The McDonnell Group

Part 2 continues through the 10 Tips for Smart Grid Media Relations starting with Number 6.  Click here to read Part 1 and steps Number 1 through 5.

6. Consider the general public a key audience even if they are not your sales prospects.
When you are selling a transformative technology -- as the Wright Brothers were and as smart grid entrepreneurs are-- your target audience is much more than those who will actually sign contracts for your product.  While advertising and marketing dollars may best be allocated directly toward prospective customers, media relations play an important role in building acceptance, demand, and enthusiasm for the benefits of the transformed society your product promises.  Neglecting to communicate with smart grid end users has already provided early evidence of the need for individual vendors as well as the electric industry at large, to engage the hearts and minds of John Q. Public.

ATLANTA - Jun 4, 2010 - The Wright Brothers lived in an era of innovation as breakneck as our own.  As they built their company and arguably reinvented aeronautical engineering, making powered flight a reality, they were much in the press.

For smart grid entrepreneurs and utilities, much more needs to be done to articulate complex technology to business, consumer, and utility audiences, and to build a positive environment for the success and growth of smart grid.

There are moments when any entrepreneur can understand the appeal of a rough water crossing over facing “prying correspondents,” but the nearly 6,000 news clippings the Wright brothers generated from 1902-1914, reveal a media savvy that played a vital but little known role in their early success.

By Don McDonnell

ATLANTA - Apr 22, 2010 - First, let’s talk big picture:  The smart grid is about multi-decade utility industry transformation.  It’s a process that will ultimately encompass everything from "source to socket,” and all that happens from generation to consumer.  How will it affect the environment?

In 2006 I framed my policy perspective on this and it’s unchanged today: We need a smart grid to complement traditional investments in generation while addressing supply, demand, efficiency, and environmental impact as mutually critical components of utility industry and national energy strategy.

To assert its full potential – and prevent smart grid from becoming a utility “bridge to nowhere,” we in the utility industry need to lay hold of the inherent “gap bridging” power of the smart grid itself.

You want it when?

ATLANTA - Mar 18, 2010 - Anyone who read the early 20th Century writer Hugh Lofting’s adventures of Dr. Doolittle remembers the pushmi-pullyu, a four-legged cross between a gazelle and unicorn (more famously depicted as a two headed llama in the Rex Harrison movie) with a head on both ends.  Its mobility was often compromised by either end pushing or pulling in opposite directions.

That image came to mind after reading a Microsoft press release with results of its survey of utilities for their progress rolling out smart grid technologies.  The gist of the story is that few utilities are far along at all and that current technologies don’t adequately support the types of interactivity envisioned for the smart grid.