It’s not something that I do very often, but it’s time to take out my soapbox, dust it off, and jump on.
I’ve seen an increase in sales pitches on social media from public relations “professionals” who offer to teach business owners how to “do PR” on their own. They promise to “reveal the secrets” of generating coverage in major national outlets and achieving triple-digit increases in sales without the need to hire “high-priced” PR professionals.
I guess it was just a matter of time until the “get rich quick” video courses began targeting the public relations profession.
Perhaps I’m biased because I teach public relations at the university, but it’s true that you don’t need to have a degree in communications and/or public relations to be a successful public relations professional. I know many excellent practitioners who earned their undergraduate degrees in majors like music, theater, and political science.
However, practitioners who pitch the role of “PR” as simply earning coverage in national outlets do both the public relations profession and their clients a huge disservice. Focusing solely on securing earned media for an organization’s products or services is only a small, though admittedly important, aspect of a strategic public relations campaign.
A comprehensive, strategic public relations program will include many of following:
- Reputation management
- Crafting and distributing messages
- Research (understanding target audiences)
- Media relations
- Crisis management
- Thought leadership
- Corporate communications
- Event management
- Internal communications
- Media tracking and analysis
- Content creation
- Application stories and testimonials
Public relations is strategic and comprehensive. It focuses on how various internal and external audiences and stakeholders perceive the brand. The public relations strategy and tactics impact and inform nearly all, if not all, functions in the organization (sales, marketing, human resources, etc.). Public relations professionals help clients understand their various key audiences (internal and external) and develop and deliver key messages to achieve desired actions over the channels their audiences use, in the formats they prefer.
Representing international technology product manufacturers for more than 25 years, a significant amount of my efforts have been focused on securing earned media placements through product reviews, but in all cases, that has been only a fraction of the support I have been tasked to provide.
Honestly, securing coverage is the easy stuff, so if an organization is happy just getting a few articles placed, then, by all means, they’re probably better off paying someone to teach them to do PR themselves. Many PR professionals likely wouldn’t take the piecework anyway.
But if you’re an organization that needs help managing your reputation, establishing your organization as a thought leader and innovator, differentiating you from the competition, protecting the organization from potential crises, helping you understand your audiences and driving them to action, and more, then find yourself a PR professional that holds the Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) credential.
Spoiler alert – yes, retaining a PR professional with an APR credential will likely cost more than if you did the work yourself, but how much is your organization and reputation worth?