Oh, Canada...

A PR pitch that worked for an unexpected reason.

I’m Bill Murphy Jr. Welcome to Understandably, my new regularly published email about “the story behind other stories.” I hope you will consider subscribing!

Quick post today about a PR pitch that worked—as in, it worked on me.

The story ran early last year. It was about a Canadian accounting software company with a nice little publicity stunt.

A Canadian Company Ranked All 50 U.S. States by How Polite They Are. Here's the List.

The company went through thousands of invoices from their U.S. small business clients, then organized them by state and counted the number of times that they used words like “please” and “thank you.”

Then they ranked the states. As I wrote at the time:

No, this is not exactly a double-blind study in a peer-reviewed journal; admittedly, it's more of a publicity stunt. But it piqued my interest.

‘Just because we Canadians are polite…’

Now, in truth, it’s extremely rare that a cold pitch from a public relations firm leads directly to me writing an article. But it worked …