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Inside The Minds information is directed to the media, seeking to create greater awareness for various products and companies and services. The only way you can distinguish them and make one stand out from another – and get them onto a short list for the media – is by having a real knowledge of the product itself and the company, as well as a real understanding of the media you are dealing with. Reporters can tell very easily if the person they are talking to doesn’t really understand the industry or the product itself. Likewise, in trying to gain greater awareness for a product or a service, if I arbitrarily start working with media, regardless of whether that media person might actually be covering the kinds of things I am trying to encourage him to, I am not going to get very far. I will instead spend most of my time talking to the wrong people. You must understand who you are talking to and whether they are genuinely interested in what you are telling them. Does the PR person know the media? Does he or she understand them and how they work? Does he know what the publication has written about in the past? Does he know what the individual reporter has written about? If you have this knowledge, then you can approach the reporter. You can then give them a customized story, tailored to fit their specific needs. Public relations is not one-size-fits-all. When you have a large budget to work with, things tend to be more fun, a little more interesting, and a little splashier. However, a larger budget does not make these things any 180 The Art of Public Relations more important. You can do things with big events, with more sponsorship. These things get noticed. They are productive, and they are fun for the staff to deal with. But with a small client, the only tool in your toolbox might be working with the media, which can also be very productive. Generally, you go up the scale from media relations, which is a fundamental for most public relations campaigns, and as you start adding more money to it, you start getting into things such as trade show representation, events, sponsorships, media tours, and satellite media tours. You can use a variety of different tools, all of which are interesting, and all of which have the same goal, which is to help you drive a specific message to a specific audience using the media as the channel to get to that audience. Either way, to create a successful campaign, you must be innovative. You must be able to understand the client’s business and the client’s industry, all the while looking for new ways to get onto people’s radar screens. Being innovative doesn’t necessarily mean having the latest gadgetry or the latest software. It means being the most creative. It means knowing new and better ways to get the message across to any of the audiences you need to reach. That type of innovation comes from having the right people, because when you get right down to it, public relations is still about having the right people, not just the right tools. 181 Inside The Minds Lastly, to have a successful firm, not just a successful campaign, a few things must be avoided at all times. First of all, never lie to the media. If you do, the media will never forgive you, and you and your agency will have a destroyed reputation. Secondly, be partners, not vendors. If what a client wants is simply someone who will bang out press releases and go through the motions, that client should be working with a freelancer. An agency, on the other hand, should be partners with their clients. They should become truly involved in that client’s business and actually help that client drive their business. A pitfall for a lot of younger people in public relations is that they don’t take the time to really learn their client’s business and industry. That lack of fundamental understanding can be very destructive on any account. Measuring Return on Investment Many clients want to know how to measure the value of public relations; basically, they want to know how to determine that they get what they pay for. A variety of tools and methods can measure the effects and goals of public relations. Traditionally, public relations has been measured on the basis of the number of clips received and the circulation figures those clips amount to, compared to advertising equivalency. While this method has been a long-standing system of evaluations, it really doesn’t do much for the more sophisticated client looking for 182 The Art of Public Relations something more than just knowing they got space in a paper that reached however many people. Other tools include a greater analysis of the content of the stories that were published or broadcast. You break these stories down by each story’s ability to drive your message point, by geography, by the publications or broadcast outlets they appeared in. Were these outlets on your key priority list? On the other hand there are a lot of other ways to measure success. We like to measure the leads produced as a result of public relations. We do this by setting up a mechanism within the client, so they understand how to ascertain whether a lead produced came from advertising, public relations, direct mail, or word of mouth. It must be tracked so that everyone understands exactly where the lead was generated. Public relations can play an important role in lead generation. We may not be able to make it drink, but we can bring the horse to the water. Another source of evaluation is simply sales. We very much like to have our programs measured by sales during a particular time period. You can do this by looking at trend analysis, evaluating where sales were, and then looking at the change in sales after the injection of a public relations campaign. You can further measure that geographically, or by specific stories, or in a number of other ways. There are many ways to evaluate public relations, but they all get back to how effectively the messages were 183 Inside The Minds portrayed, and what the actual results of these messages were. Did they generate new business? Did more leads come in? Did the client’s business move forward as a result of what you did? Did your programs change audience perceptions of a company, its brand, or its products? This obviously brings up issues of compensation. How should a public relations firm be compensated? For actual work done? For success of this work? While it would be nice to have a value compensation, so that if we helped drive a business, we would receive some sort of a reward for it, the reality is that virtually always, we work on an hourly basis, and I think that that is most fair. Agencies get into difficulty when they have a large number of clients on a fixed-fee basis, and those fixed fees don’t even begin to compensate them for the actual time they spend on the account. On the other hand, simply working on an hourly basis is not fair to an agency either, because an agency has to put together an account team and maintain it. If the client has a heavy workload one month and almost no workload the next, you still have an account team that has to be paid, and that isn’t fair either. So a base fee gives you a minimum amount every month, above which you will also bill on an hourly basis. That base fee, of course, includes a set number of hours, but it allows you to be compensated for any hours above that number. 184 The Art of Public Relations Keeping House, Keeping Clients, Keeping Current Leadership is different things to different people. It is not just about becoming involved, but perhaps more importantly, when you are involved, it’s about having something constructive to put forward. It’s about demonstrating leadership and demonstrating suggestions for the betterment of the business or organization. It’s about taking a much longer view and of trying to work within the business to see that the business itself is looking far ahead. Too often, we are all so absorbed with our clients’ business that we are not thinking about where we should be going. As practitioners, we can do a better job for our clients if we have a firm handle on the management of our own businesses. There is a tendency for account staff to be solely client-oriented, and that’s as it should be. They are concerned with getting a job done, and much less concerned about staying within budgets or creating more effective procedures within the agency. But agency management must be concerned with the agency’s bottom line and its strategic approach to future business. One of the things we always talk about is what we call “closing the back door.” This means making sure you are always thinking about your current clients and their needs and retaining them, every bit as much as thinking in terms of attracting new business. If you don’t close the back door, what you bring in the front means a lot less to your growth 185 Inside The Minds and development, and you are doing nothing more than treading water. However, perhaps the most often repeated advice around our office is that effort doesn’t count – results count. As younger people work in the business, they sometimes get overtaken by the idea that a lot of effort somehow means a lot to the client. It really doesn’t. Clients aren’t impressed by effort. They are impressed only by the results you can give them. They don’t care if you spent X number of hours trying to track down some media. They care only that you actually got it. They don’t care if you spent many hours planning an event, unless the event is successful. They want only results, as it should be. One way to keep your edge in the public relations industry is by keeping current with what’s going on in your city, your state, the nation, and internationally. It’s also extremely important to keep up with what’s happening in your client’s industry, so you’re able to give your client key information about trends in his industry even before he’s aware of them. Another way to keep your edge is by staying active in your own industry. I have tried to do this by serving on the executive board for the Counselor’s Academy, the section of the Public Relations Society of America that serves the agency side of the business. In that role I discuss and deal with what is happening in the industry, with best practices and so on. Beyond that I am involved in another organization called Public Relations 186 The Art of Public Relations Organization International, which is a network group. Within this group I work with people literally all over the world who own independent agencies. We talk often about what is happening in the industry, best practices, and ways to drive both our agencies and the industry forward. And as a partnership of agencies, we assist each other as needed and use each other as resources. Golden Rules of PR Understand your client’s business. Understand your client’s industry. The only way for you to be effective in acting on behalf of your client is to really understand what they are all about. You cannot just whip out a press release and believe you have sufficient information there to attract anybody’s interest. If you really understand what your client is trying to do, and you understand it within the context of the industry they are in, then you have a much greater chance of working with the media to reach your audience with the right messages. This point is absolutely critical. Second, understand the media. You must understand just what materials and information they need to write or to broadcast. You must understand how each organization is set up, who controls whom, and who controls what. You must understand who the specific reporters are in the specific organization and whether or not they will cover 187 Inside The Minds your topic. If you do not take these steps, you will have very little chance of taking any information at all from your client to the audience through that medium. Understanding how to work with a client is essential. Understanding how to be a counselor instead of a vendor is learned over time. Younger people, especially, often don’t feel comfortable being in a counselor’s role. They need to learn this skill. They must learn to be a counselor and not an order taker to be truly successful. Only when you are a counselor can you really help your client beyond the basic fundamentals of writing a release. Last and most important, never lie to the media. All it can do is come back to hurt you – badly. Exploding Technology, Changing Perceptions Based on what has happened in the past, and projecting forward, it is safe to say public relations will continue to grow in the area of technology. There will be more and more technology to power the industry. The tools we rely on will give us a greater ability to fine tune along the way. When I began in the industry, we were basically confined to the use of typewriters. Fax machines were only just beginning to appear. It was a very different environment. Today, the Internet and the databases available on it are in 188 The Art of Public Relations wide use. The fundamentals, such as fax machines and computers, are commonly on every desk. As we go into the future, we will see greater use of the Internet for more research and for the dissemination of the news. We will see a personalization of our audiences. In the future, we won’t have a mass audience. In just the past 20 years, we have seen an explosion of media. We have gone from a relatively small handful of magazines and daily newspapers to magazines that now cover every imaginable topic. In the future we will capture much more of that online. We will dissect our audiences to a much greater degree. We will be able to get down almost to the individual level in the way we drive messages to them, which will be much more personalized. PR will move away from mass market and much closer to the individual, or at least to small-audience categories. If I could wave a magic wand, I would change the common perception of public relations. Many believe it is somehow a shallow activity involving nothing more than hustling stories to the media. I would change this perception, so people could grasp the greater understanding of its importance and the benefits it brings, not just to companies but to the people who watch TV, listen to the radio, and read newspapers. I would also want to change the training necessary to enter the public relations field, making the practice more professional at all levels. That might mean creating higher 189