From the Control Room Quality

in communicado

By Lyle Estill

More in the Spring 2009 issue

I recently read Jason Del Gandio's marvelous book, Rhetoric for Radicals, and I could not stop myself from running it through the filter of our project, which is Piedmont Biofuels.

At Piedmont Biofuels, we have been effective at communication. We have managed to get our message of sustainable biodiesel across. We have risen above the noise and landed body blows to the status quo.

I am not a communications expert.  But I still felt compelled to try my hand at an article on communication.  I am not an expert biodiesel maker either, but those who work with me know that I am unlikely to be bothered by mere facts. So here I go:

Good communication starts with timing.

Don't spread the word until you are ready.  In the early days of Piedmont Biofuels we hid from the press.  We were working at Summer Shop in my back yard, and I recall repeatedly reining in my co-founders from talking to media.  

One of the communication strategies that served us well was to wait until we were out of the back yard, and set up as a co-op.  It was a stronger story, and it got traction.

The media are like sheep.  When one news outlet breaks a story, every news outlet wants to break the story.  When one jumps over the fence, all the rest follow. That's why media organizations have news wires.  News wires take the original content (your story) and send it out to many others.

We released our story to the Sanford Herald, which is a small town newspaper that affords terrific coverage and space to local projects.  While it is true that the good people of Raleigh might not routinely read the Sanford Herald, you can bet the reporters and editors of the Raleigh paper do.  I used to work as a journalist.  So did my brother Mark. When Mark was a newspaper man, he read multiple newspapers each day.

The Herald's coverage caused us to be picked up by The News and Observer--a giant paper in Raleigh, and the Chatham News and Record.  TV reports followed.  The idea is that one audience is different from another.

We made it into the Rolodex, and we have been called on ever since.  Whenever the media notice the price of oil rising they send a camera crew to Piedmont.

In a media world that is starved for content, biodiesel just plays.  And grassroots biodiesel is a better story than corporate biodiesel.  I once tried to explain this to a media consultant for the National Biodiesel Board over lunch, but I accidentally offended her instead.  Drat.  I do that sometimes.

But it is true that "My Exhaust Smells Like Fries" plays way better than "Soybean Growers to Open Biodiesel Plant."

It is a topic that is worth thinking about.  We think about how we titrate.  We think about how we plumb.  

It's high time we started thinking about how we communicate.

Lyle Estill is VP of Stuff for Piedmont Biofuels Industrial in Pittsboro, NC, and author of the book "Biodiesel Power."