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| Bob Brody |
Come the end of one year, you may be lucky enough to have picked up some valuable insights about how to practice public relations that might inspire you in the next. At least that’s how it usually goes for me, pushing 34 years in the business.
So here I’ve compiled, crystallized and codified my 14 favorite findings from 2024 that I intend to apply in 2025:
1. What you know about the PR profession is important – how, for example, to pitch a reporter -- and so is how much you know. But more important than the kind or amount of knowledge you accumulate is what you make of what you know. Knowing, say, the right reporter to pitch, along with when and how.
2. Ask questions of your colleagues, clients and prospects. Then, just when you’re sure you’ve asked enough, ask some more. What’s your biggest issue? How do you believe I can best be of service to you? Your curiosity should be inexhaustible.
3. We should all feel an inborn obligation every day to try to do better than we did the day before. Your best competition is with yourself. You brought in a new client last week? Bring in two this week.
4. Never dwell on disappointment any longer than you absolutely have to. You say your presentation to a pharmaceutical firm flopped? Give yourself a day or two to suss out what went wrong, then leave it in your rear-view mirror. Forward movement breeds momentum.
5. The origin of all genius is curiosity (see #2) – as exemplified by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein – followed by reflex and intuition. Why is this tech client now in disrepute? How can we rehabilitate its reputation? Go ahead, trust your gut and be a genius.
6. Stretch yourself to the limits of your ambition, if not beyond. Push yourself harder than you would ever push those around you, whether in managing your staff or innovating on an account. Only if you overreach can you ever achieve anything great.
7. How you do anything is how you do everything. Okay, you’ve heard that before. But hey, exactitude in small matters is the soul of discipline. How you mentor an intern counts. So does greeting a new hire. As a sports psychologist once memorably told me, make excellence a ritual.
8. Nothing in PR is ever certain, much less guaranteed. Clients fire us in frustration over failure to deliver results in less than 15 seconds. Our profession, like life itself, is a big maybe. So you might as well accept the reality that any time you say or do anything, you’re rolling the dice.
9. Public relations is a set of problems. Our jobs on a daily basis consist largely of one failure after another. The TV producer who said no. The vice-president in the next office who suddenly quit because of you. But stick with it. You’ll get through the adversities and come out the other side. And your occupation will suddenly become solutions and successes and rewards you never before imagined.
10. Stay optimistic about doing what you do for a living, even if – oxymoronic as it sounds – hopelessly so. It’s probably your best shot at survival.
11. You may want everything. A corner office in the C-suite. A profile of yourself in The Financial Times. But in reality, just enough – having a good job with a good organization and doing it well – can be plenty.
12. “The ultimate criterion of character is the contribution we make to human happiness.” So says the New Testament in the “Ethics of the Fathers.” We could do worse than to live by those words. A client smiling at a success you delivered will always make your day.
13. It’s going to be what it’s going to be, and you have to do what you have to do, and that, my friends, will have to be that. Some clients are difficult. Some bosses are beyond insufferable. You either fortify yourself against it or catch the next bus out of town.
14. Dreaming about your future – about promises and possibilities – only makes you stronger. So look ahead. Dream long and hard and often. Dream extravagantly.
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Bob Brody, a public relations consultant, served as a media strategist and editorial specialist at Weber Shandwick, Ogilvy Public Relations and Howard J. Rubenstein Associates. He is the author of the memoir "Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age," and contributes essays to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, among many other publications.
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