On Feb. 10, 2010 Google announced a nationwide contest to build one or more test locations for ultra-high speed Internet, which would run between 100 and 1,000 times faster than what it currently available. By several measurements, the Google Twin Ports initiative was the most successful at getting grassroots support and national attention based on this share of voice report. This is a series of posts on how we did it.

Google wanted communities to show them two things. 1. The engineering of the city, and logical pros and cons of Google trying to build this test bed in their community. 2. Whether the community as a whole liked the idea, by voicing grassroots support. This is the story of how PureDriven and a cadre of dedicated volunteers together vaulted our effort spanning the Duluth, Minnesota and Superior Wisconsin communities – an area commonly called the TwinPorts – to national prominence (Step 2). Traditional stories about our effort ran nationwide; our mayor was interviewed on CNN; and video and photographs of him leaping into Lake Superior for Google showed up on the front page of the New York Times, CBS and CNBC, and hundreds of other traditional and online news outlets. Overall, the Google Twin Ports effort ultimately was discussed or mentioned more than 1,500 times online according to data collected by PureDriven.

We tell this story to explain what worked for us, so businesses and grassroots organizations can build similar successful efforts, and avoid our missteps. What is written here is also only the opinion of me, Patrick Garmoe (although it was reached after talking with other volunteers informally). As a full-time staff member of PureDriven, and a 10-year veteran of print journalism, I led the public relations effort, and therefore had first-hand knowledge of the tactics used here. Each of the blogs posts in this series will begin with a short story, followed by tips you can apply to your efforts to gain both traditional and online exposure for your company, cause or initiative.

We will be posting the full collection prominently on the blog indefinitely.

Lesson 1: To really get on the national radar, you need both real news, and an image that encapsulates what you’re selling. Ours was cheap camera footage of our mayor, Duluth Mayor Don Ness, leaping out of the freezing waters of Lake Superior. (By the way, the mayor was going to leap into Lake Superior as part of fundraiser for Special Olympics anyhow, so it wasn’t any more work to do it in the name of the Google project as well.

I knew early on we needed something that without words, would really show how much we wanted Google to come, something the public and media would respond to, and catch fire online and on the web, because it was so funny, or interesting, or crazy.

The day before the Polar Plunge, I heard about the leap. I called around that Saturday morning to videographers I knew. No one was available. So I grabbed my $100 Flip video camera that I use for video blogging purposes, and shot this video.

I took a couple hours to edit it that weekend with iMovie on my iMac, (it was the first time I used that particular software by the way) and slapped it online our PureDriven’s  YouTube account. The image didn’t pick up steam immediately, nor did I expect it to. I knew that if this effort became a national story, traditional media organizations would need visuals. Ultimately that’s exactly what happened. CBS news ran a story, along with CNBC, and likely dozens of other news networks across the region, and even internationally. That’s why I assume the New York Times eventually asked for a picture, which we were happy to provide (the one that ultimately ran in paper was from our local newspaper, the Duluth News Tribune. I’ve included a link to the picture below.

Duluth Mayor Don Ness Leaps into Lake Superior

I believe CNN saw the New York Times story, and therefore opted to call our mayor to be on its morning show the next day. Whether it’s local or national media, television takes its story list from newspapers and websites. During the same segment, CNN also interviewed the mayor of Sarasota, Fla., who also happened to have pulled a public relations stunt that got them coverage in the same New York Times story. There are thousands of cities competing for Google. Why did Duluth get so much attention? Because we did the best job coming up with a visual for news organizations to show.

As of this writing, we’ve had nearly 40,000 views of the video on YouTube. That isn’t bad for an unrehearsed piece of footage that took only five minutes to shoot. Not even the part on the end where our mayor challenges other mayors to jump in Lake Superior was rehearsed.

So Remember: As long as the picture isn’t fuzzy and the audio is decent, quality often doesn’t matter. The video looks jumpy, because I was racing around without my tripod. Don’t over think video. Just start filming. And it’s best to get a newspaper or website to tell your story. Because often the television stations look at what the newspapers do, and copy it, especially if there’s footage they can show.