Product pipeline management for public relations

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let me start you off with a simple show of hands please raise your hand for me if you have ever stayed at a hotel where there's where they serve egg and bacon for breakfast let me see your hands thank you now as I actually expected and I'm sure you did too that was basically everyone however what everyone doesn't know about the whole egg and bacon thing is that that was actually a result of a hundred-year-old PR campaign this PR campaign in the beginning of the 19th century was orchestrated by a man named Edward Bernays Edward Bernays was actually the cousin of the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud and he has been dubbed in the later years to be the father of public relations now what Edward Bernays did was that he had this client who was a food manufacturer and this food manufacturer wanted Edward Bernays to help them to get Americans to eat more meat so Edward Bernays thought it would be a good idea to get people to eat a more heavy breakfast a sturdier breakfast so what he did was that he reached out to five thousand five thousand doctors and physicians and asked them if Americans would benefit from having a sturdier breakfast 4,500 of those doctors and physicians they said well yes that sounds reasonable and the rest is history now Edward Bernays did a lot of other things as well one of the things he's famous for in in the pr world is that he had another client I think this was in late in the late 1920s which was Lucky Strike you know the cigarette brand the tobacco brand and Lucky Strike they were quite irritated of the fact that only men at this time smoked cigarettes and women didn't so they felt that there was a 50% market that was literally little really untapped so he asked Benes - can you help us to tap into this this enormous market so what Benes did was that he reached out to female influencers artists and actresses of the time he reached out to feminist groups and this was a success it worked the feminist groups of the time even called these cigarettes the torches of freedom when when they had to do this so given this thing when people ask me what I do for a living and I say that I am a PR professional I do hesitate that at times because public relations does have a bad reputation which is ironic given the fact what what PR is all about but for me I think that the core of PR is actually the personal relationships that businesses and brands can have with other people in the world so when looking at this and what the actual science behind relationships is I think there's a very interesting hypothesis and that's the hypothesis of the social brain it determines the way that we form groups all the way from the most close tight-knit group the the support clique of about 3 to 5 people with whom we have the closest bonds all the way up to the tribe 1000 to 2000 people that are sort of in our close proximity some of you might also recognize the clan number of 150 which has come to be known as the Dunbar number now here's though a problem when working with brands because brands don't really like this picture and that's because they could easily just post something on Facebook throw a couple of hundred dollars on it and you would actually surpass this limit of a 1,000 to 2,000 people the numbers are simply too small if you look at how we like to forge relationships so I think I've come up with what the problem is because every time a brand gives me a call and I come over and they need help with something this is basically what they need help with they want to reach out to as many people as possible that they don't yet have a relationship with it can be em it can be employees it can be fans followers recognition where the mouth so this is what they want help with however I would then suggest that they should focus on the existing relationships but they seem to often then think that well that's a problem that we have already solved don't care about them Jerry let's focus on these magical big numbers on the other side however I would argue that this needs to change because it is really the other way around if you think think about this in sales terms one could argue that the one side are cold leads and the other side are hot leads and then you decide which one is more important to go after this of course raises the question then of how to actually do this thing so we come from an era with mass communication and this era of mass communication has left us with our thinking that we need to reach editorial space because if we can make ourselves newsworthy enough we can earn that space and that will help us reach those big numbers however if we look at what has happened today with the social web the interconnectedness and so forth and so on we can instead see that we have not mass communication anymore but more of interpersonal relationships and there's no shortage and I don't know if you have ever thought about it that way but there's no shortage of editorial space anymore anyone can post something on Instagram anyone can start a blog or a website there's simply no shortage of editorial space anymore but there is a shortage of mental space and you don't get into that mental space faced by bombarding people with news you get into that mental space by being relevant and trustworthy so where does this leave us when it comes to those big numbers well I think it's interesting to post this question of whether or not relationships can scale is that a pipe dream or is that something that actually can happen well I like to think about this this way let's do a little math problem if you will imagine earning and winning over the hearts and mind of one true fan and for the sake of argument let's say that this true fan each month this one true fan recruits one other true fan who in turn will recruit yet another true fan so if we translate this into grains of rice on a chess board it will present us with an interesting math problem right so the first month there's one true fan or in this example one grain of rice the second month we have two grains of rice the third month we have four and so forth or so on now I can tell you this if you start to look at the actual number here's and you start to think about whether or not social relationship can scale or not there is some true magic that really starts to happen on the second half of the chessboard if you calculate actually how much rice this would be it would actually amount to a huge number and a way to relate to this number would be if you take all these grains of rice and you put them in one big heap that he would actually be bigger in volume than Mount Everest so that's a lot of true fans scaling by simply recruiting one new fan each and every month still I find that most brands and businesses are still not impressed because what they then want to know is that how do you make it in a world of infinite choices you make how do you create that one true FAL how do you make them fall in love with your brand how do you make them join your mission your vision and how do you emphasize all of this I think this is a very relevant question and to answer that question what I would like to do is to share my secret recipe for PR success and this secret recipe has nothing to do with all of those big numbers so the secret recipe only contains of two parts and it's these two parts what you need is one stupid majority and one smart minority that's all you need to make a huge PR success not only for the short term but for the long term and then you might wonder you know what what is exactly a stupid majority well a stupid majority is when a great big number of people are about to be wrong very soon and there are a number of brands that have built very loyal fans loyal followings of fans that we can recognize I pulled up some example here where there used to be a time when we thought that riding a skateboard wasn't really a sport something that redbull was very early to adapt to we have the example with Apple who did think that it does really matter how technology looks on the outside we have the example of Netflix and one that is going on right now is where Elan musk the founder of Tesla Motors is proving to the world that the majority was stupid about electric cars and as it seems these stupid majorities they tend to be everywhere and when it comes to being everywhere it's very obvious to a lot of people that you need to find these in your business speaking of Netflix I watched a documentary a couple of weeks ago about this guy named Shep Gordon most of you have probably not heard of him but he is a legendary promoter of rock star arena type artists and one of his first clients was Alice Cooper the the horror rock star of his day but in the beginning Alice Cooper wasn't known at all so they went to London in order to promote Alice Cooper in Great Britain so they arrived in in London and they had only ten days to fill up us a big big stadium for his concert but here was the problem no one in the UK really knew who Alice Cooper was so what Shep Gordon did was that he plastered a naked picture of Alice Cooper and he hired a big truck and plastered his naked picture on this big truck had a driver go into the morning rush-hour traffic around Piccadilly Circus and then had that truck repeatedly break down now this made a lot of people angry of course and it made the news for for several cycles again and again and ten days later Alice Cooper sold out the concert now you might think that I'm making the argument for that all publicity is good publicity but that's not the case what Shep Gordon did and he kept doing this throughout his career is that he had found this one stupid majority that he could just he could use pound at that stupid majority and it would work every time and that stupid majority was parents so what he did was that he constantly made parents angry which attracted the rebellious younger crowd and let me tell you the rebellious younger crowd is always going to be right in the end so where does this leave us well I think it's important to for you to establish and to realize and to figure out in your business your brands for your organization figure out where is this stupid majority that is ready to fall because that will make your brand relevant that will make a smart minority really see the logic of the fight that you're about to fight now as a final word I would feel obliged to to also add to this that no you don't have to make parents angry you don't have to pick those people as your stupid majority you don't have to make people eat more eggs and bacon and you don't have to make more people smoke but in the same way as there are so many stupid majorities out there waiting to be taken down there's also so many smart minorities as well and they're eagerly awaiting your help so my final words in that case would be to choose wisely thank you