Yes, enlightenment is the lifeblood of public relations. But before your ideas can sink in, you must first learn how to land them like rainbows striking those whom want to inspire colorfully.
To impress and hold what’s so precious in this world, people’s attention, your news needs to flash and sparkle with as much color, wit and wisdom as you can muster.
From where cometh these rainbows? From what you must first acquire yourself, credibility, knowledge and insight, then impressive ways to share it.
More than just attracting readers and viewers, your news must contain insightful knowledge that will stimulate interest in doing something, being someone, going somewhere, and the ultimate outcome (drum roll), buying something!
That’s why that headline and first sentence must strike a chord, grab attention, be enlivening as possible, or in PR you’re dead in the water.
What attracts many of us to PR is an instinct for sales, for selling our concepts, our ideas. For me it was an instinct for how to resolve crises.
I had a knack for helping clients steer around or navigate through rough, sometimes turbulent waters. I’d find ways to prevent their ship or business from sinking after some scorching media coverage of an atrocious mistake or CEO misconduct.
Perhaps it stems from my once having been a lifeguard rushing to save kids caught in rip currents. Today we call rescuing corporations crisis management.
It’s responding forthrightly and persuasively to whatever virulent attacks to avoid tarnishing or desecrating reputations, rising to the occasion rapidly by addressing whatever charge, but doing it ever so truthfully.
In the PR process I’ve helped some of the largest corporations in America to regain respect, customer confidence and to restore integrity and brand loyalty.
Something the process requires is adeptness, which usually takes media training, teaching executives how to get up off the floor, to tell what really happened and why it’s never going to happen again.
One night I literally got off the floor myself and decided to switch careers.
I was a newspaper reporter covering an angry protest rally in Philadelphia when someone came up and coldcocked me literally into another line work.
After teaching journalism at a few universities, I decided to go into PR, first at a major PR firm in New York City, then doing PR at ABC, then hopping over to NBC. There I was vice president, assistant to the president, before starting my own public relations firm, TransMedia Group.
Our first clients included what was then the largest company in America, AT&T and the biggest city, New York City, whose mayor then, Ed Koch, thanked me for my promotion on subways what was so important to him, fair housing.
Today TransMedia Group serves clients worldwide, including some whose founders and CEO’s it helped to become billionaires.
No, there’s nothing more effective in creating those customer enlightening rainbows around products and services as public relations.
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