First Person PR

As follow on to my last post, here’s a great blog entry by Rohit Bhargava called, “7 Lessons On How To Be a Great Client.” It provides great advice for clients looking to build lasting relationships with PR/marketing/communications agencies.

Read Rohit’s piece for more details, but his seven key pieces of advice are:

1. Provide clear direction
2. Invite us to the table early
3. Be honest about success factors
4. Take the advice you are paying for
5. Know what you don’t know
6. Understand that changes affect timelines
7. Ask our advice

Have any others you’d like to add?

1. Don’t be a jackass. You laugh, but I’ll wager that every agency person has worked with an abusive client at one point. Maybe it’s a VP of marketing who used to have a $15 million budget and ran PR for a F100 company who doesn’t understand why their $50k annual budget doesn’t get the same jumping-at-the-sound-of-their-voice reaction. Or maybe it’s a new CMO that thinks business reporters should jump at the chance to cover a startup with no customers, no shipping product, no real strategy, and no known investors. Or, perhaps that day-to-day contact is just over whelmed and can’t do everything being asked of her.Regardless of the reasons why, there’s never an excuse to be an ass to your team. I promise, yelling doesn’t make them work harder and won’t make them respect you. And going over the manager’s head every other day doesn’t build a strong relationship.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t expect a lot from your team. My top three favorite clients are also the most demanding clients I ever worked for. They respected me and I respected them … I’d go out of my way to help them and my team made sure they looked good internally.

2. Your 18 I-know-this-isn’t-PR-related-but-can-you-deal-with-it-anyway requests ate the budget. Especially with startups, agencies are often asked to fill in on projects, write webinar media alerts, track down reprint costs, etc. when the internal staff is overworked or non-existent. Unless you’re in a super hot company in a very popular industry, not focusing on media relations will always result in less coverage. Asking a team to jump on these minor tasks is understandable (if temporary), but if this is your situation, you need to accept there will tradeoffs and these “easy” projects can tend to be time consuming. If your priority is coverage and results, make sure you’re not the agency’s biggest obstacle.

3. That’s a dumb idea. I’m sorry, but sometimes it just is.

4. You’re not the only client. And 10 p.m. isn’t business hours. Oh, and my private cell phone … is private (okay, that might be three things). Think that contradicts client service? I don’t. I believe if a client/agency relationship is mutually respectful, the client needs to understand that parameters exist. I think I was a rare bird in the agency because I actually told my clients that one, I turned my cell phone off as soon as I entered the office building (my mom didn’t like that rule either); two, I couldn’t promise I’d answer a call or email in the evening unless I was expecting it; and three, if I didn’t pick up a page, I was probably on the phone with another client. Having a client email me, IM me, call my cell and call my office all in a matter of 30 seconds was too much for me, and ended up distracting me and creating an unnecessary level of anxiety. So at one point, I finally stopped it. I was always diplomatic in how I explained it to my clients, but I was honest and upfront about where my work/personal boundaries were.

I get that the core of agency service is client service. But unless you’re Microsoft, your agency most likely has more than one client. Especially when you’re working on more than one client, and with all the distractions that technology provides, agency people need to be able to focus when they can. That’s why your agency provides a team … if one person is unreachable, chances are you’ll find someone else (And I guarantee if your panic attack is related to a syringe being found in your product, even the most junior person on the team will know enough to find a senior person pronto).

Side note to all you agency readers and minor rant coming: To me, there is nothing more annoying and disrespectful than scheduling a team meeting only to make the junior staff wait while you talk on your cell phone, thinking your time is more valuable than theirs. Likewise, your clients are people, too, and if you work with them to meet all the deadlines during the day (which means sending that release at 4, not 8), then there’s no need for evening calls. You’ll never convince me it’s necessary for a client to call you at 9 p.m. to talk about a pitch going out two weeks later, or for you to call your client on Friday night to talk about an award due the following Wednesday. If I send my agency an email at 10 at night, it’s because I’m catching up. I don’t expect a reply until the next day

5. All that coverage doesn’t just happen. There always comes a point when a client starts thinking they’re all that, makes an agency switch for some random reason (less money, they can do more for less, etc.), and then the coverage disappears. I actually had a client that we took from 60 pieces of coverage to 500 and then almost 1,000 in two years (and they were high quality, on message) … then hubris kicked in, they made a switch, and went down to about 12 pieces of coverage the following six months. Yes, it happens that quickly. No, reporters don’t just “call” PR people to talk to you. When you start thinking that securing those massive amounts of coverage is like shooting fish in a barrel, it’s time for a reality check. It has more to do with your PR team kicking ass and maintaining key relationships than you think.

Wow. I feel better now … some of those have been bottled up for a few years.