The Top 3 Reasons Lists Are Great PR Tools posted by Lindsay Mecca at Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Lists litter the Internet and newstands anywhere you go in the world. You can credit the magazine publishing genius Clay Felker and the rise of city and service magazines 30 years ago for giving us PR peeps this great tool. Why do we love lists? Let me list the ways.

1) Lists are inherently appealing.
They organize information in a way that highlights the importance of each individual idea but ties them together under one umbrella. Plus, they are easy to follow and concise, which is ideal for the short attention span of the average reader.

2) Lists are the perfect way to establish thought leadership.
You consider your client’s knowledge base, find a sexy issue that they can discuss as an expert and build a few points (five is a good number — long enough to be substantive but short enough to hold interest) that offer the reader a unique perspective. Top 5 Cell Phone No-Nos. Which Five Things Drive Linux Users Nuts? And so on.

3) One list can pique interest in a variety of topics.
If you’ve got an interesting list that encompasses different topics examined from different angles, you automatically have a pool of story options just waiting to be tapped. Let me tell you about how we developed one client list idea into a series of stories for Inc Magazine.

One of our clients, the folks over at Untangle, are experts in small business IT. Their business revolves around the understanding that tens of millions of small businesses face the same IT challenges as global enterprises but with a fraction of the budget, manpower and expertise Knowing which IT issues are most pressing — and how best to allocate limited resources to manage these issues — are complicated questions for a small business

In a brainstorming session with Untangle’s CTO, we came up with the “Top 5 SMB IT Myths” — a benchmark by which small businesses can judge how best to invest their limited resources to effectively deal with complex technology issues.

The payoff? We pitched this list to Inc. Magazine, and the reporter wanted to take each myth and explore it in more depth in an article. Not one, not two, but three stories have run so far, with the possibility for a few more.

Just goes to show you that a well-crafted list can result in a PR goldmine.