The Warren Buffett approach to PR

This article is an excerpt from week 11 of The Digital PR Newsletter, each week I share a tip that either makes your job easier, or increases your chances of landing coverage.

You can sign up at DigitalPRNewsletter.com

If billionaire Warren Buffett did PR, have you ever wondered what his approach would be?

Of course you haven't, why the hell would you randomly think about that. But I’ll tell you what it would be.

In the documentary ‘Becoming Warren Buffett’ (highly recommend watching btw), Buffett explains his investment style using a baseball analogy (youtube link here).

He says that when a baseball player is batting, to hit it well, they must wait for the right pitch (that means a throw for the unacquainted), and that the same applies with investing.

Except with investing, you don’t have 3 strikes (again we’re talking throws here), you can pick the ‘ball’ you want to hit.

According to Buffett, rather than swing at everything in the stock market “the trick is to just sit there and watch pitch after pitch go by, and wait for the one right in your sweet spot, and if people are yelling ‘swing you bum’ you ignore them”

He says “There’s a temptation for people to act far too often… defining what your game is… where you’re going to have an edge is enormously important”.

Buffett’s approach is one that requires patience and precision.

If he were doing PR, he would act infrequently, and only when something enters his ‘sweet spot’.

Inspired by Buffett, I thought I’d approach PR in the way that he would.

To do that, I enlisted the help of Gary Hemming, a finance specialist from ABC Finance who very kindly said he’d test out my new service.

First we needed to identify our sweet spot, which is best explained using something I call the Reactive PR Matrix.

This is how I categorise reactive PR opportunities.

On the left we have ‘unplanned’ and ‘planned’, with planned being reactive PR opportunities that you can plan for in advance because you know they are going to happen, such as Christmas or Pancake day, or in finance that might be The Budget, or when the Bank of England sets interest rates.

Unplanned as the name suggests refers to reactive opportunities that we don’t know in advance, that might be instances such as when the Titan submersible imploded last year (obviously a terrible tragedy but an event that required experts to tell the story) a volcano eruption that causes travel chaos, or perhaps a significant company announcing that they are facing financial difficulties.

On the bottom we have low media interest, and high media interest, which is the likelihood that the media would write about the story.

Something that has low media interest may only appeal to niche publications or a regional publication, whereas something with high media interest is likely to be more widely covered.

I eliminated low media interest opportunities from our sweet spot, because I felt the pool of publications and journalists covering these stories would be too small to make it worth our while.

When it came to planned reactive opportunities that were of high media interest, I know that all the other freelance PR people and agencies would be going for those same opportunities too, because they knew that they were happening.

Below is a real screenshot from the inbox of a journalist just minutes after the Bank of England announced their interest rates (kindly provided by Laura Purkess).

These are all PR people sending comments about the interest rate announcement on behalf of their client. We wouldn’t have a chance of standing out if we followed suit, there’s too much competition, and besides, Buffett is a contrarian, he doesn’t follow the crowd.

So that left us with our ‘sweet spot’ as any unplanned reactive opportunities that would also be of high media interest. This is where I felt if we acted, we’d have the highest chance of success.

That was the plan and I stuck to it, weeks went by, and I did nothing (besides monitoring the news). I didn’t compromise, not even when Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced The Budget earlier this month, (a planned, high media interest opportunity).

Gary was probably thinking I’d completely forgotten about him, until last week this happened.

Finally we had a relevant, unplanned, high media interest story. It was go time!

I immediately sprung into action and asked Gary to provide me with a comment, and within a matter of minutes he’d turned around a cracking comment that summed up why Ted Baker had found itself in this situation.

It even found its way onto Wikipedia

My patience had paid off, and we’d hit a home run.

It sounds counterintuitive, but by acting less, (doing fewer campaigns and sending fewer emails) our efforts were more impactful. More than 10% of all journalists contacted covered Gary’s comment, and this all happened within an afternoon.

All because I was willing to sit on the sidelines, wait for the right opportunity, and then act fast (and so did Gary).

The Warren Buffett inspired approach may not be suitable or replicable for all types of clients or industries.

But if you find yourself engaging in constant activity, churning out multiple campaigns, or blasting out emails to far too many journalists in the hope of achieving coverage. Then my tip for this week is to pause for a moment, have a think, and try to be strategic, instead of “swinging at everything”.

Sometimes the pressure of KPIs can make us behave this way. So take that pressure off, if you have monthly KPIs get rid of them. Make them over a quarter, half a year, or even over a full year.

This will give you some breathing space, and the months where you have big hitters will compensate for the months when you don’t.

You may also find you don’t need to create so many campaigns, or contact so many journalists to achieve the same, or even better results in the long run.

This article is an excerpt from week 11 of The Digital PR Newsletter, each week I share a tip that either makes your job easier, or increases your chances of landing coverage.

You can sign up at DigitalPRNewsletter.com