OK, OK, so I went with an attention-grabbing headline… This week has been a classic PR example of how getting a story out first can make all the difference to the end results. We’ve been working with Lloydspharmacy on a sexual health campaign called Sex Degrees of Separation. The basic premise is that when working on six degrees of separation, we’ve all potentially slept – albeit indirectly – with millions of people.
Our press release went out on Tuesday, coinciding the the release of our online calculator which allows you to (confidentially) enter the details of your sexual past and gives you your own sex degrees results and the average for your age group. We were delighted to see it get covered extensively in both the on and offline worlds.
A day later media behemoth MTV went out with a story also called Sex Degrees of Separation (to support a new show of the same name), saying that we were all only three bed hops away from sleeping with a celebrity.
Cue blowing through cheeks that we were first out with the story.
There appears to be space in the media for both, with each getting a good slice of coverage, but I suspect our sell in would have been a lot harder if the MTV story broke first. From my perspective on the digital PR side, we couldn’t be happier: it’s all over the web prompting loads of chatter on Twitter, Facebook and the like. Critically, it’s also created a massive surge in traffic to the Lloydspharmacy sites (in fact, we had to increase server capacity to cope).
Moral of the tale: no matter how prepared you are on the PR and online side, timing – and a bit of luck – are both equally important.
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