Public Relations

A PR’s Drug: Gossip

Garth Beyer

You’re a Public Relations Specialist, not a conniving magazine journalist trying to keep ahead of the Kardashians.

You may think this is common sense to leave out any gossip and untrustworthy information in your communication with the public. For most, it is.

While gossip sinks into the white papers and press releases of the low-minded, ill-fitting amateurs, a real PR professional eliminates any possibility of it entering their work and their life.

See, the real gossip problem is not “in” the work, but “around” it.

As a PR Specialist, you are working with a gargantuan amount of information, on clients and their businesses or organizations. Just as well, you are being constantly overloaded with conversations, emotions, behaviors and memos from them and the public. There’s a reason Public Relations is rated one of the top 10 most stressful jobs.

Like nearly any other drug, gossip is a quick reliever of the stress. It allows you to vent, to be subjective, to rant, to release all the stressful emotions you acquire. But at the same time, it defeats your credibility, your clients trust in you, and creates a conflict of interest, rendering business with you unnecessary.

In PR and life, it is your reputation that gossip damages, not anyone else’s.

Safeguarding Confidence

Safeguarding Confidence

Garth Beyer

My personal life is like searching something on Google, just without my overconfidence in suggesting what you will finish typing. Regardless of how personal your search or question is, I’ll give you an answer.

Going into PR, thankfully, I learned that I can keep my personal life as open as I want. However, areas of my professional life, of the PR realm, confidential information of clients has to remain seal tight. There are two reasons this was tough to do at first.

1. I believe in communication being the foundation of everything successful, whether it’s good or bad, nothing should stay unsaid.

2. You never know what someone else may be able to help you with or add to what you know if you can’t discuss it.

It did not become so easy to keep confidential matters confidential until I did an interview with Michelle Welsch in which she touches on the concept of protecting the names of everyone who attends her Project Exponential events. She says,

“I want to create a space where everyone’s on the same playing field. This anonymity allows people the freedom to step away from their work and whatever preconceived notions or judgements someone might have about what they do for one evening and connect with others in a meaningful way. There are plenty of events that list of the names of attendees. You go, hoping to meet specific people there and may walk way with a few business cards that, if you’re lucky, turn into something remarkable. You may also miss meeting a handful of incredible people who didn’t have the job or the title you wanted to see.”

Michelle made confidentiality a key supporting factor in making her events work so well. It’s a skill, a mind-set even, to be able to leverage confidentiality. Not only does she build trust and credibility at every event when she keeps items confidential, but she creates real connections between people, not connections based on status, prestige, name, income, etc.

As well as in Public Relations, you not only safeguard the confidence people have in you when you keep material confidential, but you enable yourself to discover a new way to leverage something very few people attempt leveraging in the PR world.

Michelle has an event coming up and you’re invited to connect in a different way! You can buy your tickets here

Hitting The Media Over And Over And Over And Over

Hitting The Media Over And Over And Over And Over

Garth Beyer

I have briefly stated before how PR is not advertising, but those in PR strategically use different forms of advertising to leverage the success of their goal. Cutting the crust off the whole debate of how influential media is to producing sales, you can check the case studies of Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw who developed the theory of Agenda-Setting in their Chapel Hill Study (1968).

In essence, they discovered that media influence was a temporary result which would die down in the minds of the viewers within hours after being exposed to the particular piece of media persuasion, depending on the medium used. (How often do you get told during an advertisement to “Act Now!“)

When you find yourself complaining about a particular ad that is put on repeat (remember the tv commercial that played itself again right after the first one, or the radio ad which plays right after one song and before the next?) you are seeing the abused type of agenda setting.

Before McCombs and Shaw, a particular Bernard Cohen had begun building the theory by observing and stating that the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”*

Next up were Rogers and Dearing (1996), who had tried to better explain the Agenda-Setting Theory by providing more key concepts and definitions in Agenda Setting: Communication Concepts.

For an understanding of the gist of Agenda Setting, here is a positive example of how you could use Agenda Setting for the grand opening of a Coffee Shop.

You are the Public Relations Specialist for the largest Coffee House in Seattle (largest, meaning square feet, not number of Coffee Houses) which will be having its grand opening in two months. Honestly speaking, you better have your news release and press kit developed already.

Now, the announcement has gone out and not only is the media interested, but so are a few local Coffee Shops. You then begin to accept and arrange media requests for interviews, pre-opening tours, and exclusive photo shoots.

Now that you have set the agenda for the media, you direct more of your efforts toward the public by sending personal invitations to all the Coffee Shops in the surrounding area. In addition, you apply direct messaging to the demographic of people who purchase coffee on a daily basis. By notifying these people of your event, you have set the agenda for the public.

The media and the public are all over the day of your grand opening and you obtain extraordinary coverage. Now you want to remain in the spotlight of the media and public by setting even more agendas for testimonials, follow-up features, and stories from those who converted to buying your business’s coffee.

Agenda-Setting: If you noticed, no where did you hit the media over and over and over and over with the same material. You set the agenda for coverage on all levels, devoting your focus to specific types of coverage which hit a target audience.

Remember, your agenda is to make theirs.

 

*Cohen, B (1963). The press and foreign policy. New York: Harcourt.

There Is Always A Guarantee

Garth Beyer

People get nudges, hunches and feelings in their stomach that they are 100% right about something, without a doubt, it’s guaranteed.

That impulse, that intuitive response is what every PR Specialist must produce for every client. Whether it is a small guarantee of reaching a specific person in the audience you are reaching out to or as big of a guarantee as increasing profits by 67% within the first week and a half of implementing the new customer relations strategy you created.

There is no trust between you and your client without a guarantee. For a PR Specialist, that connection must be there because the success rate of your “guarantee’s” is what defines your credibility.

Making a guarantee is an act of colossal responsibility, and with this responsibility lies a power which is often abused. That power being the construction of a guarantee of outcomes in sectors of the strategy which you have no control or influence over.

To make a successful connection between you and your client (financially speaking as well), you must work to discover the largest guarantee you can make.

To make a successful PR Specialist, you must do this with every client and know that crossing the line even once can set you back further than where you began.

While you may believe that you will simply provide small, simple guarantees, you need to accept the fact that your credibility, your status, your repertoire is only as substantial as the guarantees you make and live up to.

A PR’s Ethical Respect

Garth Beyer

An underlying principle to the work of a PR Specialist is similar to an old adage about love.

“If you don’t love yourself, how can you love anyone else?”

In this saying, the word “love” is interchangeable with any other word that enforces some form of positivity, amiability or professionalism. Working with PR, the most fitting word to exchange it with is “respect”.

It now reads,

“If you don’t respect yourself, how can you respect anyone else?”

Even a better question: How do you plan to be a successful PR Specialist when respect is simply a cousin of fairness, and fairness is a code of ethics that only authentic PR Specialists and Firms use.

What makes or breaks connections in business and in life can be pinned down to ethics, whether it be fairness, accuracy, honesty, or in this specific case, respect. Respect for oneself as well as mutual respect with a client is what stabilizes the connection.

While the bridge you build with another may not lead to a success, it is better to have a bridge maintained by respect than no bridge at all.

PR: Knowing Your Audience

PR: Knowing Your Audience

Garth Beyer

Many PR firms either get lucky or just get by when their strategy for knowing the audience is to judge and make assumptions.

According to a survey conducted by Jericho Communications, the typical American Fortune 1000 CEO is more likely to have watched The Simpsons than to have watched all three presidential debates.

Now, PR may be in control of social media, but PR still involves meeting the target audience, becoming one of them in the real world (not just online). You must know where they (your audience) goes, where they eat, what they read, watch and listen to. A great PR Specialist assimilates herself into the audience at the same time as keeping an eye out on social media trends before initiating a PR strategy.

Familiarizing yourself with the lifestyle of your target audience allows you to pitch stories directly to them, create the publications that they will read, and direct the appearance of your product so it faces them in an unobtrusive way. It does well to note that there still must be your own passion that is put into the publication. Since you are placing your pitch in between a stream of feed that the target audience is more familiar with than the last presidential debate, how passionately you present your pitch matters considerably.

Unable to create that publication? Send a press release to the newspapers, the magazines, radio stations or TV stations that you know your audience views. Does breaking news involve your product? Your topic? Get those press releases out. As you know, PR isn’t about putting your product or a story in front of everyone’s faces, over and over and over. That’s called advertising. PR is special, it’s separate from advertising although it uses it. It’s about strategizing the perfect moment to turn a presentation public.

Syncing your pitch to your audience is just as important as getting in sync with the perfect moment. What puts the “specialist” after PR is the ability to combine the two.

Assimilate, Syndicate, and Presentate

A PR’s Error Correction

A PR’s Error Correction

Garth Beyer

Everyone makes errors, no matter how much of a professional someone is. Even a vocation like Public Relations, where a Specialist is meant to review every action a thousand times over before execution.

Like most professionals, the errors are corrected with haste. However, the integrity of being a PR Specialist and making errors is that not only are you quick to implement a correction, but you correct it with all audiences.

If an error is made in a Press Release, you don’t craft a general apology and apply a correction. You contact the organization the Press Release was submitted for, you contact the editors, you contact your associates, you contact the publisher who the company is concorded with, you contact the Executive, and you contact every audience affiliated with the release.

A PR’s error correction is not only immediate and direct, but thorough as well.