You could assume that it’s easier today than it ever has been to create a successful career in a marcomms or PR role. After all, there’s more media to engage with – a greater variety of outlets and formats to explore, self-promotion platforms, and that’s not to mention the numerous tools, technologies to act as support systems to help you on your way.
But along with this has come greater challenges too. Not only is there the pressure to be present, and active, everywhere, but news too moves at an ever faster pace, requiring responding to in real-time. And none of this engagement, whilst fast-paced, should be entered into lightly. Even the smallest, most well-meaning remark, when said in a clumsy context has greater potential to be seen, shared (and re-shared!) and responded to by an increasingly vocal audience.
Media relations therefore is not an easy job – PR routinely appears on lists of the most stressful professions to work in.
Keeping pace, staying relevant, and keeping a solid sense of the wider world and the industries they operate in is an ongoing effort for a PR professional. Any diligent individual or agency will be spending their time not only working for their clients but working on themselves – updating their skills and sector knowledge and exploring new ways for utilising them.
Yet amongst all this change, there are some fundamental elements of the job that will always remain the same...
- Relationships still rule all
- Your word is worth everything… until it isn’t
- Quantity doesn’t outrank quality
- The old ways still work
- You’ll never know it all
Relationships still rule all
We might be able to enlist increasingly clever tech to take on a lot of the grunt work – sourcing and researching media, compiling lists, distributing information, but there are a few vital skills that all the savvy tools in the world cannot hope to replicate. The biggest of these is the human ability to build and maintain relationships.
Relationships are the lifeblood of any effective PR or comms strategy. Without effective, trusting relationships a PR strategy simply cannot work.
For engaging with clients, taking the time to understand their needs, aims and objectives, when to ask questions and challenge ideas and remaining honest about what’s possible, are all essential in ensuring a relationship can flourish – and even withstand any turbulence that comes your way.
For journalists too, whilst a writer will certainly not be your “friend” they too rely on the PR agencies and individuals they engage with to display many of the same traits. Taking the time to invest in building a solid relationship with a writer or a media outlet can provide endless opportunity, and even an edge over your competitors if you become known as a trusted and reliable source of information.
Being familiar with their work and interests, reaching out with relevant information in their preferred manner and offering interactions in their preferred style, delivering comments or copy before the deadlines they’re working to – and being up front when things don’t go as planned are all qualities that require human intellect and understanding.
Taking the time to research, reach out and build relationships is never wasted. Whilst we might all prefer an email over a phone call these days, that doesn’t mean the human element of our interactions has been lost entirely.
Your word is worth everything… until it isn’t
Your reputation matters. The quickest way to kill a relationship, no matter how strong you believe it to be, is dishonestly - to overpromise and under-deliver.
It’s all too easy for a PR professional to seek to impress a potential client with fantastical proposals and grand ideas, but once a client has said yes, the difficulty lies in making these dreams a reality. And, if you’ve oversold what’s possible, all you’re doing is setting yourself (and them) up for disappointment.
Similarly, you’ll swiftly find yourself relegated to a journalist’s “reject” pile if you prove to be unreliable and disappoint them one time too many.
Every part of the process matters make sure the commitments you make are ones that can be honoured.
This is where building your knowledge and relationships go hand in hand. And, in instances where things do not go to plan, honesty and accountability are better than avoidance and distraction.
An honest, reliable approach builds your reputation as trustworthy (to both media and potential clients), knowledgeable (as the information you share is more often proved to be accurate than not) and as a result highly competent.
And this can be invaluable in times of crisis. Even the best PR professionals or strategies cannot avoid crisis entirely, but reputation and relationships are essential for survival.
Burying your head in the sand is never a good response to crisis as bad news never does just disappear. Having a solid enough relationship with a client to provide well-reasoned, though perhaps difficult to hear, advice and the trust to action it is an invaluable tool to have at your disposal.
And having a solid reputation with media provides the outlet for you to provide a response and do some damage control – maybe even work out how to turn a crisis into a coverage – the right kind.
Being honest might not be the most comfortable approach for a PR professional but it earns you a solid and respected reputation in the long-run. There’s a reason why BlueSky Education has kept many of the same clients year after year.
Quantity doesn’t outrank quality
Securing widespread coverage for a client is fantastic of course – but an effective PR campaign cannot be measured in numbers.
This might sound counterintuitive when you consider the fact that an integral part of public relations is to be seen – and seen well - by an ever wider audience of people. But there is a trade-off to be made when you consider quantity vs quality. It’s no good having a comment or a press release shared across a hundred outlets if those outlets have limited relevance to your objectives, are not deemed as credible by their audiences or if they have no audience at all.
The numbers might look great on a report – but what is the benefit of them beyond that?
That’s not to say there’s no value in the mass distribution of information – press releases are still an incredibly effective tool (which we’ll come to!) after all, but a strategy based on simply sending news out into the world to as many outlets as possible, and judging your effectiveness on the numbers you get back will soon show its limitations.
This again is where AI and other tech tools cannot (yet) be relied upon to provide sufficient support and human intellect must reign supreme. The crucial elements for any media engagement is the ability to assess the information you’re working with, developing news sense to find a good hook, and leveraging your own sector knowledge to find the right outlets and audiences to share the news with.
The news you share might not be right for everyone, but if you’re sharing it with the right people your results will be better – even if the numbers are lower.
Outlets with dedicated, invested followings which are relevant to our cause will take a greater interest in what you share, and will likely dedicate more time and space to exploring it – interviewing a member of faculty, offering an opportunity for an op-ed, digging deeper in to research… and the result is a greater opportunity for you or your institution to shine.
The old ways still work
There might be many that declare the humble press release to be old hat, a dying tool and a largely ineffective one at that.
I’d argue that this is only partially true. Yes, press releases are by no means a new flash means of sharing information, and yes I’d also agree that they can be rather ineffective.
But this is because the vast majority of press releases that make their way out into the world are, to be blunt, terrible.
Many companies use a press release as a means of self-declaration – putting together pages and pages of carefully polished, buzzword-friendly, self-congratulatory text which at their heart hold little in the way of information to those who manage to read them. And all of this sits at odds with what a press release is supposed to be.
The purpose of a press release is to inform relevant media of new information that might be of interest to them – giving them the core highlights, contextualising why readers should care, and signposting them to further information should they require it.
They should be informative, concise and provide no more than the “who, what, when, where, why and how” of the matter at hand.
Oh, and they should have an expert voice, with something to say. The biggest missed opportunity of a press release is when space for an expert voice is instead used to allow that expert to claim how “delighted” they are with the news they’re sharing, rather than adding extra perspective or, well, expertise.
There’s a balance to be achieved between giving enough information in a press release for it to be a standalone story where necessary and also provoke the reader to seek further info – whether that be a journalist or their audience.
And anything that’s overly promotional, too lengthy or buries the lead simply won’t get picked up by anyone.
A well-written, carefully and considerately distributed press release can be a fantastic resource in prompting engagement, and a gift that will keep on giving when journalists refer back to them time and again.
So where a press release is your chosen method of engagement, take the time to write them well! Thankfully, we have some tips to share on how you can do that.
You’ll never know it all
You might end up knowing a lot, but you’ll never know it all – and that’s okay. Guru status is achieved with a willingness to keep on learning. BlueSky takes this to heart by encouraging their community to keep on learning – whether through official accreditations such as CIPR or other training opportunities for our consultants, or by offering learning to our clients and the wider community through workshops and webinars.
The media landscape, and the world in general, is evolving at an ever-increasing rate and, like any other industry, PR too must evolve in order to keep pace.
Being curious, exploring new opportunities and routes to engagement can ensure we can keep on delivering great service for our clients.
Kerry is the Strategic Communications and Editorial Lead at BlueSky Education and a former BBC journalist. Recognised in the graduate management education arena as a leading authority on communications for the industry, Kerry has more than a decade of experience in the media and public relations.
