Sex, alcohol and chocolate – the key to PR success?

Working in B2B technology PR it’s fair to say that some of the news we talk about – although important – isn’t necessarily hugely sexy. Thus, sometimes we must be quite creative in how we help our clients get the best exposure possible. We recently had a huge amount of success for our client iPass which wanted to show how important Wi-Fi had become to us all. The results of some research we carried out helped us to craft a report that went on to provide us with the headline that Wi-Fi was more important to people than sex, alcohol or chocolate.

This news hook was too much to resist for many publications and allowed us to get great coverage in a variety of national and trade publications across Europe. It also helped us get across the broader message about how Wi-Fi is something that everyone is beginning to expect as a basic need. This meant that even though most publications used the headline about Wi-Fi being more important than sex, alcohol or chocolate, they also talked about other key issues such as how Wi-Fi was influencing travel decisions.

Once the ball got rolling we even started to see the story go viral with coverage being picked up everywhere from The Daily Mail, International Business Times, NDTV, Times of India to Infosecurity, Travel Daily and _Computer Business Review _as well as many other global websites.  In addition to this, even now, weeks later, there are many new articles popping up and the social media response has also been strong, with over 1,000 tweets about the report to date.

Sometimes a bit of lateral thinking can go a long way to help come up with an idea that will get the client’s point across, whilst grabbing the attention of journalists who get sent countless stories every day. Being able to come up with the ideas that do stand out from the crowd is key, so it’s great to see situations such as this that pay off so handsomely.