Jed Hallam

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The Value of Relationships

Public Relations

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May 13, 2008 View Comments

There has been a mass of blogging about bad pitching and scattering-gun approaches to press releases, primarily bought about by Wired’s Chris Anderson and the Gina Trapani issue, and now everyone appears to be at loggerheads about what the correct protocol is and why we build relationships at all.

I thought I’d through my (albeit green) opinion in.

Public Relations is the art of building relationships with every stakeholder, for corporate gain. We (the PR people) are the conduits to the whole world, controlling every message and shaping image. How the hell is a PR person supposed to build a relationship by sending out group emails to people they have never even conversed with? A relationship is a mutual situation. PR people need to sell themselves and their interests before they sell a story, and they should only try to sell when they know the recipient wants to buy.

PR people who email random reporters are as bad as the renegade windscreen cleaners at traffic lights. They charge along, burst the personal space bubble and then demand a return on their time investment.

I work in PR, and I will admit that when I first began my post (my first job with no knowledge or experience in PR) I was told to create email lists as big as possible and follow up every email with a phone call;
Me: Hi, I was wondering if you got my press release?
Journo: Yes, I did.
Me: Do you need any more information?
Journo: Nope.
Me: Will you be writing about it?
Journo: Nope.
#dial tone#

After a few of those conversations I realised that that is not the way to build relationships, it’s the way to burn them.

Jeremy Pepper has nailed the cause of this… Budgets and training.

Budgets mean that relationships aren’t forged, can’t be maintained and never flourish!

Public Relations needs to evolve and agencies need to invest in training potential stars properly, otherwise they’ll end up on the scrapheap before they’ve even shone.

I also realise that I’m probably the last person in the entire world to write about this, sorry. It’s taking me a while to get up to speed, but bare with me!

  • Agreed. There is a huge process needed to educate clients about what their fees buy them: Our expertise.

    While we all appreciate clients are only really interested in coverage, those results land based on the amount of work that has gone in behind it.

    Our experience and relations, and the ability to build new and successful contacts, comes from days of work on just one story - or even the fruits from years of nurturing.

    You wouldn't make a house with no foundations - it'd fall over. You'd expect the builders to spend weeks drilling down into the earth to secure a sturdy platform on which they can build the house of your dreams. If you hassle the builders to 'get on with it faster', it's likely that:
    1) the house will fall down very quickly
    2) the builders will go for a tea break. A very long one.

    Same applies to media relations. Foundations are the most important part of a campaign. A release is not distributed (hand picked of course), done and dusted in a couple of days. It takes significant amounts of our time getting it right beforehand, and quite a bit more after the event itself.

    It's no good moaning about clients that don't understand and give us a hard time. It's up to us to educate them. Doing this not only helps them understand just what is involved, it also helps us to justify our fees.

    Perhaps 'media training' needs to take on yet another guise - and be rolled out to demonstrate exactly what goes on in a single example process.
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