The beauty of the end of the old year and the beginning of a new one is that it gives a perfectly good and timely excuse to do something for ourselves and our profession that we should have been doing on a continual basis all along…re-evaluation and reinvention.
I realize it’s blasphemous to be a PR pro and agency owner and acknowledge the obvious...that not every client needs outside PR counsel. But if a client has the time or staff, a certain set of PR skills, the resources, and very importantly, a realistic set of goals, then yes, they can do their own PR.
Hashtags are now an interictal part of any social media [...]
Over the last several years we’ve noticed a trend in client objectives away from building a brand to driving sales, increasing contributions, or gaining clicks – instant gratification versus a longer term basis of positive growth. Around our shop, we refer to it as ‘making the phone ring.”
You have been there before; the media is covering a topic that is relevant to your business, but you still cannot find a way to get yourself into the conversation. It seems the media is not interested in what you have to say, or maybe you don’t know what to say. In the end, it goes by as a lost opportunity.
David Letterman used to do a comedy piece having the audience determine whether photos of various entertainers and celebrities were wearing their real hair or a toupee’. The audience would shout out, their opinion…” real” or “fake” at each photo. Sound familiar?
There are a few of us – dwindling to but a precious few every year – that remember the golden age of magazine journalism…Life, Look, Collier’s, Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated…and later as our tastes grew younger…People, INC, Fast Company, InStyle, Healthy Living, etc. A recent story in the New York Times regarding Time, Inc. brought back both these memories and how fragile they may well be.
As PR pros it may be a little easier for us to get caught up in all the commerciality of Christmas. Even Charlie Brown, a well-meaning people-pleaser got carried away. It is bad enough that the general populace is left with a bad taste in their mouth when they see the retailers as taking advantage of the one time in the year when people are encouraged to be selfless and give.
While pitching the client’s story, PR people work in a similar fashion except that instead of going door to door, they send emails or make calls (mainly send emails). Accordingly, every good PR person knows that pitching to a journalist who is well known to have a “no soliciting” sign is a waste of time and the best that could happen from that situation is if the journalist ignored it instead of subjecting it to public shame. At INK, our bread and butter is ensuring that the clients get the placements they are looking for and as such our whole existence revolves around sending the perfect pitch.
I realize it’s blasphemous to be a PR pro and agency owner and acknowledge the obvious...that not every client needs outside PR counsel. But if a client has the time or staff, a certain set of PR skills, the resources, and very importantly, a realistic set of goals, then yes, they can do their own PR.
