I was speaking to a group of Entrepreneurs at the University of St. Thomas in downtown Minneapolis this month about how a story can make a generic product seem remarkable. During the discussion someone asked a question about PR. I talked about how clients and prospective clients often ask us to generate public relations when they don’t have much of a story to tell.

Someone else in the group, an African-American woman business owner who makes cosmetics, remarked that in the past she has the media called her regularly, without any help from a media relations expert or PR firm. She was on TV several times, mentioned in several publications and often interviewed on the radio. But now she never gets called. Nobody seems interested anymore.

As she spoke it came out that the story the media was attracted to centered on how this young woman was using her grandmother’s old recipes to create new cosmetic products. But at some point she stopped talking about her grandmother. She didn’t want her grandmother to get all the attention. She wanted to be the center of attention. She threw away her story.

If you’re lucky enough to have an authentic story than you have to keep it fresh without throwing it away. Sometimes we get tired of hearing our story over and over. But you have to think about the audience and how often they’ve heard your story. If it’s working, keep telling it. If it’s not, maybe you threw your story away. Or perhaps you just haven’t found it yet.

-Jeff