The PR profession has long relied on ‘the kindness of strangers’.
In fact, I’d venture to guess that if you’re in PR and of a certain age, you’re probably an optimist.
Or were at some point.
How else could you survive in an industry with no guarantees, a lot of hoping, and an unwavering belief in unbalanced relationships?
In communications theory they call that “control mutuality,” that is, the balance of power two partners are willing to accept to make a relationship work.
And in PR, it was always been tilted way over to the reporter’s side.
The payoff?
Earned media, credibility and trust.
Along came social media
And with it a litany of excuses on why things aren’t as rosy as they once were. We found ourselves in a world where we were familiar with between one-quarter to one-half of the paid, earned, shared and owned spectrum. Influencers? What publication do they write for?
PR was losing its optimistic edge.
A lot of senior PR folks hate to admit this, but the traditional media relations model is just plain broken.
Have you tried to pitch media recently?
Earned media still works
What I’m trying to say is that there’s still a lot of merit to earned media or publicity.
But we need to approach it from a fresh perspective and move from optimist to optimize.
What does that look like?
Here are four things we can do to optimize PR:
- Make like you work for the Toronto Sun. Or any tabloid for that matter. I’m not recommending you bend the truth, I’m talking about creating the best possible headlines that grab people’s attention and also answer questions they may have. In other words, hook and help in 10 words or less.
- Re-read The Tipping Point. Malcolm Gladwell’s breakthrough book was all about how stories and ideas spread. The media only approach no longer cuts it, though they can still be a key part of the equation. Think about the path you want your story to take, the catalyst who can spark it and how you can get your story to them. Then imagine another approach and another. That’s where strategy comes in.
- Say no to second-rate stories. Take a step back and look at your story from the recipient’s point of view. As Rob Biesenbach says: Does it have a character in pursuit of a goal facing an obstacle? If not, put on your thinking cap and keep working. They take new Broadway shows on tour for weeks before opening night for a good reason: to perfect the story.
- Take off the invisibility cloak. Here, I’m talking about search. Yes, some people (boomers and GenX mostly) want to be on the front page of the Report on Business or Wall Street Journal. But how does that affect your search results? Is it driving traffic back to your site? More than 90 per cent of our online interactions start with search. That’s where we go to connect and find things out. And if it’s from credible sources, all the better. Google results are the new PR clips, so focus on how your program will play out in search.
Where do you fall on the optimist/optimize continuum? And what else would you do to optimize PR?
A version of this post was originally published in Spin Sucks.
