PR Multiplying or Dividing?

There was an interesting story we tweeted about a few days ago originally written by our friends at PR Newswire that suggested there is some disagreement about the skill set PR pros need to succeed in today’s environment, and there are three points of view emerging:

• The traditionalist, who values the ability to write, build relationships, isolate and convey key messages and build publicity strategy above all else.
• The digital enthusiast, who values social media acuity, digital content production and editing and coding skills highly.
• The quant, which focuses on data, analytics and how PR integrates with business processes.

At NettResults we like to think of it as multiplying and dividing.

If you have a list of 1,000 subscribers or 5,000 fans or 10,000 supporters in a social media world, you have a choice to make. You can create stories and options and benefits that naturally spread from this group to their friends, and your core group can multiply, with 5,000 growing to 10,000 and then 100,000.

Or you can put the group through a sales funnel, weed out the free riders and monetize the rest. A 5% conversion rate means you just turned 5,000 interested people into 250 paying customers.

Multiplying scales. Dividing helps you make this quarter's numbers.

So it is with PR.  You want to ever increase your sphere of influence, or put another way, you want to increase the number of journalist you can call up.  At the same time you want to concentrate your time on the 5% (or is it another 80/20 rule?) that don’t just passively receive your news stories, but actively read into them, converse with you and find the story they can report on.

This is why an intellectual rivalry between traditional PR pros and digital enthusiast PR pros is a loose/loose battle.  To be good at PR in today’s rapidly evolving media market, you need to be both a traditionalist and a digital enthusiast.  Gone are the days when having one Millennial digital evangelist in your PR agency’s office was enough – today each of your teams need to be made up digi-traditionalists.

Oh, and they better be able to measure that success. Results are king.

6 Surefire Signs of Good Public Relations

There is good public relations and there’s bad. 

Let’s face it, some organizations, people and agencies are good at it, and some are not. 

But when you are in the thick of it, when you’re spending the money, how do you know?

Oh, that’s quite simple, you wait five months and then look at the coverage you achieved.  Wait a minute, did someone in the back utter that they move quicker than that and they don’t want to wait five months?  What, you actually want to know now if you are spending time and money wisely?  OK, well in that case, there are six sure fire signs of good public relations.

1 – First up, you better have a strategy.  A clear, concise strategy.  Can you (or the person/agency in charge) define in half a page:
- the target market that needs to be reached
- the media used to reach it
- the message that needs to be communicated
- the desired action of the target market
- the media tools that will be used to achieve that
- and when they will be used?

If you can’t then you’re running your PR strategy in an ad-hoc manner, which is not going to give you the results you need.  The number one tell-tail signs is inconsistency… in regards to when coverage is achieved, who it reaches or the messages it conveys.

2 – How are your relationships? It doesn’t matter how great your strategy is if your PR team doesn’t have the best media relationships to get it delivered.  This is where larger teams have the advantage. I’ve yet to meet one person who gets on with everyone.  So it stands to reason that if you have a one-person team or freelancer on your PR they can’t have relationships with all the core media.  It takes a diverse team of people at various seniority and experience level to be able to hold all the core relationships.

This is doubly important if your target includes multiple social-economic targets or possibly more than one language.  Look at the make up of the journalists and editors you are trying to reach and make sure your team are similar.

3 – Responsiveness and consistency rules.  PR is not a tap you can just turn on or off as you feel.  It’s more like a snowball pushed down a hill - once started it will keep on rolling and growing if you treat it right (and if you don’t treat it right it’s like putting a tree in front of the snowball). To keep that snowball rolling and growing you need to be ever responsive to the media (never leave a man hanging) and you need to ensure you fuel the media machine with consistent, newsworthy and relevant information. 

Tell-tail signs - if your PR team can’t respond to you within a coupe of hours, then they are not responding to the media quickly either.  And if you don’t have a constant funnel of news and ideas being worked on, then it’s akin to your snowball rolling over concrete.

4 – Reporting and feedback. At NettResults we make it simple for all our team members: for a successful client/agency relationship there are two things that drive success – media results need to be obtained and there needs to be constant reporting with the client.  A campaign that has great results, but there is little client/agency interaction or lack of reporting, will fail. 

Media relations is a constant feedback loop.  Multiple minds need to plan it out and everyone needs to be watching what is working and what is successful. This is the only way that momentum can be gained and we can drive a higher return on investment.

5 – Business acumen.  Look at it this way - there’s this funnel.  At the bottom of the funnel is PR, above that is marketing and above that is ‘the business’.  While I’ve had bosses that have said to me they can write a press release about anything, irrespective of whether they understand the subject, you can’t play in the PR space successfully unless you understand business.

Much as we would like to think that media and PR teams are the bees-knees – there is always a higher being that is driving the business. The PR team needs to be aware of this and have a true understanding and respect for when PR plans need to be modified due to a business requirement.  Tell-tail signs – have a conversation with your PR team about your business, not the latest PR news, but about the actual business.  Do they talk sense?

6 – Is there a level of trust?  What this all comes down to is trust.  A client needs to be able to trust that their team/agency is proactively working on their behalf.  There has to be bilateral trust between the PR team/agency and the media. 

More than most industries I have witnessed, trust is central to PR success.  Like all professional service business, we’re talking about a professional’s time.  How it’s being used and how efficient it is.  We’re talking about abstract terms.  We’re talking about things that people get emotional about.  Wrap that all up and the lubricant that keeps the cogs turning is trust.

These six simple concepts will give you good insight into how successful your results will look in five months.

Power is nothing without Control

...according to the tire manufacturer Pirelli. And so it is with public relations. Gone are the days when an organization can fully control their corporate message to the media.

In days gone by, it was normal for an organization’s employee handbook to strictly dictate that no employee could speak to the media without prior approval and spokesperson media training. No problem.

Then a few years ago social media popped up. According to a recent piece of research by Altimeter, companies average an overwhelming number of corporate owned accounts – about 178. That is a bunch of people from different departments and around the globe that are speaking on social media platforms, that the media are seeing. And that’s before we count the personal SM accounts of employees who happen to mention their job. So what’s to be done?

NettResults recommends three levels of corporate communication development:

1 - Relinquish a mindset of control - instead ‘enable’. In business school we were taught to foster message control and encourage all corporate representatives to stay on message. Yet today, as multiple business units from support, sales, HR and beyond participate in social technologies, communication is spread to the edges of the company – not just from the PR department. As a result, PR groups have changed their mindset to safely enabling business units to communicate, based on pre-set parameters they put in place through governance, coordination, and workflow.

2 - Roll out enterprise workflows - education programs at four levels. We’ve found that savvy corporations have detailed workflows, including sample language in which employees should respond. Beyond creating these workflows, they must be distributed throughout the enterprise through education programs, and drilled. We’ve found savvy corporations have up to four types of education programs spanning: Executive team, social media team, business stakeholder teams, and finally all associates. Even if the mandate is for rank and file employees to not respond in social on behalf of the company, reinforcing education is still required.

3 - Run mock crises. Lastly, we’ve found a closer relationship with media relations, social media and crisis communications. Savvy corporations are working with agency partners such as NettResults to setup mock crisis drills where they approach a week-long crises in a number of hours in private. Not only does this test the mettle of the organization it provides useful training so companies can respond faster, in a more coordinated approach. We have already witnessed health organizations receiving ‘social-crises-ready’ compliance notices and we expect compliance programs to spread into other industries.

Get ready – take control.

Who are the key decision makers and are the spokes people media trained?

Every company has a organizational chart - a ladder of power, but how this structure functions during a crisis must be clarified with all the stakeholders in the company; particularly the communications department. A crisis can hit at any time, and the company needs to determine secondary command structures in case key decision-makers are unavailable at the time.

Not only is it important for those to know who need to spring to action (and how those people are contacted) - it is equally important that everyone else in the organization knows they can not speak on behalf of the company or to the press. Something that is best handled in a company employee handbook.

Organizations also need to decide which situations warrant which spokes person, and plan accordingly.

Most importantly, the spokes people need to be media trained in advance. Effective spokes people should receive professional media training and should be well versed on how to deal with the press. An organization's spokes person need not necessarily be the most senior staffers. For example, in some cases, the CEO is not the most efficient spokes person due to experience, knowledge or geographical location.

PR and the power of a story...

I just read with interest the article that Meg O'Leary wrote on PRNews Once Upon a Time There Lived a Plot: The Importance of Storytelling. I've long been an advocate of storytelling in marketing and public relations. It just makes so much sense.

It's worth understanding why storytelling works. It's in-build into our DNA. We grow up listening to stories and frankly they are a darn sight more interesting than 90% of PR copy-writing out there.

A good story is one that touches people in some way. As PR professionals (storytellers), our mission is to involve the audience, make them interact with us and the story, even if it is just in their thoughts or core. A really good story has a sense of truth and resonates with some basic universal aspects of being human.

But it does more than that. We have stories because they:
- Build credibility
- Unleash Emotion
- Permission to Explore
- Influence Group-Thinking
- Create Heroes
- Vocabulary of Change
- Order out of Chaos

There is a simple way to look at good stories. Back in my youth I was involved in a movie production company and was asked to read my fair share of movie scripts. It very quickly became apparent that stories fell into one of two camps - 'usual people in unusual situations', or 'unusual people in usual situations'. Think about it. Think about your favorite book. Think about the last movie you went to see.

I believe there are six tips to think about when creating a story for PR purposes:
- Know your audience
- Keep it simple
- Stay fresh
- Be honest
- Demonstrate credibility
- Spark interest

There are also eight elements that in essence make a good story, the:
- protagonist
- antagonist
- inciting incident
- call to action
- dreadful alternative
- conflict
- quest or progression
- other characters
- transformation
- moral

You also could look at it another way - the 'wow' factor. Forbes had a great article about this written by Brett Nelson in July.

Lastly, thanks to Professor Brian Sturm from UNC Chapel Hill whom in 2007 had the foresight to record one of his lectures. There is a lot of value in the 45 minutes, and the first 8 minutes are fabulous.

Why not write a story today?