Public Relations Strategery

Image courtesy of Flickr user stevendepolo

It’s graduation season and once again, the resume, internship, and informational interview requests are rolling in. You’ve just graduated with a degree in communications, advertising, PR, or marketing, and have joined the thousands of other grads in competition for hundreds of entry level jobs and internships. It’s a tough market out there and I don’t envy the position you’re in at all. On the one hand, you’re being told you need to have experience to get the job, but to get that experience, you need a job. It’s a Catch-22 that many people never figure out, leading to them either going back to school hoping things will be easier with an advanced degree (they won’t) or giving up hope entirely.

As someone who has reviewed hundreds of resumes and hired a number of entry level folks over the years, I wanted to share five things that make those resumes stand out to me:

1. Internships located away from your hometown and college – Ultimately, it’s the quality of the internship that is most important – did you get a chance to hold real responsibility? Interact directly with clients? Learn from respected professionals? Aside from that, one of the things that catches my eye is when I see that your internship was located in another city, away from your familiar surroundings. It shows me that you’re willing to take a risk, to go after an opportunity even if it’s not the easiest path, and that you can do it and come out better for it on the other side. There’s nothing wrong with taking the internship that will get you your college credits – with a local business, a family friend, or even with your own college, but if you want to stand out, consider taking that internship that’s a little bit scary and totally outside your comfort zone. After all, if you get a job in this industry, that’s pretty much where you’ll be every day – might as well get used to it now.
2. Specific, detailed examples – One of my pet peeves is when I read resumes that read like job descriptions. Don’t spell out your job duties in a laundry list of bullets telling me what you were hired to do. Tell me what you did do. Rather than taking five bullets to tell me that you wrote press releases, managed social media sites, created media guides, and pitched media, tell me a story. How many press releases did you write? Can you link to them? What were the results? How many social media sites did you manage? What types of content did you share? What were the results? How many media guides did you create? How were they used? If you pitched media, was it local, regional, or national? Where were the results? What was your approach?
3. An active, professional online presence – Link to your blog, your Facebook page, your Twitter profile, your Tumblr, your LinkedIn profile – anything that will give me more information than what’s on your resume. Every new grad has a resume. Not as many have a credible, professional online presence. And please, at least make it look like these profiles weren’t started the day after you graduated. The people who have built and maintained their online presence over a long period of time will stand out over someone with no search results at all.
4. A point of view on…something – If you’re going to have an online presence, make it worth something. Pretty much all recent grads have a decent resume. Most have a LinkedIn profile. Some have an About.me or similar site, but very few have a point of view on something related to marketing, advertising, or PR. You’ve got fresh eyes. You haven’t been jaded by years of bureaucracy, clients, and budgets. What needs to be changed? What do you want to accomplish? What are your thoughts on the future of social media? Are you a PR specialist? Then start a blog and talk about your thoughts on the industry. Get on Twitter and share your thoughts on the latest PR crisis. Share links to articles you’re reading on Facebook. This isn’t rocket science. If you’re a graphic designer, talk about the latest trends in graphic design. Share your opinion on who’s doing it right. Show me your thoughts and beliefs and what sets you apart from the hundreds of other people who claim to do that as well.
5. A recognizable name – And by a name, I mean your name. It’s pretty easy to find the names, blogs, Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn profiles of people working at the organization you’re applying to. Before blindly filling out some form, attaching your resume and hitting submit, do some research first. Comment on the blog posts of the people in the department you’re applying to. Follow them on Twitter. Share one of their status updates with your network. That way, when your resume hits their desk, you’re not just another applicant, you’re that person who’s been making those insightful comments on your blog or retweeting your tweets.

There are a lot of new graduates and not a lot of available positions. Working three or four internships even after graduating is common. Many will get frustrated and give up. Don’t let a boring, run-of-the-mill resume keep you from reaching your potential. Spend some time now updating your resume and online presence to set yourself apart. Even that may not be enough to get you the job, but it should at least help you get your resume printed out and put on the boss’s desk a lot more often.

Make friends, not ads.™

That's the message that greeted me when I first opened the Cramer-Krasselt homepage and again when I walked into the lobby for my first interview five months ago. Seemed especially fitting for me as I've railed against traditional advertising ("look at me!! come buy my stuff!! Now! Now! Now!") and traditional PR ("we're the world's leading provider of innovative solutions…") for what seems like forever. Five months after that first interview and six weeks after my first day, I realize that this is much more than a tagline – it's the future of branding. 

For years now, I've been telling my teams, my clients, and anyone else who will listen that they need to read the Cluetrain Manifesto, internalize it, and put it into action. In fact, stop reading this post and do yourself a favor and read the 95 theses included in that book. It has really changed the way I think about business, branding, public relations, and advertising. Now, maybe I'm just naive or I haven't been in the private sector long enough, but I'm seeing signs that this industry is finally starting to get it. Success isn't about creating that one really cool ad, but about creating lasting relationships with your employees, your customers, and the public. 

Here are a few of the recent articles that I've come across that seem to back this up – 

Consumers Are Most Likely to Forgive USAA, Hyatt, Chick-fil-A and Costco Because Of Their Customer-Service Records, According to New Research — But Much Less Likely To Forgive Chrysler, US Airways, Comcast and BofA

"Forgiveness is a valuable asset that you earn by consistently meeting customers' needs, but many companies don't have enough forgiveness stored up to recover from their miscues"

It's Time for Advertising to Take a Lesson (Gasp!) from Public Relations

"They're not your customers; they're your constituents. It's been said often, but it bears repeating: People don't buy brands. They join them. So modern brands must function like political parties, identifying issues, expressing a coherent world view, staging debates and structuring dialogues."

Social Media Is About Cultivating Community, Not Corralling Cattle

"The harder you try to sell, the more you scare — or simply bore — people away. This central truth is not difficult for brands to understand, but for some reason it is hard for them to internalize and act upon. What is first required is to embrace social relationship-building not as the latest marketing fad, or even as a new reality that has been forced upon you, but as a means to revaluate who you are, what you stand for and why you are in business in the first place."

"As agencies, we have to be honest with clients and help them figure out how big or small their footprint should be in an ever-expanding social universe. Are we crafting community strategies with the brands' objectives truly in mind? Marketers should take the time to step back, look at how many things their consumers have in common and build social presences around what their customers care about and why they are connecting."

"Let's bring PR in so they'll get us some media coverage for the new launch!"

"Let's make sure we have PR look this over to make us sound better."

"Can you have PR develop a plan to make sure the public thinks we're awesome?"

"Our customers keep complaining about our product – can we get PR in here to help drown that out with good stuff instead?" 

"No one is following our Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Pinterest/LinkedIn/Foursquare account – can PR go get us more fans/followers/likes/subscribers/friends?"

We've all heard these things at one point or another in our career because people continue to misunderstand what public relations is. Despite coming up with new definitions, there continues to be a lack of awareness on the part of our clients, colleagues, and friends about what we actually do and the value that we bring to a business. PR isn't:

• Some transactional activity that's thought about only after the advertising campaign is created.
• Something that's brought in after the product is completed and you're gearing up for launch.
• About getting media coverage.
• About making the public think your product is the best or that your company is awesome
• About generating "buzz"
• Something that's going to cover up bigger issues like customer service or product quality

Public Relations is much deeper than all of this. Public Relations is about – you guessed it – building and maintaining relationships with the public, the very public buying your products, walking into your stores, writing about your company, and telling their friends about their experiences. Those users, demographics, markets, and audiences that you and your analysts always talk about? They're actual human beings. Human beings with very loud voices who can, at moment's notice, make or break your business. Your brand isn't determined by what you say you are, but by what you actually do. It's determined by what your customers see and hear from you every day.

The general public has never had more power than they do right now. Yet, businesses continue to try to take the easy way out clumsily advertising, optimizing, and marketing to these people like they're switches that can be turned on and off if we hit the right levers. What most companies don't realize is that not only is the public more powerful than ever, they are also smarter than ever too. Your customers, employees, and partners want require more than a company talking at them – they want a company that talks with them. They want to talk to actual people. They want companies who care about more than selling more widgets. They want companies who think about something other than their own bottom line. 

Paradoxically, organizations continue to look at public relations practitioners – the very people trained in developing and maintaining these relationships that are more important than ever – as little more than an afterthought. "Oh yeah – we're going to need PR to drum up some media coverage too!" Smart organizations are realizing that marketing and advertising can only take them so far. As my favorite book, the Cluetrain Manifesto says –

"We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with."

Successful organizations are integrating public relations earlier and deeper than ever before. Instead of being a key component of their marketing campaigns, PR is now becoming an integral part of their business plans. This integration, while more time-consuming, has many benefits:

• Online communities of advocates who promote your brand not because they're being paid or because they have to, but because they truly love your brand
• Consumers who are more likely to forgive when you inevitably make a mistake
• Employees who truly love your brand and who act as an extension of your marketing department through their everyday work
• People who will pay a little more for your product because they trust you
• Reporters who call you asking for story ideas instead of the other way around
• Organizations who voluntarily cross-promote your products/services because they trust and respect you
• People who will leap to your defense in the face of attacks and criticism
• A corporate voice that sounds authentically human instead of stiff, hollow, and fake
• Content that is entertaining, informative, and/or useful instead of screaming BUY OUR STUFF NOW!!!!
• Issues that never become full-blown crises because of the relationships that have been built with employees, customers, media, and partners
• Corporate counsel that represents the public, not just the bottom line or the shareholder

The public is more powerful now than ever before and good public relations has never been important for your brand. Shouldn't PR become more than a bullet point at the end of the agenda, more than last department to get budget allocations, more than the cherry on top of the sundae? Shouldn't your relationships with the public be a key component of everything you do?

I attended the PRSA Digital Impact Conference last week, and like many PR events, it had a mix of really great presentations but I also noticed the continuation of a disturbing trend throughout our profession – laziness. Laziness disguised as "social media best practices" and cool new tools. 

Don't get me wrong – I don't think people are actively trying to be lazy. I don't think most people even realize that they're trying to take the easy way out. I think they view it as becoming more efficient or effective. And while many of these tools and practices may help someone increase their reach or save them some time, they are also making social media a hell of a lot less social. Why are marketers and PR pros doing everything they can to eliminate the most beneficial part of social media – the people? We are taking what should be a boon to our industry – social media – and making the exact same mistakes we've been making for years with other media. We're reducing relationships to impressions. We're eliminating conversations in favor of automated Tweets. Auto-DMs have replaced actual introductions. Hell, ghost-tweeters even allow you to remove completely  yourself from the equation altogether. People, relationships, and feelings are complicated – metrics, statistics, and tools are a lot easier to deal with. 

Imagine if we could do the same in the real world. Tired of going on all those dates without that…ahem…"payoff" you're looking for? Here's a tool that will let you isolate the targets most likely to deliver said payoff. Tired of all those boring conversations with your wife about how her day went? Here's a tool that will play auto-responses from you so that you can focus on watching the game instead.  I'll just use this app to create a hologram to sit at my desk even when I'm not there and auto-talk with the people I work with. That way, I can be "interacting" with my co-workers 24 hours a day!! 

Dan Perez wrote a post a few months ago – "The Bastardization of Pinterest Has Begun: A Rant" – where he noticed how marketers, advertisers, and PR people have flocked to Pinterest, crowding out actual conversation in favor of more and more content, infographics, and promotions. Social media used to be about people connecting with other people. Forming and strengthening actual relationships. Sadly, it hasn't taken long for people to figure out how to game the systems, how to eliminate actual conversations (those take time, you know) and minimize actual relationships (those can get messy). 

Like the kid scoring 10 goals on wraparound goals on NHL '94 (seriously, if you played that game, you know what I'm talking about – that play was unstoppable) or blocking extra points with Lawrence Taylor on Tecmo Bowl, people are sucking all of the fun and authenticity out of our social media platforms via tools and practices that promote automation and efficiency over relationships and conversation. 

Integrating social media into your public relations and marketing strategies can be difficult and if you haven't already done it, it's only going to get harder. There are a lot of PR professionals out there who think it's going to get easier – there's going to be some new tool that will automate everything, some new "best practices" that they can copy, or that some social media playbook is just going to appear that gives them the step-by-step of how to "do social media." There will always be people claiming to have tools and methodologies that will maximize your time in social media or to eliminate the time you spend Tweeting with only one person (if you would just Tweet between the hours of 3 and 4 on Tuesdays, you'll maximize your reach!!). 

Don't be one of those guys. Be the guy who values actual relationships and conversations over likes, impressions, and followers. Instead of trying to game the system, take some time and actually enjoy the people you're getting to know. Being able to blast your generic press releases out to 10,000 more people isn't a good thing. Focus on sending it to the right 1,000 people instead. Talk with a reporter about the stuff he's writing before you need something from him. Instead of measuring your success by how much stuff you put out and how many people it may have reached, measure your success by how many people actually read it, shared it, and did something with it. Just like playing Tecmo Bowl or NHL '94, gaming social media is easy, fast and unfulfilling. Building actual relationships and talking with people takes time, can be messy, and isn't real efficient, but it's much more rewarding.