TOP mistakes in press services: why are business communications not always effective?
A business that consumers and partners trust. A business that even those who do not use its services know about. A business whose reputation, even in times of crisis, makes people doubt whether it could have made a mistake. This “ideal” image is the work of the PR team. But understanding the goals does not always mean understanding the tools with which it can be achieved. Sometimes press services make mistakes even at the stage of organizing their work. I analyzed my experience and collected several key points that communicators should avoid.
Lack of systematization. Effective PR is a structured and regular process, so press service employees must adhere to consistency in communications. And when there is no strategy (or it is ignored), the company’s public manifestations become spotty and chaotic, without any schedule and with large gaps in time. Does the business only congratulate on the holidays and react to crises that have already happened? This is what unsystematic communications look like.
PR is out of sync with business goals. Communications is as much a part of the company as logistics or finance. And they should work for the goals of the business. However, often the PR department is either not informed about the company’s strategic plans, or does not pay attention to them. As a result, the messages that are broadcast in the public sphere do not coincide with what the business needs. Often, such a gap occurs when PR people mindlessly carry out the orders of the CEO or other heads of related departments. For example, the company has a problem area and the communications people are strongly recommended to work on it (and often only on it).
But the fact is that not all communications are needed by the business. Often they are not worth either the time of PR people or the money that the company spends on them. In one of the large businesses where I used to work, they introduced an assessment of the effectiveness of communications. As a result, 40% simply fell out as inappropriate – they did not work for the company’s strategy in any way, but simply served as informational noise. Here we come to the next mistake.
Communication for the sake of communication. Some press services believe that even in the absence of information drives, one must somehow remind oneself of oneself so as not to disappear from the information agenda. This “just in case” not only does not work in favor of reputation, but on the contrary makes it worse. Inappropriate, frankly empty public manifestations are clearly worse than silence. Although again, if the PR department is aware of the goals of the business and is trained in systematicity, there will always be something to talk about.
Turning CEOs or other top managers into personal PR people. If strengthening the business reputation of management is part of the strategy of creating a pool of brand advocates, that’s OK. However, sometimes public manifestations of managers have nothing to do with business goals at all and are the result of personal influence on PR people. Is it worth spending company resources on this? A rhetorical question.
Lack of analytics and measurement of the effect of communications. This is a complex but fundamental issue. There are many tools in marketing, but PR is more modest about this. Communicators use either the AMES methodology or invent their own metrics to give the business figures that it will understand. And this is necessary not only to protect the annual PR budget. The lack of analytics does not allow to fully understand the scale of the communication crisis, if it has begun, and even to miss its beginning. And resolving reputational crises requires immediate involvement in the work, because the consequences will be felt not only by PR specialists, but also by the entire business.
Lack of specific interaction between the press service and other departments/CEO/Owner. How can this manifest itself? The PR specialist receives information either partially or after the fact. The legal department does not allow the company’s position to be released into the public space. The coordination of messages, urgently needed to protect the company’s reputation, is delayed so much that the information crisis has time to acquire threatening proportions. The solution could be a company-wide system protocol that obliges everyone involved to a) respond; b) do it quickly; c) fully cooperate with the PR department. I discussed this in detail in one of my previous columns.
Destructive attitude towards the media. A critical mistake that press services or individual PR people sometimes make is to believe that journalists are the sworn enemies of business or owe them something. Media people are not opponents in the information ring or servants. They are business partners, and it is this healthy positioning that should lie in building relationships with the media – constructive and effective. This is the basis of loyalty and trust, a guarantee that if an information crisis occurs, journalists will come to you for a comment, and not quote opponents.
