Mind Readings: Work With Your Clients, PR Folks

In today's episode, let's talk about public relations folks. People pitching um and people working with clients, uh, pitching influential people, key opinion leaders, whatever the term you want to use. Recently, I had a PR person um pitch me to a cold pitch um from uh on behalf of a tech company, and and this is a you know reasonably well-known talked company, and saying, hey, this person has just started working at our tech company and uh they're a new executive here and they've got a lot of expertise and stuff. Now, I will uh give credit where it's due. It was on a topic that I cover on on this channel and stuff like that.

So it was well placed from that perspective. But where the PR firm dropped the ball was they were pitching somebody that is an actual personal friend of mine, right? If you like, you know, somebody's saying, Hey, you could uh you could get a chance to talk to Christopher Penn. And he'd be like, Yeah, yeah, I already do that. I I don't need your help with that, right?

And that's essentially what happened here. They're like, hey, you know, you want to interview this person, you know, they they might be a good uh guest for your show. I'm like, uh-huh. If I if I wanted to to put this person on my show, um, I would just ask them if they wanted to be on my show, all they have to do is DM me. Like they don't have to go through a PR firm.

They just say, hey, I want to be on your show. And we say, okay, well, I can figure this out. Because they're an actual friend. We've been friends for over a decade. Um, but something got lost along the way, some miscommunication happened.

And this happens in two different ways. One, a PR firm doesn't do its due diligence, it doesn't understand the landscape and then say, hey, you know, company, um, who do you know already? What are relations do you have already? Um doing that would have saved them a lot of headache because they would have been like, oh, great, you already know Chris, so can you just DM him or email him and say, you know, beyond go beyond the show? That would have saved them a lot of time.

The second part is for companies, for brands that are hiring PR firms, proactively provide a list of your friendlies, your close contacts, your executives' friends, etc. In advance of the PR firm, A knows that you know, maybe don't pitch these people and say and reach out to the exec and said and say, Hey, can you go talk to this person? You're friends with them. Um, and B, it helps everybody not look like a bunch of dummies. Because what happens when you pitch somebody that is already known, has already has a good working relationship.

You look incompetent. You're like, Why why does this PR firm telling me to get in touch with you? I I talk to you like uh every other week. They should know this, and so the PR firm looks bad, the client looks bad. The client's like, it looks like you know they don't know what they're doing, and and it's just not a good situation.

So better communication is what's missing here. Working out who are the friendlies? Who are the relationships that are already in place, and how can the stakeholders who are responsible for those those relationships make use of them in in a way that's that's helpful and useful? And if this is this is a really important point. If a stakeholder doesn't feel comfortable pitching their friends for uh some kind of campaign, it's not the stakeholders' fault.

You've got a bad pitch. If someone is not willing to tell their friends about the thing they're working on, then you've got a bad pitch. You've got something that nobody wants. Because, you know, if if I was like, oh gosh, you know, uh, I don't know if I really want to reach out to to my friend Ann with this new e-book from Trust Insights. Then it's not a good e-book, right?

I should be excited. And you gotta read this new thing. I've you know, I just wrote it. Go check it out. I should be proactively like, I'm gonna uh, you know, you guys over there at the PR firm, you go do you know whatever you're gonna do with your media list, but I got this, I got this one.

I got it. Um so that's a really important barometer, right? To say, like, yeah, if you've got something worth pitching, the stakeholders should be excited to do it. They should be eager to do it, not uh, right? If you're like, uh, you don't have a good uh thing for pitching.

So that's today's mind reading. Make sure that in public relations you are coordinating both directions, communicating both directions between PR firm and client as to who knows who, right? Who is known by whom, and that you've got something that's worth pitching. And if you're getting pushback from internal stakeholders that they don't want to reach out to their friends, you've got a bad pitch and you need to fix that. Thanks for tuning in.

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