I’m humbled to be referred as a PR Professional at such a young age by Project Exponential.
Thank you Michelle!
PR
Beginners In PR Trailblaze Their Way To Becoming True Specialists
You may be the Public Relations Specialist but, someone is almost always monitoring the direction you are going.
When you set out on a mission, when you formulate your tactics; where you will send your platoons of effort, you have a commander-in-chief approving it all.
Lucky for you, when you are just starting to become the professional PR Specialist you have dreamed about, you have a lot more freedom than you will once you become that professional. Unless of course, you take advantage of this initial freedom.
When you are starting up your PR career, you will be involved in mediums that may not matter too much to the world. Take for instance nearly any internship. You will typically be part of a group that gets told, “here are some ideas we have for you to work on, if you have any you would like to pitch, let’s hear it.”
The majority go off the ideas that are presented, a few build off them, and a rare couple actually pitch their own ideas.
(As a side note suggestion, pitch your idea on the spot, don’t wait. You will likely have a second idea once you acknowledge your freedom, so save that email asking to work on an idea you came up with for your second idea. Pitching your idea on the spot offers instant feedback, further awareness, additional respect, and special attention which is necessary for progression in the industry. Pitch on the spot, you won’t regret it.)
Those who pitch their own ideas and run with them – well, to put it blatantly – it doesn’t matter whether they turn out good or not. The point is that you are taking advantage of your freedom now in hopes that you will build your repertoire, your voice, your personal technique which will be so strong that when you enter PR professionally, you will be able to continue your work.
When starting up, you don’t get just one shot to enter PR professionally, you get one shot to trailblaze your way into it.
Enlighten Others
PR Botique And Originality
Here’s an oxymoron: everyone is unique.
If every PR agency continues to say they are a boutique public relations firm, the term boutique will lose all it’s meaning, all of its power.
Here are four out of a thousands of sites that consider themselves Boutique firms or agencies:
Heck, this one has Boutique in its name.
Now here is where I show that I don’t know everything. Before researching this concept, I thought I was on to something big. I wanted to show that PR firms and agencies need to quit saying they are all unique, they are all boutiques, they are all different niches of PR and to come up with something more meaningful. PR Outhouse, Exclusive PR, PR Booth, or something like PR Superette are all better variations than the traditional and overused Boutique.
All cool ideas, I feel, but then I read this.
So maybe these PR firms and agencies are not doing any wrong when calling themselves a Boutique, but don’t you agree they can be more original?
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PR Gangnam Style
This is a prime example (2:40) of what separates the old age of PR and the new.
The old PR would see this video and say that his glasses are his image. He can build a reputation from those glasses, he can build an audience from those glasses, he can build an enterprise from those glasses.
The new PR would see this video and say that the fact he took his glasses off makes him real. It makes him human, and in this digital PR revolution, that is priceless.
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Dancing To Your Own Tune
Public Relations is a lot about reaching out to a specific group, your target audience. When you reach out to your audience, you want to develop positive awareness that turns into an action that everyone takes.
A big problem before going out with a press release or other form of an announcement is that there is more than one thing you want your target audience to do.
Don’t just buy the new iPhone 5, tweet about it, tell us what you think about it, write a blog post about it, get someone else to buy one, show it off to your coworkers, try our app on it … the list goes on.
At times, yes, PR is about target, precision, and getting your audience to take one action at a time, but this current digital revolution has created the 100-focus-mind. Everyone can and does focus on a hundred things through the day and never is there a time that only one item is focused on. It’s a two-or-more interactive world.
Every digital native audience is capable of handling it, so why do PR specialists still focus on one-group-one-action strategies? It seems to me that you can reach out to each individual member of your audience and give them the option of what to do. As a result, you will have created sub-audiences – people who are taking the same action (listening to the same tune) bundle together and then you can focus on their progress.
Basically it’s about letting every member of your audience dance to their own tune. Whether it is communicating to the entire audience or subgroups, they are all still dancing.
Enlighten Others
A PR’s Drug: Gossip
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.
Enlighten Others
Safeguarding Confidence
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
