June 27, 2002

Dare To Be Different

In 1984, my Dad asked me what we could do to promote his three Northern California hammock stores. In a successful publicity stunt a few years earlier (good PR skills must be partially genetic), he broke the Guinness Record for hammock swinging - eight days - and enjoyed great press coverage. We needed a new hook to get journalists to cover our story or Hammock Swinging Record II would be seen as rehashed news and would fail to attract media attention.

Bingo! We decided to wrap our record-breaking attempt around the US Olympics taking place in Los Angeles. We sent out press releases that we were breaking the eight-day swinging record as a way to demonstrate the athleticism and difficulty of hammock swinging. "We aren't just smashing a record," we proclaimed. "We're showing the world that hammock swinging deserves to be an Olympic sport."

Well, the media ate it up. We generated three newspaper articles and significant coverage on local television networks. One newscast even featured a slow motion shot of my running off on a bathroom break with the theme song of "Chariots of Fire" playing in the background. My friends saw it and made fun of me for the rest of the summer. So what? Hammock sales spiked in the months following the stunt. We didn't succeed in getting a new Olympic sport created but we did sell a lot of hammocks.

This story illustrates some key points on how you can launch a successful PR campaign:

1) Dare to be different: The media is hungry for news. Can you imagine the stress journalists must feel to put out a newspaper or newscast on a daily or hourly basis? Journalists need news like we need air. Yet, you'll only get their attention and coverage if you provide them with a unique story or find a new way to spin old news.

2) Get coverage where it counts: We had such a unique idea and funny angle that I'm sure we could have gotten national coverage for our story. But, what good would that have done? With three stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, we could only sell locally. That's why we focused all our efforts on local media and enjoyed the sales boost that this coverage generated.

3) You don't need special connections to get good PR: I was 19-year-old kid whose only media contact was the paperboy next door. With clever press releases sent to 30 different media contacts that I copied out of the Yellow Pages, we generated free press coverage that sold a lot of hammocks. In future newsletters, we'll give you ideas on how you can come up with clever ways to put your company in the news and sell more.

Best wishes,
Patrick Galvin