Seth Godin blogged about it today. One option is to struggle to be heard whenever you're in the room... Another is to be the sort of person who is missed when you're not.
The first involves making noise. The second involves making a difference.
And so it is with succssful public relations. We take the unusual step of saying to our clients (either during a pitch or after it is successful won) that frankly we don't care how many press releases we are asked to distribute. All too many agencies seem to want to calculate their retainer or projects based on the number of press releases. This doesn't make sense to us. So long as each and every press release is newsworthy and relevant we don't mind working on one a day.
Off course I've yet to meet a client that had that many newsworth releases... in fact back in 1999 I was speaking to a journalist who was compaining to me that Microsoft sent them a press release every two days. They actually didn't care that the releases were every two days (they were allready clearing 100+ emails from their email of usless pitches), but they did care that 99% were irrelivent to the title they wrote on. Of course it wasn't Micorsoft's fault - just the agency at the time that wanted to spam all journalists.
Successful PR campaigns and to add to that - campaigns with longevity - require a spokesperson that makes a difference - or to put it another way, one that will be missed if they are not commenting.
How is your spokesperson doing?