How can you stitch together your PR story, and who is the best person to spin the yarns in public?

The lesson that I've learned today actually was when I went shopping with my daughter for a sewing machine, and I was taught by one Mr. Pickles. Now, this may seem slightly strange, but I'd like to talk to you about the importance of passion and the importance of passion in public relations. I went with my 12-year-old daughter to buy some fabric materials. We went to the shop here in Bath. Just inside the door, there was a man fixing a sewing machine. This chap, I thought, must be the repairman. Actually, I'm interested in sewing machines not for myself maybe, but for my daughters and my wife. I said, "Oh, that's interesting. I'm just looking at sewing machines myself," and he said, "Oh, yes, well, there are

one with a bobbin that goes into the base and the other without a bobbin in the base. They divide, sir, between those with and those without," and he started the conversation. We started the conversation based on a very simple but illustrative point of difference between sewing machines that would be sub-200 and sewing machines that would be 250 up to 7,500 for a sewing machine. I'm no expert, but this chap went on to explain more and more about the different configurations of these sewing machines, and that one set of sewing machines, for example, could do 60 patents, and another could do up to 30. This particular one would sew a hole for a button, and he proceeded to show me. This is in front of the store, surrounded by other customers, and it became a whole sales demonstration. My daughter, meanwhile, came back with more materials and the chap said, "Oh, I think we've got some black fabric down the back of the store. You might want to use this one, because it's longer and this is a metallic thread, which is nice if you're making one of these quilts." Within 20 minutes of being in this store, we learned so much about sewing machines. I also became, as we all did, pretty engaged in this man, and he's only about 5'5", quite a heavy build-looking guy, slightly balding on top. You would not have imagined this man to be the owner of a seamstress store, and it turned out that this is Mr. Pickles. Mr. Pickles has been, open as he explained, five days a week throughout the lockdown. Mr. Pickles is one of those people whose business has actually gone from good to better. He explained to me that you can't buy now sewing machines for love nor money, because the shipping has all been curtailed coming from Asia. He said all the sewing machines come from Japan, China, and South Korea. I'm lucky, because he's got a sale on this sewing machine that should be 325 plus vat. It's only 250 if I'd like to make make a decision today. Meanwhile, he's spinning his barbs and making sure that the different patents are being sewn on the materials, and my daughter is collecting more and more items from the store. When I came out of the store and my daughter and I were seriously engaged in the idea of buying a very expensive sewing machine, even though it wasn't what we got to purchase, I asked my 12-year-old, "What's special about that store?" and Amity, that's her name, she said, "That man's really passionate about sewing." She said, "It's really a surprise, but he knows everything." It made me just think about, in public relations terms, the importance of passion in what we're talking about. There's a phrase around compassionate communication where, in this particular case, Mr. Pickles and I were talking, and I said, "I don't really know what I'm looking for, " and he said, "Don't worry, sir. We've got lots here. I'm sure that there's something we can help you to find out what you need." When I said, "We're feeling like we should get a sewing machine," he said, "Oh, that's great. Many people are looking at getting machines, because they want to do work at home or to contribute to the hospital scrubs and so on." So here we were in this unlikely setting, and what also struck me was that Mr. Pickles was actively doing something. He was actively working with the product that I was thinking about, well, not thinking about until I had seen him doing this. The nonverbal communication that's involved in public relations and in sales are pretty similar in a way; asking the question, then, what can we do in and around our businesses when people are coming in to both make them feel welcome, that their feelings and their values and their needs are legitimate, and also that we then buy into the genuine passion and knowledge that the spokesperson that we're speaking with or that we're putting forward for media work is giving. We then thought as we moved on to other things and said we needed to just consider the purchase, there is an issue there around the integrity of the person speaking about the product. In that Cision survey that I mentioned a little while ago about reputation and spokespeople, actually, the most trusted spokespeople of companies are the product experts and the technical people. We normally field the MD or the CEO for spokespeople opportunities for the media, for office openings, or product launches. But ironically enough, the CEOs and sales directors are actually probably the least trusted when it comes to getting the public relations message out there. If you think about it, it's because we think that those people are going to be trying to sell us something, whereas a technical expert or product expert is going to be representing the truth in an unvarnished way about that product, and this is really what Mr. Pickles was doing. He didn't seem like a salesman. He wasn't dressed like a salesman. He didn't sound like a salesman, but actually, it was his own business and his passion and his product knowledge meant that he was very much such a salesman. If we look then at our own opportunities for PR, it's worth thinking about whether we're going to put ourselves forward, or whether we can put forward other people with training and with supervision and some guidance to actually articulate what the company is doing. Certainly, this can be true, for example, in restaurants, we always see the chef. If you think about toothpaste commercials, it's the dentist. It's the practitioner that is brought out. After leaving the emporium for all things to do with seamstress work, we then dropped into the local pet home because we're looking to adopt a cat. A young woman there said, "Oh, it's great. We've started to let cats be adopted again, but there's a waiting list. You'll need to fill out the form, but if you're in interested in having a look, I'm live streaming the kittens through Facebook." If you're interested, it's the Bath Cats and Dogs Home. They now live stream the kittens that are up for adoption, because they're understanding that we may not be able to put our arms around those kittens for the next two weeks, but they don't want to lose the attention and the passion. And I could tell you, Amity's eyes lit up when she thought about how we could sit at home and watch kittens on TV. As we know, kittens are some of the most watched videos. In the same way that the Woodlands Trust is using a webcam in the Scottish Highlands to film in the Valkyries a pair of kestrels that have just given birth, they are also using live video as a way to capture and to engage people. What Mr. Pickles, the cats home, and Woodland Trust are all doing is they are showing mastery of their topic by having obvious domain expertise. They're genuine in terms of the passion that they're displaying with the products, or in this case, the animals they're working with, but they're also showing. And as we look at our public relations activities, how much of it are we relying on print or on static text? Video now is both so easy to create and to distribute that it's really no excuse not to be putting some video somewhere into our marketing materials. Now, Mr. Pickles didn't seem to be live streaming his own classes. Maybe that's something that he'll be doing in the future. But if we've got products or services and we've got knowledgeable people in our organizations who we don't necessarily traditionally think of as the spokesperson, is there some way that we can deploy them? Is there some way that we can start to have user-generated content, where it's not the CEO and the salesperson and the MD giving the company line, it's the product manager, it may be the hygiene officer, it may be the driver, who then comes centerstage? Because the person delivering the service, the person who's developed the product is often the most credible and certainly the most knowledgeable about what it is. The CEO, the MD, or the sales director may be able to articulate the company's role in delivering that product or service, but that may not be the same. There may not be the same passion and the same insight as that person who's actually involved in the making of it. In the book that I'm working on called Start With Who, I like to think of the passion of the person that is working in and on the product or the service as being of fundamental importance, because people buy people, because we trust and we value people. Even my 12-year-old daughter who met Mr. Pickles just for 20 minutes came away feeling that this was the shop that she would go to, that Mr. Pickles is much more knowledgeable, so loyalty starts young, and it starts with passion. So as we build our public relations, how can we demonstrate passion in store, in facility, in factory, in restaurant, whichever facility we've got? Sometimes it's showing people what we do out front, and sometimes, it's about sharing it in the way with the kittens that they're not allowed to let people in and see the kittens yet, but they can take the people there with them and do live streaming. I spoke today about passion, and that passion and domain expertise are often held by the person doing the job, not necessarily by the person who runs the company. I hope that I've managed to stitch this quilt of thoughts together in a way that Mr. Pickles might have been proud of. I've done it without the aid of a sewing machine, just my technology here at home.