Evaluation

PR Freelancers Don’t Neglect The Last Phase

Garth Beyer

Public Relations Phase

A PR strategy can be broken down into three phases. The last, the most important and often neglected.

1) Ideation

Write down everything. Brainstorm. Read about other products’ PR strategies (not just similar brands to the one you’re working with). Talk with a different person each day and ask for help. You can do it alone, but you can do it better with others’ help. Here’s a site I read a lot when brainstorming.

2) Evaluation

No one loves to redo something because they forgot a piece. Nor does anyone enjoy scrapping work they’ve spent hours on because while it may be good work, it doesn’t fit the overall strategy. Evaluation is easy, but dealing with the criticism may prove difficult to handle. You can get attached once you start creating, not before.

3) Creation

Here’s the spot a lot of PR freelancers neglect before pitching their strategy. It’s easy to suggest a business sends out a newsletter. It’s much more difficult to write that newsletter yourself. It’s easy to suggest how to use Twitter and Facebook, but much harder to think of 30 tweets or 24 Facebook posts they can use. It’s easy to suggest building a clock a bird pops out of each hour and sings, but … you get the idea. No business wants to hear what they should do they want to see it. After all, they are hiring you to do it, not just think about doing it.

 

Stay Positive & Go Create Something Special

The Finish Line

Garth Beyer

What I love about runners, racecar drivers, swimmers, and any racer in general is that when they reach the finish line, they don’t stop. They zoom through it and then start to slow down.

Taking a finish line literally, it means you finish at the line, as in, you stop on the line. Why go past it if it’s the finish line? Taking it literally would mean that you need to slow down before you get to the finish line so you can stop on it.

In reality, that’s actually what a lot of people do. The closer they get to their goal, the slower they get. They want their step on the finish line to be perfect. Plenty of times over, the fear of success, the fear of it not being perfect, stops them from making it to the finish line. Once near it, they take a couple of steps back just to make sure they are doing everything right.

Don’t.

Find out where the finish line is drawn and run past it.

You don’t need to be a racer to live the concept of a finish line. Have a goal? Blow past it, slow down, and then evaluate. You will learn, adapt, and grow much quicker than if you stop before you finish just to evaluate something you havn’t completed.

 

Stay Positive & Let’s Race To Our Goals This Year (and by to, I mean past)

Garth E. Beyer

Take A Swing

Garth Beyer

You’re going to be criticized, judged, influenced, and swung at.

There’s no preventing it and there’s no reason to prevent it. Getting swung at will help you redirect what you want to say, what you mean, what you want the audience to understand. If you look at criticism as a opportunity to calibrate your crosshairs, then you can better succeed next time (There will always be a next time.)

However, the best of the best have a tough time handling brutal criticism. While there is no preventing it, you can weaken any future criticism.

Take a swing at yourself before anyone else gets a shot.

Look at your work from a critics point of view, from your audience’s point of view, from a random-person-just-coming-across-your-work’s point of view. Dont just criticize yourself before others do, make the adjustment so no one will criticize you the same way you just did. Run a self-evaluation before you release your work. It’s only then that you can really benefit from the input from your audience. If they make suggestions to what you already know, how do you learn anything new?

 

Stay Positive & Just Don’t Keep Swinging (everybody wants a turn)

Garth E. Beyer

The Five Stages Within The Diffusion Process

Garth Beyer

The Diffusion of Innovations, also called the Diffusion Theory, is a theory that strives on the interpretation of how people either adopt or reject new ideas, technology, products, or change in general.

There are five stages within the diffusion process:

  1. Awareness Stage: An individual becomes aware of the existence of an idea but lacks knowledge of what it does, or the benefits of it.
  2. Interest Stage: An individual has a desire to obtain more information on the idea: what is it, what does it do, how will it affect our culture, what are the possibilities of using it?
  3. Evaluation Stage: An individual mentally questions the selfishness that the idea can be used; how will it benefit me? The individual also begins to demonstrate interpersonal communication by requesting feedback on the idea from others.
  4. Trial Stage: If it benefits the individual, then the idea will be tried. It will be a personal experiment, a small sample to be tested in a way that concludes how the individual can benefit most from it.
  5. Adoption Stage: The individual begins to scale the idea and use it consistently. This adoption stage is largely based on continuous satisfaction of the idea.

A similar five stage process in the mental acceptance of an idea is Knowledge, Persuasion, Decision, Implementation, Confirmation encompassing similar definitions to those I have presented.