Imagine spending your life refusing to check your reflection in a mirror, or even looking at a photograph of yourself. That sounds pretty insular, inward-looking and actually unhelpful to leading a fulfilled life.
You might of course miss some important signs, even warning signs about you and your well-being. Perhaps the great playwright Oscar Wilde was a tad flippant when he declared: “One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation.”
This might seem far fetched, but how different is the example of the person above with many organisation’s efforts to mange their communications and public relations?
Here are 5½ ideas from our PR Healthcheck programme on what you can do to monitor and manage your own public relations.
1. Ask fundamental questions. The fundamental PR question: ‘Have you got the reputation you deserve?’ is the cornerstone of reviewing the performance of your PR.
Then ask the fundamental question for the future well-being of your organization and its brand: Do your customers recommend you to their friends? This is perhaps the single key indicator of the future success of your organisation. The response shapes your word of mouth, which crucially frames the prospect future purchase of your products or services.
2. Address fundamental strategic issues. Again, profound questions are the starting point for analysis: Where are you doing well? Where are you doing less well? What can you do to maximize the positive and minimize the negative? It’s not rockets science but how many out there fail to do a regular diagnosis.
3. How do you compare? What are best practices in your sector – and how do you compare with key competitors or organisations doing a similar job to you? How do you compare to your predecessors?
4. What decade are you operating in? What new things should you be doing or using? The world of communications is moving at an exponential rate? How do you measure up? Are you 21st century? Or on a par with the 1990’s in what you do?
5. How well are you listening? What do you do to listen, get feedback and find out what others say about you? (One of our favorite definitions of a brand is ‘what others say about you when you’re not in the room’.) You might be picking up data from your environment, but are you really listening?
From our experience far too many PR managers fail to recognize feedback as a chance to learn something about their organisation. Instead, there can be a tendency to go on the defensive, seeing differing points of view as a criticism rather than points of learning.
5½ How future proof are your activities? None of us have a crystal ball. Yet what are you doing to anticipate the next crisis issue before it hits you. What undercurrents are there you are monitoring? What are your contingencies for the worst phone call you could receive from a BBC reporter?
By using these 5½ key insights you can address the health and wellbeing of your own PR activities. There is also nothing to lose from an informal chat with the team at GREEN Communications on 0845 450 3210.
Do make the call. It is not as if you are afraid to look in the mirror.