For most PR professionals, continuing education means learning about the latest communications tactics.
Over the past year, Adfero Group and the National Press Club have sponsored the Get PR Smart series to focus on exactly these sorts of tactics: how to use the latest social media tools, how to connect more directly with a target audience, and how to effectively engage in media monitoring.
The next event – scheduled for Friday, December 10 – will take a different approach. The seminar will address one of the most important, but often overlooked, subjects for both PR professionals and clients: Establishing a Meaningful Client/Agency Relationship.
An effective communications strategy requires a healthy, productive collaboration between a client and its agency. Yet, too often, critical mistakes are made early in the formation of the agency-client relationship.
For clients, the approach used to select an agency can be problematic down the road. It is natural to choose a PR firm based on its past experience, its expertise in a particular issue, and its general reputation. But if the criteria end there, clients never evaluate a firm on traits like responsiveness and thoughtfulness – two keys to a successful relationship and a successful campaign.
Particularly here in D.C., where the need for communications support can come up unexpectedly, a client’s chemistry with a prospective agency is often a nonfactor. But fit matters – no matter how good an end product may be, an agency should be enjoyable to work with. Clients should take the time to evaluate a potential firm from all angles.
Agencies also make early missteps by overpromising to win a client’s business. Optimism is great, but an agency must be realistic about its own capabilities and what is actually possible to achieve with a given campaign. In the professional services industry, it is widely accepted that client satisfaction is equal to the perceived results minus the client’s original expectations. Overly lofty predictions by the agency will ultimately lead to a dissatisfied client (and probably the end of the relationship).
To avoid disappointment on both ends, it is crucial for clients and agencies to set reasonable expectations at the beginning of a relationship or project.
At the Get PR Smart event in December, my colleague Shellie Edge and I will focus on what sorts of expectations should be set for a client-agency relationship to be productive. Here is a preview:
- Communicating: The agency needs to receive clear expectations about how to communicate with the client. For example, are standing meetings necessary? Is email or phone preferable? Establishing these protocols at the outset will prevent conflict down the road.
- Tracking Progress: The agency should establish how to update the client on a project’s progress. For example, depending on the nature of a project, it might be appropriate to give the client access to a collaborative account management tool. In other cases, clients may not want or need that level of access.
- Measuring Results: Any communications campaign should have measurable metrics for success. The agency needs to establish corresponding reporting protocols that allow a client to see how those metrics are being met.
To learn more about how to establish and nurture a productive and health client-agency relationship, register today for the next Get PR Smart event.
Originally published on the PR Week Insider Blog
A reporter for Roll Call interviewed White House senior adviser David Axelrod last Thursday about the upcoming elections.
Facing a likely historic number of losses for Democrats, Axelrod indicated that the Obama Administration didn’t do enough to explain its accomplishments to the American people.
“President Barack Obama ‘didn’t have time’ to focus on messaging as he tackled major issues that ‘came in rapid fire’ as soon as he got to office,” Axelrod said in the interview.
It’s honorable for Axelrod to admit a mistake. But I am hard-pressed to believe that better messaging would have a big impact on these mid-term elections. Even the best communications strategy would not have stopped the tide of voter dissatisfaction headed for the polls next week.
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I’m Maddie Grant, an association/nonprofit industry blogger on social media and online community building. I’m very happy to have been invited to be a regular poster on K Street Cafe.
This is my first post here, so I’m still getting the lay of the land as to what kinds of topics will interest K Street readers. I am an avid blog reader and definitely consider myself a “content curator”; Here’s the kind of stuff I read and write about on my blog.
So I thought I’d do two things. First, I want point you to a few PR/Public Affairs/Advocacy related blog posts I’ve found very interesting recently – and ask you to tell me if these float your boat or not. Check ‘em out.
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It took a recession, but resumes finally are receiving renewed scrutiny. The ability to embellish and obscure shrinks when one out of every six workers is under or unemployed. More than ever, recruiters want to see accomplishments, not responsibilities; numbers, not adverbs. (more…)
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Can the law keep up with technology? (CNN Tech)
As technology lurches forward at an astounding speed, legal issues are emerging just as fast. A legal system at least five years behind developing technology is at a loss for how to handle issues such as lawsuits derived from posts on social networking sites.
Census Turns to Kids for Help (Wall Street Journal)
The U.S. Census Bureau is running an interesting campaign targeted towards children in immigrant neighborhoods as a way to reach adults who don’t speak English.
The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.
And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.
Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.
Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.
When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.
The press release is dead. Long live the press release.
