Curiosity: cool for cats and communicators

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Curiosity is a very useful, if not essential, character trait in great PR consultants. If you’re not naturally curious about a wide range of subjects, you’ll struggle to get up to speed on your clients’ businesses and industries. You’ll also be less likely to muster a contagious enthusiasm for the subject you’re communicating.

Curiosity is helpful if you’re an in-house practitioner, of course. But for agency consultants, natural curiosity has some other major career benefits. Let’s break them down:

1. Curious consultants dive into topics and, thus, acquire an impressive knowledge of their clients’ subjects. This makes them an invaluable media resource as well as a credible spokesperson, advisor and strategist.

2. The curious are driven to follow through. Once they sink their teeth into a story, they have to know how it ends. So, they follow up with clients, media, partners, vendors, colleagues and other stakeholders to see through the story or project.

3. When you’re naturally curious, your mind likes to turn over a topic and you’ll think about it in the car, shower or post office line up. And that process is often when the best ideas magically materialize.

4. Curiosity fuels an inquisitive nature too. Curious people ask questions. And asking good questions is critical to developing a good strategy. Good question often lead to tough questions, and a good practitioner must get the tough questions on the table with the client before the media or other stakeholders do.

5. Curiosity can also help build relationships with clients. What does it say to a client when a consultant thinks to ask “how is the Australia expansion going?” or “has your son picked a college yet?” It shows them that you care about their business or about them as people, and that’s invaluable to the relationship. It has an added benefit in that you might learn something about the client’s business that gives you a broader perspective. It helps position you as a collaborator and helps take you out of the box that clients can sometimes put their subject matter experts in. Lastly, it’s helpful to understand what’s happening in your client’s personal life so you can take that into consideration.

The benefits above are tough to achieve if you have to fake or force curiosity, but if you foster it and encourage it in yourself, you’ll be rewarded.

What do you think?
What are the benefits of curiosity that I missed here? Share below or on our Facebook page.

Is curiosity always good?
Curiosity can have its pitfalls such as miring client discussions in trivial questions or nice-to-know tangents. You don’t want to be that kid on the grade school field trip who won’t stop asking questions. So, keep the questions on point.

It’s also important not to assume that your clients’ audiences have the same level of curiosity (a.k.a. interest) in the subject. As a rule, never underestimate their total apathy to your clients’ subjects, and work hard to find ways to drive and encourage curiosity and interest. Without either, there’s no basis for engagement.

So, ask why, how much, when, where and how. Ask them early, and ask them often. But remember that the question good practitioners really need to be curious about is this one: so what?

Be curious and pursue the answer to that question relentlessly on behalf of your clients’ audiences, and you’ll be at the top of your game.

Part 2: The Pressures of PR in 2010

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If you’ve always thought that PR is just putting out press releases, think again. The press release is the least of it, folks. That said, it’s where clients often put the bulk of their attention.

Clients want coverage, of course. That’s how they most often measure the return on their investment, but when they don’t take the media’s needs into account and emphasize press releases over targeted story pitches or newswires instead of exclusives, they are putting their PR professionals into a box and, therefore, confining the reach and results of their own campaigns.


As your agency, we work on media relationships continually, we study the media landscape, and we identify coverage trends to ensure we’re able to be most effective for you. We understand the need to do more with less, but we cannot afford to shortchange any of our relationships or cut corners on best practices in our interactions with others on your behalf.

To understand the pressures of PR in 2010, we’ve collected below, in their own words, what journalists expect from PR professionals today. With thousands of pitches coming at them every week, trust us when we say that you cannot succeed with cookie cutter approaches, un-researched pitches or weak news angles.

And if you haven’t already, we also suggest you read Part 1 of this two-part post on the challenges journalists are facing today as well as our previous post about what makes a good story. After you’ve read through these comments, please share with us below whether this re-affirms what you already knew about PR or if it has caused you to adjust your perceptions.

NATIONAL BUSINESS NEWSPAPER:
"If you're pitching a small startup that's not publicly traded, tell me why it's part of a bigger trend. Product pitches aren't likely to succeed. I don't really care for press releases announcing a new product debut at a conference or trade show.”

"It must be something done by a big company or an action of a small firm that affects the bigger players. I don't want product announcements or minor management activity."

REGIONAL BUSINESS:
"The best PR pros are candid. In these difficult economic times, I still expect truthful answers to questions about a lack of funding or other problems. Don't be overly aggressive and keep trying to pitch deals I am not interested in."

NATIONAL NEWSWIRE:
"I never do a story based on a single pitch about a company, person or product. The best PR pros frame their pitch as part of a trend."

"I would cover a show that a celebrity is appearing in, but I wouldn't write about a charity that person is promoting. I prefer exclusive pitches, but they don't have to be just for me. However, I don't want something that's already been exclusive to someone else."

NATIONAL TV NEWS BUREAU:
"I look for character-driven topics with really amazing people. I want exclusives. Don't pitch my show if you're also trying to be on other networks too. Links to video of your client is very helpful. I can also use b-roll."

NATIONAL NEWS MAGAZINE:
"The best PR people provide exclusive information and a unique angle to the story. We'd never write about a particular product and sometimes get those types of pitches. It's obvious when PR people don't read the publication and suggest things we'd never cover."

NATIONAL FINANCIAL NEWSWIRE:
"Give me a unique insight into what you do and give us access to people who aren't normally available for interviews. If we won't use the pitch, we'll let you know quickly, so you can offer it elsewhere. Don't include us in shotgun blasts that go out to everyone.”

MAJOR MARKET DAILY NEWSPAPER:“"I don't do stories about individuals hired to run a company. I want to be connected with experts who have knowledge of a specific issue in the news. Don't be cute. Be succinct. Tell me in the pitch what the news is. Don't pitch me ‘Joe Blow' who can talk about the economy or the markets."

Part 1: Pressures of Publishing in 2010

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The last 18 months have been hell on journalists and, therefore, to a lesser degree, on media relations professionals too. To adequately explain what late 2008 and 2009 have been like in our field, we’ve got to start with the journalist’s view. Hence the two part approach to this post.

In 2008 and 2009:

• Journalists feared for their jobs. Therefore, they wanted only to cover the most compelling stories. (To understand what a compelling story is, see our last post.)

• Journalists were forced to cover more beats. One columnist we work with had his column frequency and coverage area doubled, was assigned obituaries and asked to contribute regular human interest profiles. Another had to produce streaming video product reviews for the paper's website while blogging and producing daily business news coverage.

• Journalists had less space to cover stories. Page counts shrunk in print publications and with them coverage opportunities became tighter too. A story that might have merited coverage two years ago now literally had nowhere to run.

• And, of course, journalists did lose their jobs in layoff rounds and many of the press contacts we'd made over the years were downsized.

In this environment, (W)right On Communications simply worked harder and smarter to give our clients' stories the edge.

In 2008, we began adopting more social media strategies to find additional avenues to deliver client messages and help our clients engage with their audiences and stakeholders. We watched as traditional reporters and columnists joined Twitter and Facebook and news media began to embrace real-time social media tools to break news and encourage reader participation and commentary. (In that regard, the trends weren’t all bad – given a different set of circumstances, this would have been pretty cool. But the triple threat of Craigslist, media fragmentation and decimated advertising budgets took a lot of the fun out of it.)

Our support of traditional media relations continued, however, with a greater than ever emphasis on best practices.

What are these best practices you ask? At their heart, they’re consuming traditional and social media in frequent and large doses. We read a lot! That means blogs, newspapers, and magazines as well as journalists on Twitter and Facebook. This is how we know who’s writing what, what’s new with who (or, er, with whom), and what they’ve been writing about lately as well as what they are likely to write about in the future. In addition to this, we’ve had to stay on top of trends in our own industry, first and foremost, but our clients’ industries as well.

Such research has always been necessary to produce results for our clients, but never more so. It’s not just the current economic environment. It’s also the low barriers to entry in the PR profession--from easy leads via HARO to easy and cheap press release distribution via PRWeb. These tools as well as more expensive but convenient databases like Vocus and Cision that allow people to send thousands of emails with the push a button mean that journalists are receiving 400 emails or more a day—and many to most of them are either completely outside of the journalist's beat or perhaps in their beat but containing no real news.

So, yes, sticking to best practices is, unfortunately, the way to stand out and serve the last journalists standing.

And, no, 2009 was not an easy year for media or PR professionals and 2010 may see some small improvement, but for those who haven’t cut corners and have kept their skills, knowledge and relationships fresh, the outlook is much brighter.

Stay tuned for our part two post, in which we acknowledge more of the perils of our industry.