Blog posts tagged opps

PR doesn't work

What have I learned from spending the thick end of a decade in PR? Well, I’ve learned many things. And one of them is that PR doesn’t work.

Never mind my own experiences and opinion, I’ve heard it said so many times it must be true.

I’ll try to explain.

I spent about three years as a supplier of PR services to Microsoft UK, in particular developing and managing PR-related services that were made available to Microsoft’s network of Gold and Certified partners. These partners came in all shapes and sizes – some were very well versed in PR and marketing, others hadn’t a clue. Plenty had an ad hoc approach to this sort of thing and it was from this group that I learned that PR doesn’t work.

If you’ll forgive me for generalising a little, I can give you a taste of what I heard – usually it went something like this...

“PR..? Yeah, we tried that once a few years ago. It didn’t work.”

And that’s the thing with PR – if you only try it once, or if you don’t invest any focus in it, it probably won’t work.

PR requires commitment – a consistent series of messages pushed out to your target press. I’ve worked with companies who have successfully used PR to out-gun much larger competitors when it came to public perception, proving that hard work and knowing your onions can beat deep pockets time and again.

For a lot of smaller businesses the target press is often the local press or the trade press in your market sector.

You can push out your messages with press releases, letters to the letters page (where better after all..?), photo opportunities, and a host of other things.

But whatever you do don’t just decide to punt out a press release about your new office premises and expect the cry of “hold the front page” to echo throughout the land. Read the press you’re targeting, see what kind of stories they run and try to emulate them. Better still, see if you can identify which individual journalists write about the sort of things you want to say and contact them directly when you have something interesting to tell them.

Finally, remember that one of the differences between PR and advertising is that you shouldn’t expect the press to write word-for-word what you tell them, nor will they show you what they’ve written in advance of publishing it – don’t ask, you’ll only cause offence! Journalists are not an extension of your marketing team and editorial is not the same thing as advertising. It is independent, free from fear or favour (supposedly) and that’s why it can be such a valuable and effective way of publicising what you do.