52 Tips for Strong PR – A 2014 Users Guide Tip #1: Be the Calm

PR is an ever-changing, swirling, mess of a profession. It can be the calm before the storm or the tempest that sweeps everything out from under you. You’ve got to keep up with a thousand different details that might change at any given moment. And part of your job is to be the calm in that storm.

When the reporter is screaming about a deadline or the client is going ballistic over a story he’s not in, your job is to stay calm and rise above. When the conference room isn’t packed before your client’s session starts or the reporter includes that juicy bit someone said but shouldn’t have, you need to remain calm. Storms swirl, all boats rise, calm. 

You want to be a resource when needed, a conspirator when required and a voice of reason when everyone else in the room has drunk the Kool-Aid. But you can’t be anything of these things if you don’t remain, you guessed it, calm…and rational.

There is a time and place for big ideas, for amazing campaigns and PR stunts that wow the world (crop circles anyone?), but there is more often a time for being the PR person that folks can count on. Reporters count on you to pitch an interesting story, to understand the details enough to help them get back the first blush of interest, and to ensure they have the access they need to write something unique and interesting and a story that other people want to read and share.

Your clients want to know that you have things handled when they go off the rails, or just seem to. They want to know that you can fix things, even when you can’t, or that at least you’ll make sure they don’t happen again. Because things will go wrong, events won’t turn out as expected, coverage won’t always be favorable. I remember an event we were part of a few years ago that had an unfortunate choice in venue and some of the attending press didn’t like it. I talked to a couple of the irked media and helped smooth things over, but the PR folks from another vendor went for Option B: they were “outraged” and “embarrassed” and unabashedly “apologetic” and built what could have been a molehill of a problem into a mountain. They even hosted, at their headquarters thousands of miles from the event, a six hour crisis situation meeting for something that was solved with a change of venue and a few soft spoken words at the airport bar.

Basically, in our world, everyone has the right to ride the madness but us, because going off the deep end doesn’t buy us anything. Doesn’t give us more credibility with reporters or gain us more respect from clients or executives. It doesn’t win you points with conference and award organizers, or gain you followers on Twitter.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying we can’t get mad or be direct, firm or contrary. It just means we should do it calmly, in a rational manner. This is especially true when a real crisis hits your company or client. One thing that will help it to have contingency plans in place long before a crisis hits but as important as that pre-planning is, you'll go a long way in helping your company resolve, overcome or weather a crisis if you're the calm voice in the storm.

 

 

2012 – Pause and Take a Breath

In a 365 day, 24/7 news cycle, it’s hard to take a breath these days. Add to this frenzy the fast news cycles of online media and the opinion-driven style of today’s blogs and twitter feeds, it’s sometimes difficult to understand when enough is enough. PR teams feel the pressure to be a part of every story, on every news outlet and have teams ready to respond to any negative tweet or post. While I am not suggesting that you don’t have to be vigilant to protect your company’s
brand and value, I am suggesting that we are sometimes victims of our own need
to be relevant.

This is why I’m recommending that when things happen, or fail to happen, it’s always best to pause, take a breath and evaluate what, if any, response or action is needed. There
are absolutely times when a response is warranted but many times, the crisis identified
is not a true crisis. It might be inconvenient, unfortunate or even embarrassing for a company or individual but it does not warrant the revving up of the corporate spin cycle. It is best to plan for the best and worst case scenarios, but a good PR company will have a standard plan in place that just needs to be followed with the pertinent details that are available.

There was a recent story in NC about the sitting Governor deciding not to run again. She didn’t give any reasons, just told reporters that she wasn’t going to seek re-election. The media had a field day examining why she wasn’t going to run. When it seemed like the story was winding down, one of the news outlets decided to interview local PR people to get their reaction to her decision to not explain her reasons. Every single one of them said she was in the wrong and that she should have explained her reasons to the media, that the public had a right to know and they would have counseled her to be more forthcoming. When I read those stories, my thought was “of course that’s what they would say, it’s their job to create news cycles.” And that’s just what they did, created an unnecessary news cycle about something they weren’t personally involved in on a subject that they had no insight into. The PR people were creating the news cycle for
their own benefit, not because they were adding any new information to the story.

News cycles like this spin up every day. It’s inevitable when the “always on” news media and a culture that believes we have a right to know everything about everyone that we find mildly interesting. We don’t and it’s important for PR people, and the companies they represent, to understand and appreciate this fact.

While I’m not advocating that companies adopt a “no comment” policy when something negative occurs, I am suggesting that they pause and think before they react and engage. The good thing about the current news cycle is that if you blink, the media is off chasing the next story, about the next issue or trend or dastardly act by someone else.

Industry Leader of…None

I recently did a search on PRNewswire for certain key terms that I know drive reporters crazy. Companies love to use these terms and PR writers often fall back on them as a descriptor when nothing else is appropriate.  That’s where the problem lies – these words are used as filler when nothing else comes to mind to make a more contextual or interesting descriptor.  So, a company launching a new product becomes an “industry leader” and launching an interesting new product is instead launching a “breakthrough” “innovation” with “advanced” capabilities.

These words might sound good on paper but, in fact, these words have become so ubiquitous that they actually mean nothing.  In my recent research through PR Newswire, I searched for these words in press releases issued on a specific day. The date I choose doesn’t really matter but for records sake, it was October 31, 2011 at 10:54 am. Bear in mind that the search ran was just for releases issued that day before 10:54 AM EDT. These are the results:

• 1,253 “innovative”
• 903 “advanced”
• 202 “global leader”
• 123 “breakthrough” or “groundbreaking”

We all know that there weren’t 1,253 truly innovative products or services announced on October 31, 2011, by 10:54 AM EDT. There probably weren’t 1,253 truly innovative products announced in all of 2011. So what does that mean for PR writers? It means using the word “innovative” to describe your company’s (or client’s) products isn’t that innovative anymore.

Every industry is packed with vernacular and buzz words that mean something to someone. The problem is when these buzz words go mainstream, they lose the original context that help define the meaning. Writing for PR should be about context, not buzzwords. You need to craft a story that helps readers understand how the announcement fits into their industry, their needs and their lives.

Mark Twain once said, “Don’t say the old lady screamed-bring her on and let her scream.” Translate this into PR writing and you get: “Don’t say the product is innovative, bring it out and tell us how and why it’s innovative.”

This is harder said than done because, let’s face it, not everything that a company announces is as groundbreaking as the company likes to think. That doesn’t mean it’s not news, it just means that you have to work a little harder to make it newsworthy.

2010 – Get Your Head in the Game

2009 was tough. Your company got beat down, you got more “noes” than “yeses,” and the best bet might be just to hunker down and wait until all market indicators are point up, right?

Wrong.

Now I’m not saying it’s time to break the bank, but it is time to start planning what you do, and just as importantly, how you measure if you have been successful or not. To be successful you have to plan, and careful planning includes understanding your core assets, what the market wants to hear (and what they have already heard), and how each program element can contribute to achieve your goals. It all starts, though, with having goals, of knowing where you want your company to be, being realistic in what you can achieve in a given time frame and then making adjustments along the way as the market and your company evolves.

As stated, the first step in planning your marketing, communications and public relations programs is to understand what your marketing goal is for the year. Ask yourself, “How do I want public perception of my company to change by the end of the year?” or “In what ways do I want to change the way my company interacts with its target audiences?” When you have that answer, you can start to build, and measure, programs to help make that goal a reality. Before you jump into any program, list what you are currently doing and then consider why the industry isn’t already making this connection between your company’s contributions and the business issue you are solving.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll look at the different types of goals companies can set for themselves and then discuss some recommendations as to how you set and measure programs throughout the year. We’ll look at the following categories: thought leadership, market leadership, lead generation, competitive threat offsets and category creation.

Let’s say your objective for 2010 is that you want the industry to recognize the contributions your company has made to solve a critical business issue for your customers. I would put this into the “thought leadership” category and your next step would be to create a campaign to help you achieve this goal.

Step 1: Before doing anything, you’ll need to inventory what you can credibly say publically about your company’s products, how it solves a specific business issue and what your customer base is willing to let you showcase about how you are helping them solve it. Next, you’ll need to take a critical eye to what your product does compared to your closest competitors to make sure that you’re not leading with a feature or functionality that will be considered a “me too” in the marketplace. It’s always good to look to define a market need by your product’s strengths and your competitor’s weaknesses!

Step 2: Now look at who within the industry is writing about the business or technology issue you’re addressing with your company’s products. Are there two or three analysts that regularly report on this market or that are frequently quoted in the trade media about this topic? Are there editors that write about the topic either in their regular columns, features or as part of their blogs? Is there someone that leverages Twitter to talk about this topic and usually generates a lot of “retweets” about what they post? If the market doesn’t currently give your company credit for solving this issue, a good place to start is with the industry analysts that are covering your market.

Step 3: Evaluate what the people in Step 2 are writing about and develop an understanding of the stories they are trying to tell and what stories they have already told.

Step 4: This is the tricky part. You’re going to need to leverage information from all three steps above to create a compelling story that articulates how your company is helping its customers solve this business issue. Your story will have to be informative, relevant and new.

Step 5: You might think you are done once the article(s), report(s), etc. come out , but you still need to see how this story is changing the way people think about you. Once the campaign is launched, are you getting more inbound leads or getting requests for additional interviews? Is your sales team telling you they are spending less time in meetings explaining what you bring to market and instead focusing on selling? Essentially, having a story published, did you achieve the goal of changing the perception of your company? The metrics you create will be specific to what you are trying to accomplish and it’s always a plus to understand what these are before you begin.

My next blog will focus on lead generation goals and make some recommendations about ways to help create pull from the marketplace.