Story telling

Being a brand is more than just simply pushing out your content to an audience.  Now, there are greater expectations and people are looking to humanize the brand that they engage with. A faceless company does not garner loyalty, but one which has a voice, and a personality and a shared vision or outlook creates loyal customer engagement.

Telling your story is one way to achieve this.

Too often companies forget that their goal is to connect with people – customers ARE people – and instead they focus on pushing out the same old corporate engagement strategies – full of marketing speak and lacking personality, vision and humour.

Don’t make this mistake!

Failure to brief

Part of the problem about working in PR is the sorry fact that many clients think that you know all there is to know about their business after an initial briefing.  They don’t realise that the more detailed and clear the information that they provide , the better the quality of their PR and the more effective the results.

Recently, I had a client ask me to write up a series of  media releases and then get offended when I queried the acronyms that they used.

Just because a client understands and uses terminology does not mean that the general public will understand these terms.  And when you compound this with technical data you are asking for trouble.

Part of any PR professional’s mandate is to simplify things – not to complicate them – and if a client can’t explain adequately what they want in a media release and doesn’t appreciate being questioned then you know damn well that putting them in front of the media will be a mistake.
And probably an expensive one at that.

Who owns the conversation?

These days it isn’t about who you are or what you say – it is about the conversations that you are having and how valuable these conversations are to other people.

It’s “Gossip Girl” gone mad!

Many people though don’t understand this process and, to them, getting a message across is a one sided engagement. They write a media release and send it to a journalist and then wait for it to be published.

Or they create a one-dimensional website saying “this is who we are.”

Feedback is to be feared because they no longer have control of the subject under discussion and now have to engage or respond. And they have to do this in a public forum.

But then again what is worse? Having your customers unhappy about your products or services and you having no way of knowing this – or having someone write to you and you respond quickly and accurately with the information. Other customers (or clients) read about the positive experience that they have had with you and everything moves forward.

I guess the only thing you have to fear is whether you are up to the challenge!

Moi?…Which hat today??

Who am I?

A plethora of stuff depending on which hat I chose to put on…

Corporate communications specialist, speechwriter, author, public relations director, academic, doctor, wife, twitterer, writer, researcher, mother, Islander, sister, daughter, aunt, bullshit artist, expat, traveller, nomad, Australian, social media student, and, of course, blogger!