
spotty work history and a very poor command of the English language. I added a
coffee-cup ring stain in the corner and a red stenciled “REJECT” stamp in the
middle of it and had the graphics department lay out and print 150 copies. Then
I sent them to my media list with this short note attached: “Les Likely is
about to lose his job again. Give me a call and I’ll tell you why.”
And they
called. And I never wrote a traditional release again.
The lesson I
learned then—which I use to this day—is this: before delivering any message, I
must first determine exactly what it is about what I have to say that could
possibly be of interest to my audience.
And as
important as that lesson was in the 1990s, it is imperative today. You see, the
days of making declarations in your best Ted Baxter voice and expecting the
fish to bite are over. In fact, the more Ted Baxter-y you are the less likely
you are to connect with your audiences.
Of course,
there are inherent risks whenever you color outside the lines, but the benefits
of creativity
are worth the occasional ding, such as that time my laminated
dollar-bill plan got us on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, above the
fold. I’ll let them recount it, since they tell it best:
We were
intrigued by The Employment Policies Institute's latest cost-saving endeavor.
To protest President Clinton's proposed minimum wage increase of $1 an hour,
the Washington, D.C., business-funded think tank mailed laminated $1 bills to
300 reporters at various news outlets. According to our calculations, the cost
of that little stunt could've furnished a minimum-wage earner with more than
two months of the boosted hourly rate.
It’s true
that my heart stopped beating briefly when I read the Journal that morning. But
that hit actually lit up the phones with calls from other reporters interested
in the study, demonstrating once again that any press is good press.
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