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I’ve been saving this for a while, thinking about it. Again, a great interview in Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It’s an interview with Lois Kelly, author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing.

This is Kelly’s explanation of the top nine types of stories that people like to talk about. “If you’re pitching your company to investors, customers, partners, journalists, vendors, or employees and you don’t use at least one of these story lines, you probably have a problem.”

Here’s the full entry: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/07/what-people-tal.html

Here are my thoughts:

From a P.R. perspective, I find that of the nine best story lines for marketing, the media loves these three the most:

1. Contrarian stories - “Contrarian perspectives defy conventional wisdom; they are positions that often are not in line with—or may even be directly opposite to—the wisdom of the crowd. The boldness of contrarian views grabs attention; the more original and less arrogant they are, the more useful they will be in provoking meaningful conversations.”

2. Personalities and personal stories - When the media writes a profile on a company, they want to be able to include interesting personal stories about the founder, key executive, customers, etc. Why? Because people are interested in people. While they want to read about a cool new product or company, they are even more interested in the personal stories related to the company.

3. Glitz and glam - Our society is obsessed with celebrities. And they like to read, listen and watch information related to celebrities. An almost surefire way to get media coverage is to be linked to an A-list celebrity (lesser known celebrities are ok, too, just not as surefire).

So, if you want to get P.R., see if you can tie into one of these three stories. Check out the other six to see if you can tie into them too.