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When it’s time
to review your PR agency: five
warning signs that it may be time to think again
1. When
your PR agency talks in terms of “activities”, not “results”
If you don’t specifically ask your PR agency
to provide you with updates on “results”, then a high proportion of your money will be spent on them
writing up reports of “activities”. Time wasting agency “activities”
which get in the way of actual “results” include:
- Arranging meetings for no particular reason, with no agenda
and which don’t achieve anything
- Filling in timesheets, minute-by-minute, which bear no
relation to the overall objectives of the campaign
- Frequent reports and updates when not much has happened
- Trips out of the office, when telephone calls or e-mails
would serve the same purpose
- Replying to peripheral enquiries, which distract from their
main priorities
2. When
results just aren’t happening
Despite the ongoing debate about measurement
and evaluation, PR is actually quite easy to measure as long as you establish
the ground rules of evaluation at the very beginning and agree what
exactly you will be measuring.
The simplest
“outputs” include metrics such as the number of article mentions, the
number of favourable analyst mentions, the number of thought leadership
articles published or the number of press releases issued.
If these are what you want, then ask your PR
agency for a basic report every quarter with results columns which show
“Target” and “Actual”.
3. When they
can only offer you the same old ideas
If your PR
agency’s suggestions can be summed up as: "We’ll sell this piece
in to the trade mags" then you should be wondering why they
haven’t caught up with the not—very- new technology of RSS, podcasts or
blogs. Posting your releases to social media sites is a good way of
broadening your audience reach.
A general lack of
understanding of anything to do with guerrilla, viral, buzz or social
media and, more disappointingly,
a lack of interest in learning anything about them, is a sure sign that
your PR people are not keeping their knowledge and skills up to speed.
4. When
your competitors always seem to get more coverage
PR is all about standing out from the crowd. It
doesn’t matter that your PR agency has gone down all the traditional
routes and ticked all the right boxes, if they can’t make you stand out
from the crowd or generate a “buzz” about what you do, then it’s not
really working.
Part of their job
is positioning – making sure your name is always mentioned whenever
their competitors are; that you are always invited to pitch for new
business whenever your main rivals are; that you are one of the top
three “must watch” companies that journalists seek out whenever there
is a major industry story.
5. When
they’ve just stopped coming up with creative ideas
Working on an account for any length of time
can sometimes lead to “ideas fatigue”, especially if the client has
shown themselves stubbornly resistant to new ideas in the past.
However, agencies should be brainstorming new ideas all the time. Recruiting
a dance choreographer to work with a local football team on devising
the ultimate goal celebration, bringing out a specially-named crisp
flavour to celebrate a national event or creating a spoof character to
write letters to editors are all ways agencies have demonstrated their
originality.
Ó Sara Paine 2007
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