I was one of a wide assortment of public relations and corporate communications people who gathered at a holiday party last month hosted by Douglas Simon, President and CEO of D S Simon Productions. The company is a broadcast and social media video production firm with headquarters on West 36th Street in Manhattan. Doug decided to take advantage of the gathering of this motley crew at his studio by recording interviews with some of us with tips for corporate communications best practices in 2012.
Some of you may remember a blog post I did last year criticizing my own performance on a video interview Doug did with me, for which I was, sadly, not well prepared. This time around I was better prepared.
I’d welcome your own PR tips for the year ahead. I just read an economic forecast predicting that 2012 would be the turn-around year that people have been waiting for, so hopefully many of you will have bigger budgets for public relations, corporate communications and marketing communications. What are your highest priorities for spending those budgets in 2012?
Even though I’ve been in a PR agency for quite a few years, I still remember what it was like to be responsible for agency activities within a corporation. That experience gives me a little insight into clients’ pet peeves about their agencies. Senior PR agency managers are generally pretty savvy from long experience about what not to do. But not everyone in their organizations has the experience – or the training – to know. For their sake, here are some tried and true ways that public relations agencies and their account teams put their client relationships at risk.
Agencies get fired for:
1.Not managing the client’s expectations. Often this happens because the agency over-promises to win an account. This may help win new business, but it usually results in trouble and leads to frequent client turnover for an agency.
2. Allowing the lines between business and friendship to become blurry in the client relationship. The relationship, no matter how friendly, is rooted in business. When the team members forget this, problems can develop that can lead to bad feelings on both sides.
3. Providing unrealistic budgets and then exceeding them.
4. Disappearing for weeks at a time without making contact with the client. Even if the agency is working diligently on its own, clients want progress reports.
5. Shoddy writing that is poorly organized and has grammatical or spelling errors, or factual mistakes because the writer hasn’t bothered to pay attention to details. Either the client has to spend valuable time editing or re-writing, or throw it back to the agency to be re-done. A frequent complaint we hear about “the last agency” is that the account team had poor writing skills and/or produced sloppily written materials.
6. Not measuring results. If the client isn’t given a ruler to measure the agency’s performance, then the agency sets itself up to have the results questioned. And the client has nothing to show top management to justify budget requests.
Some of these are so obviously destructive that it’s hard to understand why agencies aren’t vigilant in preventing them. And yet they happen over and over again. Agency management usually does know that certain types of behavior ask for trouble, but knowing it is one thing; preventing or eliminating it is much harder.
Great agency management and sound ethics should result in long-term client relationships. However, sometimes agencies lose clients even when everything is going well, through budget cuts or changes in a company’s needs. It’s a tough business, but I wouldn’t choose any other!
During my career I’ve been a journalist, a corporate communications manager and a public relations agency manager. These different vantage points have given me some insight about how PR agencies annoy their clients and clients annoy their agencies. In the communications industry, there’s plenty of advice around about how public relations consultants should behave in order to stay in clients’ good graces. But I doubt that clients receive as much input about how they should behave when working with their agencies.
Perhaps you’re thinking that the client is paying the bill, and therefore can set the guidelines and tone for working with an agency. However, paying for a professional service doesn’t automatically make people aware of the best way to relate with the professionals providing the service. The relationship between the agency and client is vital for optimal performance of both, and the optimal performance of the agency provides the best ROI for the client.
So, here’s my list of six ways clients can drive their PR agencies crazy.
The agency team members start pleading for a change of assignment (or begin interviewing for new jobs) when:
A client criticizes really excellent work. (Some clients think the best way to get the most for their money is to keep the pressure on the agency at all times to make the team feel it never does enough. This is counter-productive, because it’s very disheartening for agency staff.)
A client expects the team to pitch the media and arrange interviews when there’s no news, and no budget to develop projects that would actually create news. Wasting a journalist’s time can ruin our relationship with that individual.
A senior executive makes a habit of cancelling media interview appointments at the last minute. Sometimes it takes weeks, even months, to arrange an interview. We know that busy executives sometimes can’t help cancelling, but it’s the responsibility of our client contact person to explain the importance of the interview and make sure that a cancellation really can’t be avoided.
Company executives – even the client contact – react slowly to agency messages about journalists’ needs for information or access. If the company doesn’t meet a journalist’s deadline, either the company will be left out of media coverage that could have beneficial, or the journalist will write about the company without hearing its point-of-view and input.
The client wants the agency to work for free. This is never stated directly in this way, but that’s what it means when the scope of a project that is underway is increased, but the agency is expected to stick to its original cost estimate.
The client doesn’t ask for the agency’s input, but simply gives orders to carry out plans made internally. The client squanders a valuable resource by not making use of the skills and experience of the agency team. We can’t do our best for a client that doesn’t include us in the decision-making process.
One of the advantages of being the owner of a PR agency is that you can decide which clients you want to work for and walk away from the impossible ones. At Bridge, we are very fortunate to have considerate, thoughtful clients. But it’s my job as head of the company to sniff out the prospective clients that would indeed drive us crazy, and walk away from them.
It’s only fair to show the other side of the story. My next post will list six ways PR agencies put client relationships at risk.
…that business people from overseas often don’t know
A visitor from Europe came to discuss U.S. PR with us for his company recently. He thought he knew just what needed to be done and how it should be done, and he had already allocated a budget for the work. Our conversation shook him up a bit and sent him back to the drawing board. What he discovered is that the American market was different from his own in many respects when it comes to communications and that many of his assumptions were wrong. Here are five of the important differences we pointed out:
1. Size matters
The U.S. population is large and dispersed over a huge geographical area. There are as many people in all of Switzerland as in New York City alone. The number of media outlets in the U.S. is much larger compared to a country in Europe or South America, or one of the smaller Asian nations. (I’m not saying that Americans consume more news.)
2. From tostados to tempura
In the U.S., there are 21 languages that have at least 200,000 native speakers. Wide diversity is a fact of life in all the big American cities and even many small ones. There are few places where so many diverse cultures live side-by-side (relatively peacefully) under the same flag.
3. PR: not just “publicity,” a strategic function
In some parts of the world, PR is still restricted to bringing messages from senior management to the media and publicizing new products. It is “publicity” in an old-fashioned wining-and-dining sense of the word, and not a high-ranking function. In the U.S., PR professionals develop the messages, they don’t just deliver them. PR – and its twin sister, corporate communications – are strategic functions here that are considered very important by senior management. Often the top communications person reports to the CEO.
4. Higher budgets
Size, diversity and the strategic nature of PR all contribute to higher costs and bigger budgets.Overseas companies often come to the U.S. with too low a budget to do an effective job of communicating. They don’t understand that they need to spend more here to reach their target audiences (who have different lifestyles, are spread 3,000 miles apart, live in totally different climates, come from a wide variety of cultural traditions and speak different languages).
5. Vital importance of targeting
With such diversity and geographic spread, the way to make effective use of a communications budget is to narrow down the audience to the people you most want and need to reach – those who are the best and most important targets for your company – rather than trying to reach everyone. Unless this is done, either the budget becomes astronomical or efforts are spread so thinly they aren’t effective.
