In The News
By Felicia Knight
There are many skills that public relations professionals bring to the table that will never become obsolete: the ability to tell a story, to write and think creatively, to listen, and to anticipate. These are abilities borne of experience and will continue to serve clients well into the future.
By Felicia Knight
We’ve all been there. The five stages of grief.
Numb with disbelief, simmering rage, looking for some give and take, laid low by loss, then facing the truth: No one is going to bite on your pitch. Responses so far have ranged from dead silence to “good luck with that.”
Now comes the worst part: you knew it would end like this. Why? Because you let the client steamroll you with a project that either wasn’t ready, didn’t have a clear strategy, or, in the end, just wasn’t a good story. A good public relations campaign starts with a good story. If you don’t have one, start pushing that boulder up the hill.
By Felicia Knight
Managing a public relations crisis isn’t easy. That’s why we advocate avoiding a crisis in the first place. It can be made a little easier, however, by understanding what’s happening, what’s at stake, and what needs to be done. Most important is how you respond and the best way to respond is with a story—a true story, a better story—that moves beyond the crisis.
By Felicia Knight
There are public relations blunders and then there are public relations disasters. There are PR problems that erupt out of nowhere and there are those that are self-inflicted. This week has seen a crop of all of the above, which prompted us to take a constructive look at some PR problems that we’re thankful landed on someone else’s desk:
There’s a scene near the end of the movie Gosford Park, (Julian Fellowes’s precursor to Downton Abby), where the character of Mrs. Wilson, the housekeeper, explains what it is that “a good servant has that separates them” from the others:
“It’s the gift of anticipation…I know when they’ll be hungry, and the food is ready. I know when they’ll be tired, and the bed is turned down. I know it before they know it themselves.”
