Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
With the NFL season right around the corner I, along with most of America, have had football on my mind. Will Seattle’s Seahawks make it to another Super Bowl? How will the Denver Broncos play without Peyton Manning leading them on the field? With all my thoughts about the upcoming season, I realized that football and PR have a lot in common. I understand that helmets and pads are not needed in PR, and football games do not take place in cubicles, but PR professionals can still learn techniques from football teams.
If At First You Do Not Succeed, Try Again
In football, you hardly ever see a team give up after losing a game. Instead, they go back to practice the next day with an even more determined attitude. Players will watch game tapes over and over again taking notes of what they did wrong and dissecting what should have happened. Then they will practice the improved plays until everyone on the team knows how to properly execute the play. PR professionals need to do the same thing. If you do not win a client or secure an article, you reevaluate your methods and change them for the future. It is not the amount of wins that defines your life – it is the way you handle your losses and rise above.
Winning Requires Teamwork
The most successful teams — whether they are football teams or PR agencies — realize that strength lies within the team. In football, when one person scores a touchdown the credit also goes to their team, coach, and even fans and family. Same goes for PR firms – just because one person’s name is at the bottom of the email does not mean that other people did not work on the project. Behind every successful person is a team of people armed with strong resources.
Preparation is Essential
If an NFL team was to go into a game without any previous knowledge of their opponent, there is but a sliver of a chance that they will be the victor. Football teams spend hours studying other teams’ game tapes and learning their strengths and weaknesses. As with football, one of the most critical parts of PR is research. We research prospective clients, clients’ competitors and journalists. In PR, knowledge is the key to success. A PR agent needs to be able to familiarize themselves with news circulating about their client so they are able to take the next proactive step.
Evaluate
If a given route or plan does not seem to be driving the anticipated results, football teams will typically either alter the play or come up with a new one. By consistently updating and improving the plays, football teams are confident in knowing that they have all of the proper tools to succeed in a game. In PR it is necessary for agencies and professionals to analyze and evaluate their campaigns to see if they were successful at accomplishing their goals. If there are any areas that they could strengthen for future accounts, then it would be best for the professional to be aware.
While PR might not be a contact sport, and football players’ jobs don’t depend on keeping up with the newest trends, they do have similarities. In the upcoming season, put your thinking helmet on and start attacking the PR world like a football game.
You have been running to meeting after meeting, answering countless e-mails and taking endless phone calls all day, yet when work is finally over you feel as though you have accomplished nothing. Sound familiar? Don’t worry, you just have a case of busyness disease, and it’s incredibly common. Agencies have always had the tendency of being afflicted with “being so busy,” but now a majority of America’s workforce seems to have caught the bug as well. This is because we firmly believe that the busier we are, the more meetings we attend, the more emails we reply to, the more work we are getting done. The problem is that being busy is not the same as being productive.
Marketing and PR agencies are especially prone to this problem because they are used to billable hours. Having every hour of the day tracked causes agency employees to cram as many meeting, phone calls, and emails into their days as possible to increase how productive they appear. Unfortunately, it is having the opposite effect.
What agencies, and all companies, need to do is slow down. Employees need to block out chunks of time each day to do uninterrupted work – no emails, no calls, no meetings. As harmless as replying to an email may seem, it can be surprisingly detrimental to work efficiency. In fact, Microsoft did a study that found it took an average of 15 minutes for employees to go back to their important projects after being interrupted by an email or phone call. That means that if an employee only got 20 emails a day, an average of five hours would be wasted on replying and the distractions that come with it.
Seagate Technology did a similar study using VoloMetrix, a data-mining tool that helps track employee activity, which found that a single consulting firm was using up 8,000 hours of Seagate’s employees’ work time each year from nothing but emails. If productivity is the goal, cut down on the number of emails being sent each day, make sure emails that are sent are only going to people they actually apply to, and make sure the content is clear and concise, to avoid a flood of responses asking for clarification.
In PR cutting down emails can be especially difficult because of the volume of communication necessary when you are constantly talking to reporters and working with strict deadlines. However, it is still important to block out some email-free time during the day, even just an hour, to make sure you are meeting important deadlines as efficiently as possible.
Emails aren’t the only problem though – meetings are just as bad, if not worse. One of the biggest issues is that we like meetings. When we have back-to-back meetings all day, it makes us feel important. This idea brings to light an important factor behind the busyness disease, which is that being busy is a type of social currency. The harder it is to schedule a meeting with an executive, the more important and sought after they must be.
This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that an empty schedule means no work is being done. There is a fear of idle time in the workplace so pervasive that executives and employees are scheduling meetings that are either too long or completely unnecessary. A study done by Bain, using VoloMetrix data of 17 large corporations, found that senior executives devote more than two days each week to meetings attended by three or more co-workers, and that these meetings are, more often than not, scheduled “just because.”
Meetings are an important way to connect with colleagues and employees, but only when they are necessary. Back-to-back meetings all day make it nearly impossible to sit down and actually put the ideas and decisions made into motion, making the entire “busy” day a waste. One way to be more effective is to have a smaller number of meetings each day with fewer employees, followed by a block of time that will allow the attendees to actually implement the ideas discussed.
As technological advances continue to make it easier to be distracted by emails, calls and other forms of communication, it will become increasingly important to stress uninterrupted work time. Keep emails, calls and meetings to a minimum and only include those that are absolutely necessary to help cut down on wasted time. The more time that is devoted to spending time on, and completing, one project at a time before moving to the next, the more productive the workforce will be, and saying, “I was very productive today,” is much more satisfying than saying “I am so busy.”
Most people have more power than they realize. Organizations that help the individuals on their teams identify, harness and effectively use their power are more likely to achieve business success.
To identify their own power, employees should ask themselves, “On your very best day at work – the day you come home and think you have the best job in the world – what did you do that day?” according to Facebook’s Global Head of Recruiting, Miranda Kalinowski.
Facebook is an example of what’s known as a Strengths-Based Organization – a company that harnesses the power of its individual employees’ strengths. By helping employees identify their individual strengths where they align with company objectives, Facebook empowers its teams to do work that is meaningful and positions the company to meet its business objectives. But leveraging individual team members’ strengths isn’t solely the work of billion-dollar companiesThe gamut from small family run businesses to global enterprises can each work to harness individuals’ strengths by following a few simple principles.
The first step is helping individual employees understand their power and how to use it effectively. It’s a valuable skill and one that should be fostered and developed – personally and professionally. (See also “Understanding Power Dynamics Can Help You Lead More Effectively.”) By helping individuals understand their power in the workplace, they are better positioned to contribute what others can’t and to complement others’ strengths.
Unlocking individual talents is a two-pronged process: 1) Observe what employees get excited about and where they see success and 2) engage in a discussion with them. Ask what they enjoy and what helps them find meaning in their work. Harvard Business Review offers fantastic tips to get team members to speak up and share their strengths. Helping employees align their work around projects that are meaningful to them will drive results for the company.
Second, transparency about business objectives is critical to empowering the team to act on their individual power. By being transparent about our business objectives and how our business model functions, for example, each individual on our team is empowered to think creatively and present ideas that help the company meet its objectives, as well as ideas that help them meet their individual objectives and goals. We recognize that great ideas can come from any level within the organization – but only if everyone knows and understands the objectives. With a team comprised of individuals with different perspectives and experiences, the way each of us approaches a problem and the solutions we propose may vary widely. Soliciting a variety of ideas increases the likelihood we will get to the optimal solution versus having it dictated from the executive team.
At Communiqué we recently revised our approach to an aspect of our business based on a suggestion from a member of the team, and additional tweaking by the group. The change resulted in renewed energy due to a stronger alignment of personal interests with business needs. It was a great idea that wasn’t evident to me but the impact even in a short window of time has been significant.
Lastly, aligning professional development and growth around individual interests and talents is critical. In terms of an employee’s individual needs and interests, it may not be realistic for a manager to know what an employee is looking to achieve or experience. That employee is better positioned to come up with creative ways to meet their own professional goals/interests, while also demonstrating how it would benefit the business and other members of the team.
Last fall when one of our team members approached us about taking two months off to travel, she was able to articulate how it could work for the business and our clients, as well as how it would make a difference to her. It was a persuasive proposition, which we were willing and able to accommodate. As a result she was able to achieve a lifelong dream and we were able to retain a valued employee, one who returned to work with new experiences that translate into her contributions for our clients and ultimately our team and the company.
As an employer, I want my team to feel empowered, be solutions-oriented, and to be focused on the same organizational objectives. While this can be a scary prospect for some leaders, having an empowered team is more rewarding – emotionally and financially.
Empowered employees also add value to your business: They are more committed, deliver better results, take less sick time and foster a positive and proactive spirit within the organization. In the article, “The Importance of Empowering Employees,” Beth Williams, CEO of Forward Focus outlines five specific benefits of empowered employees:
- Quality of work produced
- Satisfied employees
- Collaboration grows
- Productivity increases
- Employee empowerment reduces costs
Of course with that power comes some responsibility – not to misuse or abuse that power. Ultimately fostering a culture where employees know and understand the power they have to help an organization achieve its objectives and to achieve their individual objectives is a win-win for the company and the individual. It is a lot more fun to be part of a team where we are all working toward the same business objectives, everyone is empowered to contribute to achieving that goal, and everyone shares in the success!
Storytelling is intrinsic to every culture. From creation myths to legends and folk tales, it’s at the core of what makes us human and how we relate to others and our world. According to the Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales by Princeton Press, as soon as humans developed the capacity for speech, “humans began telling tales” and “may have even used sign language before speech originated.” Moreover, from an evolutionary perspective, “Telling effective, relevant stories became a vital quality for anyone who wanted power to determine and influence social practices.”
Storytelling is also at the core of effective public relations, as we seek to influence reputations, perceptions and behaviors. To meaningfully relate to journalists and our target audiences, we need to tell compelling stories. We can’t simply announce news or offer a quote – what we share with target audiences needs to be in the context of a larger story to help us connect with others and show why our clients’ news matters. Though plots may differ, effective stories tend to have the following narrative components, in varying order.
Exposition – Often the opening of a plot, exposition introduces the characters and the environment they inhabit. It’s the opening shot of a movie, where we see the Shire and Bilbo Baggins celebrating his “eleventy-first” (111th) birthday. Rather than explaining this information, effective writers bring the context of the story to life. They use a character’s actions to illuminate his/her traits and offer colorful descriptions to help the reader picture the environment, from its physical appearance to its social order. When we reach out to media, for example, we provide exposition when we share background information on our clients that demonstrates thought leadership in their respective categories. We also highlight the landscapes in which our clients operate to set up the conflicts of their stories.
Conflict – All gripping stories have conflict. The conflict drives the story and usually provides motivation for the protagonist to achieve his/her goal. The scale of a conflict can vary widely, from personal quests to societal-level issues of oppression. In public relations, we identify a compelling conflict and position our clients as the protagonist who’s actively working to resolve the problem. Conveying the conflict and positioning our client as the protagonist happens over a period of time, in what writers call rising action, as we conduct strategic media outreach and build up to the climax of the story.
Characters – Joseph Campbell, who studied and wrote about myths extensively, argued that we are each the hero of our own story. According to Campbell, “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” Compelling stories have a heroic figure who’s working to solve a conflict for the betterment of others. To tell stories people want to hear, we need to consider in what ways our clients are the heroes of their own stories – what problem are they solving, and why does it matter? Furthermore, who’s the villain in the story? The villain could be a literal person, but more likely the villain is metaphorical in nature – resistance to change, antiquated products, a crowded marketplace, or misunderstanding of the client’s product or service.
Climax – Imagine an action movie, in which a protagonist finally meets the villain to deliver one final, crushing blow. The knight slays the dragon, the big battle reaches its pinnacle, the guy finally proposes to the girl. This is the climax, and the story wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying without it. It’s the turning point in the story, when our hero finally confronts the conflict head-on and we approach resolution. In public relations, the climax of the story could be when our client achieves a certain momentum metric, beats a competitor on earnings, or achieves a successful exit. The key? The story builds up to this moment, making it all the more exciting once we reach it.
Denouement/Resolution – Denouement is derived from the French word “denoue,” which means to untie. Once the climax is over, we’ve reached the wrap-up portion of the story, where we “untie” a complex plot and the action comes to an end. In The Great Gatsby, for example, the denouement occurs when the protagonist Nick returns to Minnesota to seek refuge from the people he thinks are morally reckless and unfaithful. While the denouement serves an obvious function – to end a story – it also reinforces the themes of the story and allows it to resonate with the audience. In public relations, it’s crucial to consider what theme we want our audiences to walk away understanding after an important announcement.
Though it’s easy to get laser focused on a particular announcement or contributed article, effective public relations pros see the forest through the trees. What’s the broader story we’re trying to tell? And how can we use narrative elements to effectively tell that story? As U.C.L.A. professor Robert McKee said, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”
Content marketing continues to be a top priority for B2B (and B2C) marketers. However, with often limited resources and subject matter, and experts to develop original content and repurpose it across multiple channels, many content marketing programs remained stalled.
Indeed, according to the “2016 B2B Content Marketing Trends – North America” survey report from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, the top challenges B2B content marketers face include producing engaging content, producing content consistently, and producing a variety of content.
If a company is limited in the internal resources it can dedicate full-time to content marketing initiatives, a viable option is to leverage your PR agency team to drive content development and repurpose that content for a variety of audiences.
The benefits of working with your PR agency to draft and develop content are manifold. As columnist Rachel Lindteigen writes in MarketingLand (“Who should create your content?”), agencies can often scale production and have multiple resources working on your account. Further, agency personnel frequently have the backgrounds in PR, journalism and English to get the job done efficiently and without requiring extensive training. “It’s this combination of the number of team members and the educational/background mix that can make your agency a great asset for content development,” writes Lindteigen.
For example, Communiqué PR is assisting our client EMC Isilon by conducting a number of interviews with business unit CTOs to get their perspective about industry trends and issues facing their target audiences. From there, we draft content that is utilized on the company’s blogs (EMC Emerging Tech and EMC Pulse). We also use the information from these CTO interviews and blog posts to pitch and develop contributed articles, proactive pitches, speaker proposals and award submissions. In one case, we were able to take a series of blog posts that weren’t yet published and pitch them as an exclusive three-part contributed series to TV Technology magazine for EMC Isilon’s CTO of Media and Entertainment Tom “T.V.” Burns.
Below are some suggestions for PR agency teams to help support content marketing programs:
Utilize in-house experts. Work with your primary client contact to identify subject matter experts and conduct one-on-one interviews with them about their roles and their experiences interacting with customers, partners and other key stakeholders. For example, who better to talk about the challenges that customers are facing than a customer service executive who speaks with them every day? In just an hour or so, interviewers can access valuable insight and perspective for blog posts, social media channels, infographics, case studies and more.
Consider briefings with C-level executives to get a view from the top, but also try and meet with contacts across all levels, including engineers involved with product development, customer service representatives, or those contacts involved with partners or strategic alliances.
Put your journalist hat on. When conducting interviews, think like a journalist and make sure you get the right information you need for the content. Don’t let them rely too heavily on acronyms or jargon– ask for details and specifics. Recording the call is highly recommended since conversations can easily go off track and it can be difficult to remember details several weeks following the interview.
Here are five sample questions to consider:
- Is there a common pain point you hear about frequently from customers or partners?
- What are the biggest changes coming in your industry over the next 2-5 years?
- What issues/trends are your customers not paying enough attention to? What needs more noise?
- Other than your company, is there someone whose approach in this space you really like and respect? Why?
- What publications/websites/blogs do you read?
Banking on content development and repurposing. So you’ve got your PR agency involved with drafting content and supporting your content marketing initiatives – great! The next step is to get the whole company to access and leverage that content. In a column for Forbes (“60% Of B2B Content Sits Unused, Here’s the Fix”), contributor John Hall discusses the importance of corporate knowledge banks, which are centralized content hubs where sales, social media, recruiting, employee training and other team members can pull content and incorporate them into their own initiatives. As Hall writes in an article for the Content Marketing Institute, these hubs create a single location for employees to find internal knowledge, industry knowledge and data and opinions. The key is making sure it’s updated frequently and accessible to all employees.
Does your company have a content marketing program? Have you used a PR agency or other contributors to develop content? If so, what were the results? We’d love to hear about your experience in our comments section.
I’m admittedly a little too into HBO’s Game of Thrones. Through the months of March, April and May you can find me around the office discussing new theories and predictions and analyzing characters’ developing personalities. With the recent finale and the laundry list of Emmy nominations, I was inspired to take a closer look at four strong Game of Thrones characters and think about what we could learn from them and how we could apply those learnings to our daily work in the PR world (admittedly a far cry from their home of Westeros).
Jon Snow: Jon Snow is undoubtedly one of the most beloved characters on television, but that’s not necessarily the case in the world in which he lives. As a leader, Jon is often faced with tough decisions yet what he sees as right (and his ultimate decision) is often against what others want.
As PR professionals, our clients are seeking our counsel and looking to us to lead them through the media landscape to help them achieve their business and communication objectives. More often than not, they trust our suggestions, however, they occasionally may disagree with our recommendations or request we move forward with an activity that we believe won’t hold much value. Part of our job as the hired experts is to have the hard conversations and inform them what is realistic and what we believe the results will be.
Like Jon, it’s important that we explain the rationale behind what we think is the best course of action. But unlike Jon, at the end of the day, the client has final say, and if it is something that is important to them, then we will do everything in our ability to achieve the best results possible!
Peter Baelish/Little Finger: Most Game of Thrones fans are probably thinking, what could we possibly learn from the manipulative Lord Baelish? Well, it’s true, he is sneaky, devious and betrays one person after another. But the one thing that he knows how to do and to do well is address his audience. He knows exactly what people want, what interests them and usually presents them with a way to get exactly that.
Please note: I am not recommending you operate in a way that is manipulative. Rather, I recommend you take the time to truly understand the audience your pitch or story idea will reach. Know the journalist—consider if what you are sending will be something they are interested in and if it is something their audience will be interested in. Lastly, is this audience the audience that your client is hoping to reach? If not, then rethink your idea or find a new target.
Arya Stark: Over the last couple of seasons, Arya has been on an interesting journey, essentially learning how to be an assassin. She spent time and energy studying the way this group of assassins operates and practiced and perfected a set of skills. But after a couple of mix-ups she decides to return home, bringing with her a completely new set of skills that can be applied regardless of where she is. Arya shows us that skill sets are versatile.
While you may be an expert in PR in a specific field – retail, technology, media and entertainment or consumer products – that doesn’t mean you are limited to one area. The skills you learn while doing work for one company can almost always apply to another industry, and may even give you a unique perspective. To find success, you simply need the skills as a foundation and a creative mind set to apply them.
Daenerys Targaryen: All good things take time. Dany has spent six seasons building an army of loyal followers, gathering ships and conquering cities in preparation to take the iron throne. She’s had her frustrations and setbacks, but with determination, passion and an unwavering focus on achieving her goals (and with the help of three dragons), she is finally headed west, something she has been working towards since we were introduced to the character.
The takeaway is results don’t always immediately present themselves. A major funding story may garner significant coverage with less effort, but getting that feature or trend story may take months of cultivating a relationship and providing countless ideas and updates. These profiles or trend stories aren’t going to happen every day, but if you put significant thought into the idea and meaningful effort into the presentation of it, the results will eventually follow.
This is only a brief overview, by way of Westeros, of some of the qualities we can work to implement into our daily duties as PR professionals. Being confident in your recommendations and expert knowledge, understanding your audience, growing your skill set and having the patience and resilience to build key relationships (journalists can be tough!) are all critical to finding success as a professional and on behalf of your clients.
And as Game of Thrones fans know, I’ve barely scratched the surface with the lessons we could learn from key characters. What other lessons have you learned or what other character qualities can we apply to our role in PR?