Throw Out Old PR Elves for the New Year
It's hard to imagine a more bountiful time in terms of the Internet and its power to connect like-minded and link-minded folks to one another. The challenge I will give to you this week is to make it a goal that you will utilize all the social media and networking tools available to you and be authentic when doing so.
Too often traditional PR advises us to stay inside, lock the doors and only let one elf out to make the annual company pronouncement. Too often that company announcement is laden with overused buzzwords that someone drinking to much laced-nog late at night added to make the company sound more official. These words including: leading, leader, cutting-edge, and anything you can find in the "Buzzwhacked" dictionary.
This year make it a different year for your PR and tell the truth, take out all the buzzwords and help educate your customers or potential customers to why your solution or service will ease their pain points.
Write articles that have real value, post blogs that have real purpose, and freely give your insight to whomever inquires it. Answer the journalist's calls and don't put up walls between you and your "messaging" - have them all be congruent, consistent and real.
Get rid of the traditional PR elves that want to polish your words and your company up so much that what you really do doesn't even come through.
Here are the top ten ways to reinvigorate your PR in the New Year:
1. I will not be afraid to answer a question coherently and with speed.
2. I will no longer muck up our real accomplishments with buzzwords to make them seem even larger.
3. I will ensure that my company and PR team are congruent in their messaging and that we all know what that messaging is.
4. I won't let a PR person rewrite, rethink or retool our company's mission into a hodgepodge of buzzwords and over-intellectualized crap.
5. I will be open with our achievements and our lessons learned from failures.
6. I will blog openly and authentically or I won't blog at all.
7. I won't hire a bunch of elf-ghost-bloggers to blog for me.
8. I will understand that conversation is a two-way street and I will learn how to listen even when a reporter is irritatingly overbearing.
9. I will encourage my employees to talk about what our company stands for and be advocates of the company in their own way.
10. I won't resort to tricks, thievery, alias postings to overtake my competitors on the PR front. I will simply get my message out there and work hard to live up to what we promise.
