PR people need continuity. So do their clients.
The PR consultant with the heart of a journalist (instead of the brain of an outright showman) cultivates niche interests. When you hire him or her you pay for the PR to cultivate YOUR interests. These consultants are intelligent people with a nose for news and a vested interest – yours. That’s what you pay them for.
A freelancer will write a press release for a fee, if that’s what you want. If the writer is acquainted with your industry, the piece will have a resonance with your market because it will have the right references, jargon and touchstones. If the writer is hired purely for the right price or happenstance, you’ll get reasonable copy, but any effectiveness will be down to the writer’s sense of craft more than anything else. Strategic, emotional or ‘hot-button’ responses will be elicited by chance as much as anything else.
Keep this in mind, as a hiring client, if you want a ‘press release’…
I am a pragmatic publicist, lazy if you like to call it that. I will not strain myself in promoting a hollow cause or a hopeless brand if I can’t see journalists and editors buying into it.
I am a wily PR consultant – I enjoy pursuing the shortest route to gaining exposure because to do otherwise leeches the life out of me and all around me.
I am a vain columnist – relying to a large extent on journalists to further the aims of my client brands and their positive exposure requires a degree of journalistic idiom and empathy to get ink. I aim never to submit any copy that a fellow professional would question or ridicule.
I am an expedient journalist – understanding what busy editors need in order to meet deadlines and satisfy readership expectations informs my writing. Knowledge of media outlet editorial style and policy helps cut out press info from other PRs if the editor knows he/she can include my copy with minimum subbing, my submissions go to the top of the pile every issue.
Now frankly, to achieve this, demands familiarity between brand and PR practitioner. In this age of fiscal probity and the need to hold onto cash, brands need to know this – most especially, small and young businesses who are a) unused to managing outsourced marketing, and b) whose cashflow is much more life-intensive than for larger corporations.
To summarize, you cannot say to a PR professional, “Write me a press release”, and reasonably expect satisfaction. If you get it, it’s a fluke and you’re lucky. (That alone is a basis for an effective business relationship.) By inviting in a communications professional to your business and embedding a trust, you’re embarking on a contract that is akin to a happy marriage. Trust and familiarity will breed a dynamic that means you say I do, as well as I think you react, and this needs to come about and I haven’t the time, and even I’m not quite sure what I mean, but, you know….
I have actually sat in the offices of a global PR consultancy near Goodge Street in London where a 22 year-old graduate suggested – as the solution to a 180° brand turnabout – “Let’s put out a press release”… Hallelujah, we are delivered!
A client has never been as far from its PR resource as this. And it’s time to bite the Luger.
Don’t interview a PR consultant.
Talk to him.
Engage her.
Establish common ground and conceive a partnership. You control the information now so make use of it. In time your PR consultant will know more about your market than you do. If there is trust, this information – pooled – will be gold.
Above all – don’t be an arse! Trust your PR as an uninterested service-provider; then as a disinterested commentator; and then as an engaged wayfinder.