Be Aggressive

SolarCity was not a cautious company. When it expanded to the East Coast, it came in fast, with an aggressive approach to growth, to market entry, and to communications. Boykin Communications ran East Coast communications as part of a small, tight team — managing media relations, market launches, and press strategy across the region, including relationships with national outlets based in New York and Washington: the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others.

The Approach: Make Everything a Moment

SolarCity's communications posture matched its corporate culture. The company made news — and not just local market launches. New products. Acquisitions. Financing rounds. Company milestones. Policy positions. Everything was treated as a story worth telling, and it was pitched accordingly.

CEO Lyndon Rive was willing to speak with everyone. Trade publications and local outlets, bloggers and broadcast producers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. No outlet was too small and no reporter was turned away. That posture — genuinely open and accessible at the top — made the communications effort work in a way that a less available executive never could have.

That cadence generated press across every level. Local outlets covered market launches and job announcements. Business reporters covered the growth story and the financing. Energy reporters covered the technology and the policy angle. Consumer outlets covered what it actually meant for homeowners: a new roof, lower energy bills, no upfront cost. The rooftop lease model was new. The idea that going solar could save you money from day one was new. There was a real story to tell, and SolarCity told it constantly, to anyone who would listen.

The coverage accumulated into a flywheel. Press drove more press. But more importantly, it drove something else entirely.

This was the start of the national residential solar industry. Coverage introduced the concept of rooftop solar to consumers who had never considered it. It gave credibility to a product category that was still unfamiliar to most homeowners. It drove sales directly — people called because they had read something. It drove recruiting — engineers, installers, and sales staff wanted to work for a company they kept seeing in the news. Communications was not a support function. It was a growth engine.

The lesson: in a new and fast-growing category, you do not wait for the perfect story. You generate a steady stream of real ones and treat each as worth telling — to every outlet, at every level, without exception.

Don't Get Bored With Your Message

Through all of it, the core messages did not change. SolarCity was making solar accessible to homeowners. It was creating local jobs. It was delivering community benefits — cleaner energy, lower costs, work for local contractors and installers. Those three things anchored every announcement, every pitch, every launch event, regardless of the market or the format.

That consistency was not an accident. In a noisy market with a lot of competing narratives, staying on message is a discipline. The temptation is always to chase the newest angle, respond to every development, find a fresh hook. The better move is to find the core story and repeat it, in every format, in every market, until it lands.

The discipline paid off. SolarCity became the clear market leader.

Why This Matters More Now

This engagement ended nearly a decade ago. The lesson has only gotten more relevant.

The media landscape is significantly noisier than it was in 2011. There are more channels, more voices, more content competing for the same attention. Visibility is harder to earn and easier to lose. The companies that cut through are the ones willing to be aggressive about it — consistent, persistent, and loud about the things that matter most.

There is also the AI dimension that did not exist when this work was happening. Every press placement, every local news story, every industry mention builds a public record that search engines and AI tools now draw on. When someone uses ChatGPT or Perplexity to research who the serious players in a category are, the answer is built from that accumulated record. The aggressive, consistent press program SolarCity ran did not just drive growth in real time. It built the kind of distributed, multi-source public record that now determines discoverability.

The companies that are aggressive about communications today are building two things at once: market presence now, and discoverability infrastructure for the long term.

The Lessons

Be aggressive. Treat every announcement as worth making. Set the threshold for news low and the cadence high. In a noisy market, the companies that go quiet disappear.

Don't get bored with your message. Find the two or three things that are true and important about your company — the product, what it does for people, what it means for the community — and repeat them, consistently, across every format and every market.

Build relationships. With reporters, with editors, with elected officials and community leaders. Those relationships are what make the aggressive approach work. The press releases go to inboxes. The calls get answered.

The world is noisier than it was. The approach has to match.

Boykin Communications has spent 15 years building communications programs for clean energy, sustainability, and climate tech companies. Get in touch.