Shooting for the Moon with the Internet of Things - Nick Freer

Nick Freer admits his PR pointers for what makes a good story were well and truly eclipsed this week

There was a story in the news this week about the Moon being 40 million years older than previously thought. Wow, I thought, until I read a bit further into the article to find out that the Earth’s only natural satellite is over four billion years old anyway… so, y’know, what’s another few million years right? Whatever, it’s a great story all the same.

I try not to make a habit of it, due to a relatively shy and retiring disposition, but I was persuaded to do a live-streamed Q&A session recently on the subject of PR, specifically what makes a good story for the press. Terrible segue? Tick.

The session took place at the Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC for short) at Skypark in Glasgow, Scotland’s first Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator, which launched (first of a few shameless celestial references) almost exactly two years ago. Run by IoT veteran Paul Wilson, it’s been a pleasure to work with the team on all things PR during that span of time.

​The moonshot concept – as defined by Sir Tom Hunter – equates entrepreneurial leaps to sending spacecraft to the Moon (Picture: NASA/Newsmakers)

IoT is an exciting sector, as an agency we’ve worked with IoT startups like pureLiFi for the best part of a decade. STAC’s CEO Wilson, backed by a slew of organisations ranging from Scottish Enterprise to Intel Corporation, plans to build globally competitive IoT companies from a base in Scotland, shooting for the stars and putting Scotland’s IoT cluster on the international map.

Back to the PR Q&A, thankfully it ended up being a relatively painless exercise, and hopefully I passed on a few useful pointers for the audience. For me, I’ve always thought PR is a reasonably straightforward thing, although people, usually PR people, can make it out to be more complex than it really is, and I mean c’mon it’s hardly rocket science.

For an audience made up of tech startup founders, we covered the basics of what goes into a press release, how to pitch your story to editors, the importance of describing what the company does in layman’s language and not getting too technical or jargonistic, again nothing too earth shattering.

Talking of shattering earths, back to the Moon story… what I hadn’t realised was that, according to the prevailing theory known as the giant-impact hypothesis, the Moon was formed from the ejecta of a collision between a Mars-sized object and a young Earth four and a half billion years ago. The ensuing, blasted-out material bounded by its own gravity created the Moon we see today. Hey, this Moon story just gets better and better. In fact, it eclipses anything I had to say about what makes a good press story.

Nick Freer is the founding director of corporate communications agency the Freer Consultancy (Picture: Stewart Atwood)

Next week, I will be attending the inaugural Scaling Up Scotland conference at Gleneagles run by The Hunter Foundation in partnership with the Scottish National Investment Bank, following an existing collaboration between the bank and Sir Tom Hunter’s ScaleUpScotland 2.0 programme.

Expect a write-up here in the near future, and I hope to grab a word with Sir Tom himself along these lines. I’ve heard the storied entrepreneur and philanthropist speak about the moonshot concept on a few occasions, using that term to equate entrepreneurial leaps to the act of sending spacecraft to the moon. So, watch this space.

Nick Freer is the founding director of corporate communications agency the Freer Consultancy