Getting More From PR

It is a great time to be a PR pro. With literally hundreds of new companies finding their way into the online space every day, people are looking for a way to differentiate themselves from the pack. This middleman that brings forward the best assets of a company is you.

Here are four ways that you can deliver PR services that are above and beyond the norm of what the industry considers a baseline of operations.

Learn Social Media and Social Media API Integration
Everyone in the industry knows how to use the basic social media platform, but very few PR people know how to leverage more than one social medial platform at once in order to maximize the ROI of a campaign. This is done through the social medial API. Applications such as Hadoop or Hootsuite are just the bare minimum of what an API that is properly used can do for a business.

You want to have your client at the head of multiple social media sites, not just one. You also want to make sure that your network of sites is glued into your landing page. This is an art form that is done through the API, and the more that you learn, the better that you will be able to service your clients.

Be Willing To Go Out on a Limb for a Client
Your clients will expect you to have new ideas for their company. This is not a time to grill your new client about what your last client accomplished using a certain technique. Although you should definitely use techniques that have worked in the past, you must make sure that each action that you take is an individual solution for the business client that is in front of you right now. This is the only way that you can solidify success for each and every separate client regardless of their needs coming in.

Go out on a limb for your clients. Be willing to take a risk and shoulder the blame if things go wrong. Have all of your research handy to show why the risky activity has more of a chance of success than of failure. All of these things are aspects of PR that your client likely does not have time to think about. You will endear yourself to your client base if you take your partnership to this level.

Collaborate with other PR Pros
Your clients certainly have competitors. However, all companies also have collaborators, at least potentially. If you do not have access to a potential collaborator, then maybe one of your colleagues does. Leverage your contacts in order to provide a more effective platform for your clients. For instance, if your client is peanut butter, how much more effective would it be to throw an event with the jelly client from your colleague down the street?

Be Willing to Listen
There is a fine line between taking over a marketing and advertising campaign and simply adding a professional touch to the resources that are already there. If a company can afford to hire a public relations rep, then they have likely done something right in the past. For most clients, the trick is not to find a completely new pony. They simply need help in making what they already have going on fully professional.

Your role in providing top notch service is to be a person of detail. Make sure that everything goes smoothly and that your client is ready for prime time.

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Ronn Torossian, 5WPR CEO, New Yorker and author of Public Relations book,"For Immediate Release: Shape Minds, Build Brands, and Deliver Results with Game-Changing Public Relations".