the ever curious PR guy

Looking at PR in a music kind of way

Frankly, I am not a PR professional. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am a practitioner of public relations and strategic communications, and this is my day job that pays the bills and puts food on the table. But, when someone asks me "what do you do?" I have a hard time saying, "I am a PR professional!" I am many things, and it's just hard for me to believe that I am just one thing.

So, in addition to being a PR professional and other things, I am a musician. I love music and play guitar and join bands from time to time. There's always a guitar near me and I get through life's ups and downs being around music and songs that tell powerful stories and open my eyes and ears to the truth. Truth never changes, but it comes at you wearing many different outfits and points of view. Music is a great way to understand our differences and the ultimate platform to engage and find commonalities. 

So, how does my world of music relate to my work in public relations and communications?

Music is a communal thing, meant to be experienced by people together. Music is the ultimate art that allows people to "relate" to one another. Get it? "Relate"... Public "relations."

If you go to a great music show with friends, chances are you and your friends will become "aligned" around that experience for a very long time. Talking about music with friends is sometimes more fun that the actual music itself, and these conversations help solidify our relationships. If you actually get to play music, finding musicians to play with and collaborating to make music together is the ultimate exercise in developing partnerships.

Musicians and songwriters are your quintessential PR people: always looking outside at the world (local and global), seeking understanding and reconciliation between the world and themselves (value-seeking), and putting this into words and music and finding ways to bring these to life in shows (their "business" value). It all comes down to telling stories and gathering trust and fans along the way.

So, having said this, enjoy this post I found outlining the practical similarities between music and PR: "Want to 'Rock' in PR and Marketing? Everything you need to know can be learned from rock bands."

 

New York Times tool visualizes news article links and influence

via nytlabs.com

Watch the video HERE describing project "Cascade" from the New York Times' R&D team.

Think like a mutual fund when it comes to marketing and comms budgeting

Bonds = traditional media

Domestic stock = digital media

Foreign stock = social media

Short-term investments = cash reserve providing flexibility to quickly boost positions in any of the three

via www.beingpeterkim.com

Interesting post HERE on how to approach allocation of marketing and communications budget for media partnerships. I found it really useful in how to think about placing a value on the wide variety of choices available today for media partnerships.

 

10 questions every communications professional should have ingrained in their head

Question # 3: What Is Important to Your Audiences? 

Once you’ve defined your audiences, you can go about determining what issues matter most to them: What inspires them? What scares them? What are they most passionate about? Where do they go for information? The closer you get to identifying an audience’s passions, the closer you are to understanding why they are loyal to your company or brand. 

via kdpaine.blogs.com

I am a big fan of PR measurement guru Katie Payne and was grateful for her recent post on measurement, HERE. It is good to stop every once in a while and think and re-think the fundamentals. The 10 questions she recommends for guiding the measurement process are actually questions that every communications professional should have ingrained in their head about their organization or client or program or anything that he or she is working on.

I am always most excited and passionate about question 3, finding out and mapping what's important to my audience and how to get audiences to know about my organization, have the right attitude about our objectives and get them motivated to do something valuable not just for us but also for themselves.

 

The Bible might just help you design a better communications and PR measurement program

In his book "Utilization-Focused Evaluation," Michael Quinn Patton addresses the need to think "big picture" at the outset of an evaluation or measurement effort:

The genesis story of evaluation

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And God saw everything that He made. "Behold," God said, "it is very good." And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

And on the seventh day God rested from all His work. His archangel came then unto Him asking, "God, how do you know that what you have created is 'very good'? What are your criteria? On what data do you base your judgement on? What impacts were you hoping to achieve in this creation? Aren't you a little close to the situation to make a fair and unbiased evaluation?"

God thought about these questions all that day and His rest was greatly disturbed. On the eight day God said, "LUCIFER, GO TO HELL!" Evaluation was then born.

 

The point here is the understanding that measurement begins with a value question about what it is that you're measuring. What is good? What are you looking to measure?

Measurement should never begin with a methodology or technical perspective. (e.g., a qualitative or quantitative survey? or social media driven research? etc.)

The job of designing the measurement program is not empirical at first, but value driven. The researcher will eventually produce answers to the question(s) with quantitative and qualitative empirical data. But we first need to ensure that the original question of value is clearly established and that we collaborate with everyone involved in the communications program's strategy and delivery to make the value question crystal clear.

 More about Michael Quinn Patton.