Chamber prez points to campaign’s early successes

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As a member of the media, I’ve been extremely interested in the public relations campaign to get members of the national and international media to write positive stories about Charlotte.

The campaign, which was announced last year and launched this year, involves the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, Charlotte Center City Partners and the Charlotte Regional Partnership. Advantage Carolina, a nonprofit the chamber launched in 1999, is funding the effort to the tune of $200,000 a year for two years, although the second year of funding has not been approved yet.

With the banking industry’s woes hanging over Charlotte like a black cloud, the groups are hoping to convince publications like Forbes to spotlight other stuff happening around here, such as efforts to grow the area’s energy and life sciences sectors.

Like I said, the campaign fascinates me, because forcing the national media’s hand is never easy, especially if a news outlet feels it is being coerced by an effervescent PR person to write a “positive” story. It’s not that all journalists are opposed to showcasing success stories. But when PR people come on too strong, it makes them seem even more self-serving, which often makes the skeptic in journalists even more on guard.

So I was intrigued when Bob Morgan, president of the chamber, told me this week that the campaign has already been effective.

He pointed to the announcement, made in January, that Paris-based Capgemini will open a $4.2 million office in Charlotte, creating 550 new jobs over the next three years.

Charlotte-based Luquire George Andrews and New York-based Development Counsellors International, the two firms hired to handle the Charlotte PR campaign, pitched the Capgemini success story to about 12 publications in France, Morgan said. While not all 12 ran a story on it, some did, he said, adding that without the PR campaign it’s likely that the foreign media would have ignored the story altogether.

But the campaign has had some help it didn’t expect. Indeed, some of the campaign’s successes can likely be attributed to Charlotte being picked for the 2012 Democratic National Convention. 

For example, Morgan said the campaign had pitched to a magazine (he declined to give its name) a story idea about Charlotte being an energy capital. At first, the magazine did not find the story compelling, he said. Then came the Feb. 1 announcement that Charlotte won the DNC. Suddenly, the magazine was interested.

“The magazine is now pursuing the story,” he said, adding that last week the publication had sent a reporter to Charlotte.

Now that Charlotte has won the DNC, it will be another arrow in the PR campaign’s quiver, he said.

I asked Morgan how the success of the campaign would be determined. Will it be based on the number of stories written about Charlotte?

He said that a year from now, there will be an attempt to measure the economic development leads generated by the project. So the stories — or “earned media,” as Morgan refers to it — written about Charlotte are a means to an end: generating leads.

But there’s another way that the success of the project will be determined: Next year, will Advantage Charlotte inject another $200,000 into the campaign?

Editor Deon Roberts can be reached at [email protected].