CREATING A PR BIOGRAPHY AND WORD OF MOUTH

Reference:
HCO PL 31 Dec 2000
PR Series 46
WORD OF MOUTH
One of the tricks of the trade is you have to have little stories. Your biography becomes little stories. People remember actions of why and what, and what it is you have to have some fanciful these stories so they can quote them.
You have stories to be inventive to the degree that you have to make the actors put the scene. These are picking up the glass on the stage, dialogue while the facts if it's down the tray and "bits of business." Is a "bit of business." In PR, you always surround biographies with a bit of business.
This is an example of a "biography." "He went to Ogbogh High School and graduated in 1926. He studied music for several years and then first began to play when he was 22." What you are trying to develop is word of mouth unless nobody is going to spread that as word of mouth at all. A biography has no use if it generates word of mouth.
You select those bits and put them together and put emphasis on them, which people can throw off to somebody else and which will give word of mouth. A PR biography has very little to do with a chronological biography.
The statements have to be true and have to check out. But you can emphasize them or you can put hyperbole. "Lloyd-The World's Tallest Trombone Player." "Kenny-The World's Shortest and Youngest Flutist." Those are the superlatives of press agentry. And we get Kenny a Fife and of course it would be "the original Fife used at the Battle of Waterloo" or something.
Those are the bits of business which you add into the scene.
You are always working for word of mouth and that is something normally omitted in PR actions. You get all of your papers in, you get all your radio spots in, you give your shows and interviews, and what you are really working for is word of mouth. When somebody reads the papers or hears the radio—you want them to say something to somebody and *as your name*.
Word of mouth, far and above any other type of advertising, is what you are after.