What a good PR agency should do for your company

My article published January 11 on PR agencies has prompted a number of comments in my blog in Spanish. As a result, I have felt the need to clarify my position, which is not “don’t bother hiring a PR agency”, as some threaders seemed to think. I believe that a PR agency can add significant value to a company, if they take the right approach. So the task in hand is how to find the right PR agency.

My premises are still the same: the PR agency needs to focus on reaching people, it will need to leverage the most it can from them, and should use the latest formats and trends. In a world in which we increasingly expect companies to establish personal contact with us, we can no longer expect mail merges and press notes sent out to addresses gleaned from a database to have any impact.

What should we expect from our pr agency?

• Develop a presence: A good agency will advise you about what people need to know about your company when they search the web. This involves a corporate ego search and helping you establish an online presence in all senses. The agency will need to advise you why your page needs certain sections, why you must have a blog, why your page should be bang up to date, and even help you to develop content if necessary. Furthermore, it should help you to define your awareness strategy on the social networks, avoiding the scattergun approach of “the more people you reach the better” (this isn’t true; the important thing is who you reach, not how many people you reach), or “everything to everywhere” (which is tedious for all concerned).
• Who says what: Every time somebody mentions you, you must know about it immediately. But beyond the “press clippings” services now available everywhere online, your agency should help you to detect opportunities, which is to say when somebody didn’t mention you, but could have done. When a page, influencer, or media outlet writes or talks about a subject that falls within your remit, you need to know how to contact them and develop a communication opportunity in the medium term. Your agency’s job isn’t to spend its time looking for your name, your directors’ or what you do on the internet, it is to think like you and generate opportunities proactively.
• Who is who: Your agency needs to understand the who is who that makes up your relevancy score, and that is not just about a list of publications. It must include anything that can be used as a communications opportunity, everything that you need to know, and what people need to know about you and what you do. It’s not enough for your agency to tell you that you need to be published in this or that media, they have to tell you who in that media writes about the same things you do, how to reach that person, when they have last written something similar… and aside from meeting them personally, you need to maintain a good relationship with them that will allow them to open doors for you, and they need to know the people that you know.
• How to get where you want to be: At the same time, the agency should know what is in the diary of these people or publications, including recommendations on when to use advertising. Your agency has to work closely with you on advertising and provide some input if necessary.
• Know you business: Good communication means knowing what is going on out there. If you start to feel that you are having to explain everything, then either they’re not the right agency, or they are not working hard enough. So, if you’re a rocket scientist, your PR agency needs to know as much about rocket science as you do.
• Communication skills: Your agency needs to be something like a coach in communication skills. In other words, it must work with you on developing them, knowing what surroundings make you feel comfortable, teach you to develop your skills, and to overcome your weaknesses. At the same time, it needs to be proactive in seizing opportunities to spread the word, and sell you as a possible expert to the media, but without shoving you down everybody’s throat.
• Boost the company and the people who work in it: What should happen is that because your agency is working so hard, you feel like you are on communication steroids. What’s more, this does not apply just to you or your CEO. Your agency needs to know about all the resources in your company, for example, that crack programmer you have, and that when the time comes, they can use that person who for whatever reason is the right choice for a particular opportunity. It might even be that somebody who knows somebody else can open a door for you.
• A medium to long-term vision: Your agency must not have a short-term view of things that leads to an “impact for the sake of impact” approach. Instead it should set a time frame for putting you in the minds of those who write and talk about issues related to your relevancy score.
• Understand what an agent does: Following the principles of agency theory, your agency should understand that it doesn’t always make sense to do what everybody else is doing, but that there are many communication jobs that you can do, and that therefore, their role should be to make your communication more sophisticated, adding value to it, and not becoming mired in details that you can take care of.
• Events: Many communication opportunities present themselves at events. Your agency needs to know about the big events in your area of specialization, and plan out your attendance. This means working closely with one person, and using the appropriate resources to open doors. You also need to feel “protected” when you go to an event. There is nothing worse than the feeling of being “alone” at such gatherings.
• A modern vision of communication: Your agency must understand how modern communication works, which above all else means emphasizing the personal approach, in finding you high-level contacts, and in avoiding press notes, which only have a place on special occasions, when, for whatever reasons, which may just be timing, it is not possible to set up specialist communication. If your agency sends out press notes beginning with: “To whom it may concern…” change to another immediately. It’s that simple, if you suspect that they are simply generating spam, then they are.

There are doubtless many more questions related to this issue. I do not claim to have covered all the bases, but instead simply to outline the basics of PR and business communication.

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the other side of the story: all this requires you to really trust your agency, and that means paying them properly. As the saying goes: if you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys.

(En español, aquí)