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detectiveYesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried the story, “A Kenmore Fridge, at Costco?

No, I’m not tracking the white goods sector with a keen eye.

It’s the sourcing of the story – Sears plans to sell its Kenmore brand of appliances through other retailers – that got my attention.

How does the Journal know this?

Check out the trigger:

According to a LinkedIn job posting, Sears is seeking a chief marketing officer for its appliance line whose responsibilities will include promoting appliance purchases through “external groups,” such as Costco Wholesale Corp., which recently struck a deal to carry the Craftsman line. According to the posting, which was confirmed by Sears, the executive would also “evaluate evolving marketing landscape to identify new, emerging ways to reach current and future target audiences.”

Nothing particularly clever about this.

Journalists have been raking the classified ads in search of the almighty story for years.

And we know journalists increasingly use LinkedIn as a sourcing tool since the folks at LinkedIn spoke at our office last year and revealed a training program focused on the media.

Here’s the point.

The communications function should be putting this same dynamic to use in building one-off stories.

The key lies in creating the right content captured in the following chart

storytelling

Needless to say, the opportunity for storytelling lies in the upper-right quadrant.

It’s all about the content NOT in the public domain.


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