Business PR mistakes and how to avoid them
Business often underestimates the role of communications. Now humanity lives in the information age. And reputation, gossip, scandals have almost more weight than the quality of your products or services. And this is even if we are not talking about PR crises – then reputation can be lost in days or even hours. In one of the recent materials I told what mistakes the press service can make. But not everything depends on communicators – often the business itself in the face of top management has a misconception about PR and this can play a cruel joke with it. In this text I will talk about several basic mistakes of companies that prevent them from conquering the market space and public opinion.
Disharmony between external narratives and what is behind the scenes. In fact, PR as public relations is a little more than this very “publicity”. Sometimes a company forgets that its employees, as the target audience of internal communications, become an external audience after 6:00 PM and can compare the company’s messages externally and internally. As well as assess whether they correspond to reality, and tell others about their observations. But it’s not just about employees. If you position yourself as an ecological production, and dust and smoke clog the lungs of people around the enterprise. If you talk about digitalization, and people still perform primitive processes manually. This causes dissonance. How to avoid this? If you actually have nothing to praise yourself for, then you don’t need to invent – it’s better to look for another topic. Or work on yourself, and only then communicate. After all, people are not blind, deaf or dumb, so you don’t need to create excuses yourself to catch you in manipulation.
PR strategy without a business foundation. I have repeatedly encountered the fact that a company requires PR specialists to have a communication strategy without having a business development strategy. It doesn’t work like that. PR is not a foundation. Yes, it is one of the walls, sometimes even a load-bearing one. But if a business doesn’t know what it wants, communication specialists won’t help with this. Advice: first, the general business strategy – then the PR strategy. If you don’t even know whether you need a certain vector, then why waste resources on it?
Don’t invest in reputation, but expect it to work in a crisis. No, it won’t work. Because it doesn’t exist. You are not known, you have not been heard of, your expertise in general is zero, you have no loyal brand advocates. So you shouldn’t expect that in a crisis situation the media will immediately pick up your position and people will take your side. So with PR, you either have to work for a long time (it’s expensive), or you have to tiptoe around, avoiding hot spots (but sh*t happens), or you have to understand how to work through a crisis (which is expensive and resource-consuming). That is, there are no easy ways, but it’s impossible to go through each of them without PR.
Demand that PR people put pressure on journalists. Often, even the communications people themselves cannot successfully explain to management why this is categorically impossible. Because they simply cannot argue with the CEO. But media people are not hired employees of your business (with some exceptions?). Journalists work for the audience of their media. And the information needs of this audience in 99% do not correspond at all to the messages that the company wants to “sell” to them. What to do? I emphasize once again – treat journalists on a par with business partners, because they affect the business reputation of the company. Therefore, relations with the media should be built on a stable foundation of mutual respect.
A false idea of one’s own importance to society. This is still justified for big business, which pays billions in taxes and employs thousands of people. But sometimes this cognitive distortion is present in medium and small companies. They may consider themselves the best, the most responsible, the most progressive. And count on the fact that if a reputational crisis occurs, people will definitely take their side. But in the flow of information, where the average consumer has dozens of such “best” in his social media feed per day, these companies simply do not get remembered. So sometimes it’s good to look at yourself from the side, through the eyes of an unbiased person. This will help to avoid illusions and start working with the public with an objective understanding of your strengths and weaknesses.
Confusing advertising and PR. Often businesses try to promote openly marketing information in the media, not understanding that it is about selling goods/services, and not about social value and reputation. Journalists influence the audience. The audience has its own pain points and questions. They are not interested in your new product. It needs to be packaged in such a way that it can be read between the lines. So I do not advise spamming the media with press releases. It is better to create a pool of experts who will communicate topics that are important to society. And the name of your company will definitely sound there – natively, unobtrusively, trustingly and thoughtfully.
Communication costs more than its effect. It is about the irrational use of resources and misunderstanding of business goals. Producing a bunch of news just to fill the information space? Spending resources on covering an event that are not commensurate with the real impact on the target audience? If the company has a clearly defined strategy, a significant number of these unnecessary and frankly strange promotional moves
