Regardless of the line of business you’re in, you’re bound to run into a few customers who will put your patience and communication skills to test. Some need you to spend more time explaining what you’re doing than actually doing your job, others think they know your profession better than you do, some will take too long to respond when there’s an emergency at hand. But when it comes to public relations and nightmare customers, these are the ones we fear most.

1. The DIY customer

When something’s going on, why bother talking to the PR guy in your company or to the company you pay to handle such issues? Go ahead and make your own statements, release them and then have the people you initially ignored clean your mess. Think of the Cleavland Cavalier owner who decided a post attacking LeBron James was a good reaction to the player’s decision to choose another team. Continue reading

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I have crossed paths with quite a few companies lately that have taken the DIY approach when it comes to PR. Although they had no real team, no real expertise, and the people specifically hired to handle such tasks had nothing to do with the job at hand, they felt they could do it on their own. Later on, they decided hiring an agency was better suited for them. They of course could have saved a lot of time, effort and ultimately money by hiring the experts to begin with.

Why did they choose not to at first? It’s simple, when companies calculate costs, they usually don’t pay attention to details. They believe that if an employee has some spare time, that time can be used in any way. Effectiveness, ability to learn, natural talent, they are all disregarded, as of course we are all good at promoting ourselves. Much like the physicists in The Big Bang Theory who were supposedly marketing geniuses as well…

A company has three choices when they take the in house approach: use existing personnel, hire someone new with little to no experience and have them trained, or hiring a PR expert. Continue reading

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A lot of PR agencies or corporate PR departments still believe spam is the way to go. They have built or bought quite a data base over the years, they keep expanding it and then shoot an email to everyone on the list. While they might have had some common ground when starting to develop the data base, over time names and emails just keep being added without any further checks. Who cares if you’re interested, we’ll email you anyway.

I am not talking about asking for permission, or allowing people to unsubscribe, I’m talking about at least making sure they are remotely interested in what they’ll receive. For example, why would I be interested in a debate held in Beverly Hills between a Rabbi and some woman I know nothing about on dating in a material world and if money can or cannot buy love?

If you’re gonna spam, at least be wiser than the average spammer! You should be able to at least do that if you’ve ever read anything, even a tiny article on PR and/or marketing. If you’re going to take your chance and spam, at least make sure people won’t delete your email because they simply don’t care!

I’d advise you to refrain from spam alltogether. Sure, contact someone to introduce yourself and ask for their permission to send press releases. But don’t start out with an attached PR and a one-liner asking them to call you for details!

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I’ve recently received an email looking like an attempt at email marketing, promising me some world renowned book for free. I was intrigued by a) the fact that the spam filter didn’t catch it and b) my not knowing anything about the book. So I took a second look at the content, thinking it might be some promotional ebook version sent out to bloggers by someone with way too little experience.

I saw the price for the book, big and shinny, along with a promotional discount image. I deleted it and moved on. But it got me thinking about all the promises marketers and PR people make in their emails and how not keeping them makes them lose potential customers, potential exposure on different channels, their reputation and more. Continue reading

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Janelle Vadnais of Create Business Growth and I had a wonderful conversation about Words of a Broken Mirror and blogging, PR and Marketing over the weekend. It resulted in an interview she published today. We talked about my long and winding road through the world of blogging, the PR and Marketing career I chose for myself and the life of a small business owner. Just to get you started, here’s the first question of the interview and my answer. To read the rest, please visit Janelle’s entry.

Have you always been involved in PR and marketing? What did you do before WoBM?

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