Note to the PR folks who read this blog:
Click on over to Shel Israel’s post, The New PR Practitioner, at Global Neighbourhoods. It’s worth your read. (Anal-retentive grammarian types — and you know who you are — please ignore Israel’s typos long enough to soak in the overall message. It’s important that you do.)
Israel has a solid PR agency background. He cut his teeth at Regis McKenna Inc., where “we were taught to be trusted sources of information for the press and analysts who could most influence our clients relationships with customers and prospects.” So he knows whereof he speaks. And this background gives him no small insight into the issues facing the modern-day PR agency.
That insight translates nicely into higher ed PR. Oh, sure, we don’t pitch as aggressively as a lot of the agency folk, and unlike many of our corporate colleagues we’re more interested in getting coverage for our institutions rather than keeping their names out of the press. But with the rise of social media, our role is evolving, and the very nature of our work — at institutions of higher learning, where online access is ubiquitous — ought to prompt a greater sense of urgency among us than our agency and corporate brethren.
Folks, we need to get this:
PR people have a future as the same kind of trusted resources we were back in the days of Regis McKenna. except now we can use blogging and social media. We get to establish our own credibility over time and when we discuss our own clients on our blogs, we are trusted sources of information relevant to our audiences. …
[I]f you are in the PR proffesion … you will not succeed if you focus on smiling and dialing a media list of strangers, if you are intent in inject hubris into what you have to say or write. If you think you can succeed by being just cute or clever, you are living in the wrong Era.
Today, you need to join the conversation. You are part of the news distribution system, not just for your clients, but for the community where your clients would like to flourish.
This to me is very liberating. The PR people I know and respect are all interesting people and great story teller. They often know so much more than their clients allow them to express. We are now in a Conversational Era. It looks like we will be in this Era for some time to come, and the best and brightest of the PR professionals will join in that conversation, while others will just be left behind.
So. What are we doing to build those relationships? How are we becoming those trusted sources of influence and information? How are we joining in on the conversation in this Conversational Era?
