The pressure is killing us, I know. Our clients want something done yesterday and all at the same time. I know it’s hard completing everything on time and making it perfect. But like it or not, the devil is in the details! So stop focusing on the major ideas only and pay attention to details as well. The reason is simple: not doing it and making little mistakes slip in makes you look sloppy! No one will care that you were all tired and stressed and the phone was ringing non stop. They will only care that you had typos in every paragraph of the text you have delivered.

I’ve happened to come across quite a few invitations, press releases and announcements, all hurried and sloppy-looking. Typos, text format inconsistencies, important details not mentioned, overlooking negative meanings that could be linked to a whole event concept, poorly chosen locations, you name it, they’ve got it! And this makes the PR people behind it look really bad, although they are quite good at what they do.

But coming up with the plan is one thing, implementing and delivering it is another. And the great ones do all of these steps perfectly. Think of it this way: your press release, your advertorial, your event invite, your email might get to your future customer. They won’t care about anything but the fact that their name might be misspelled in your next press release. Or that their event name will be trashed online. And they won’t be there to listen to excuses.

We’ve all been there and overlooked something. Have we all learned from it? Are we all paying more attention to such aspects? Unfortunately, no… But we could start today!

I have crossed paths with quite a few companies lately that have taken the DIY approach when it comes to PR. Although they had no real team, no real expertise, and the people specifically hired to handle such tasks had nothing to do with the job at hand, they felt they could do it on their own. Later on, they decided hiring an agency was better suited for them. They of course could have saved a lot of time, effort and ultimately money by hiring the experts to begin with.

Why did they choose not to at first? It’s simple, when companies calculate costs, they usually don’t pay attention to details. They believe that if an employee has some spare time, that time can be used in any way. Effectiveness, ability to learn, natural talent, they are all disregarded, as of course we are all good at promoting ourselves. Much like the physicists in The Big Bang Theory who were supposedly marketing geniuses as well…

A company has three choices when they take the in house approach: use existing personnel, hire someone new with little to no experience and have them trained, or hiring a PR expert.

Wasting the time and expertise of existing employees?

If you hired someone on a certain position, you did it because they were good when performing the tasks the position implied. If now they have some spare time, using it to make them learn something completely new is a waste. Why?

• it would take far more time to learn something new than perfect their existing skills
• if they are interested in a field, making them take an interest in PR might cause them to lose motivation and interest

The alternative? If you have too many employees, and they don’t have enough tasks for a full time position, you could either downsize or switch them to part time jobs.

Inexperienced wannabes to cover your public relations needs?

As I mentioned, they lack experience, they lack the required skill set, they might turn out not to be really good at it. Especially if their past experience is on a completely different career path. Your costs include, among others:

• paying salary for someone who needs months of training
• paying for training – no one in your company can do it, you have no PR department
• even after a few months of training, they will still go through a long period of trial and error, and you will pay for both their time and their errors

Hiring an in house PR specialist is by far the best option of the three. On the other hand, PRs who are really good at what they do are not that easy to come by and they are not that cheap to have either. Other than paying for their salary, you’ll still need to give them time to adjust to your field and learn a few tricks. On the other hand, you will need someone with PR expertise to help you hire them in the first place, and such services don’t come for free.

Why is a PR agency cheaper?

If you’re looking for a long term relationship with a PR agency or an experienced consultant, you can negotiate an advantageous monthly flat fee. For that fee, you will get specific services from your agency of choice. While their fee includes time for research and getting acquainted with your field, it will always be cheaper than formal training. And often times, the monthly flat fee is lower than what an internal PR department would entail. Let’s not forget, salaries are not the only costs, you still have to think of benefits, providing employees with an office, a computer, a phone, etc.

The most important aspect is that you don’t waste time, you start promoting your company’s products and services right from the start. And if you’re considering PR, you know how important starting early and getting it right really is.

Blogsessive.com has just published a guest post written by yours truly on how to make your blog and twitter account work better at promoting each other. And the solution is simple: notice what they have in common, notice the differences, and if it’s a team you want, then create one!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and your own tips on how to create a dream team out of your blog and Twitter feed, so head over to Blogsessive to read the article and share your insight

People are lazy. And laziness, when kept under control, fuels a lot of their drive to do things faster and better. Let’s be honest, we’d all want to work less and smarter, generate more income and have tons of time to enjoy those we love, our passions and our hobbies. Given the opportunity, we’d all prefer to work for 3 months and travel around the world for the rest of the year (or insert other pleasant pastime here).

We need to stay mobile and render parts of what we do automatic, so that we gain time. And when it comes to social media, well, we have taken automatic to another level. Auto replies, retweets, direct messages, scheduled posts, automatic posting of content to social media websites. It’s all working out great for us.

But when we go fully automatic, we also fail to monitor what’s happening. We know things are taken care of,  so we can’t we bothered with those aspects anymore, we have other, more pressing matters on our hands. The danger? Automatic processes don’t stop to think. And that’s how a few days ago a quite famous blogger managed to retweet their about page. Now one really tweets their blog’s about page and I caught some quite negative reactions. I immediately thought it was an automatic tweet plugin gone wrong.

So go automatic when it suits you. We all need the helping hand. Or about a dozen of them. But remember no piece of software can really be installed and then forgotten, no matter what their marketers tell you. Try to keep track of what you’re running and prevent minor mishaps that can make you look bad.

I’ll keep this one short and sweet. I get a lot of Twitter direct message spam. I overlook some of it, because it’s unintentional. I don’t think all Twitter users a) realize they send direct messages to those following them with Mafia wars requests and b) can tell how utterly annoying it is when it comes a few times a day from different people. But I draw the line at so called online professionals doing the very same. Stop! It’s annoying.

Yes, if you have a twitter account that you use casually to fool around with friends, by all means, play all the Mafia Wars you want. But if it’s a business account and you are trying to show how much of an expert you are, you should know better! No, you can’t get away with it as easily! You’re on probation! I follow people in my line of business because I admire them. We can brainstorm, discuss our ideas, share news. But I can’t look up to spammers or waste my Twitter time on them

There is this new trend in business emails, offers and promotions to start with stating the limits to what you can provide. I have actually seen email subject lines like: “This is everything I can offer you”. Or special offer announcements explaining how, if I buy enough products, I can get a discount of maximum…some percentage.

Of course your clients won’t expect you to mown their front yard if you’re a designer. Of course there are limits to the discounts you can offer. No one actually expects you to come into their life and solve all their business and personal problems in the blink of an eye. So why the big emphasis of what you cannot do? Is that really your smartest option?

I say start with what you’re offering, with what you can do. Try to take your mind and those of your audience off the limits. Use percentage ranges instead of a maximum. Besides, limits always stretch! If I want to buy everything in your store, you might want to further discuss that discount! And if a certain client pays enough, you might even hire someone to mown their lawn

If you focus on how limited your offer is, so will your customers. And they might go for a more flexible, more open-minded competitor.

Those two concepts put together, not likely to win the “couple of the year” award, are they? And they shouldn’t, simply because guilt trips should never be part of business emails, especially when it’s the first email you send out!

Imagine this! You want to introduce your recently launched business. You mention your website, then jump to saying you have a kid who’s just turned two and add  a link to cute photos of that kid. Then mention an obscure site you used to have but no longer exist. And finally, in paragraph 4 actually mention one of the services you provide. Nothing on your expertise, no reference to satisfied customers, no detailed skill set of your team. Just throw the baby in, that’s bound to work!

No matter how I twist and turn it, other than guilt trip, no other reason comes to mind for mentioning offsprings and showing photos to potential customers. Maybe, just maybe, if you were a photographer specializing in newborns and toddlers, there might be a reason for the photos. But saying your main quality as a business professional is having a child? It’s crazy! And the image of yourself you put out there has little to no chance to generating leads or sealing the deal.

Remember, you’re trying to build a business relationship! Yes, if you’ve had a client for years, a personal bond develops, you might even become friends and show eachother family photos. But if it’s a new client you’re targeting, keep it professional and tell them how you can help them grow their business. Honestly, they couldn’t care less about you as a dad!

Often times, we see what people put out there. Their personal choice of branding influences our perception. We see this serious anchorman, all dressed up, nice suit, all business look. Think Tom Green. Would you imagine him in a freestyle hip hop duo with Xzibit? And yet he did get into it! Check it out and make up your own mind abut what the man can do.

Personal brands can change; we can reposition ourselves, the same way it happens with products and services. We are never bound by the limits of the image we have projected out there. But a good personal brand that people recognize will always help us promote new projects. Millions of possibilities if we ever get bored, only one rule: actually be good at it

The majority of LinkedIn members tweet, a lot of them quite frequently. That is what the results of a recent poll created by Debbie Weil have shown. Apart from 13 percent of users who see Twitter as a waste of time, the rest of them have Twitter accounts and 68% of all the 247 users that took the poll put it to good use.

Because LinkedIn polls do mix the replies with some other data on the members, you can see who tweets and how often by job title, company size, job function, gender and age.

Here are a few results I found interesting

• Company owners tweet more than others (VPs, managers and other types of personnel)
• Small companies and enterprises are big Twitter fans
• No Marketing or PR professionals see Twitter as a waste of time
• The male/female results are perfectly balanced!
• And speaking of young people not tweeting, everyone in the 18-24 age group is a proficient user.

If you’d like to view detailed results, click here.  And if you’re on LinkedIn and would like to take the poll, please go here.

Just when I though Samantha Jones of Sex and the City was the major challenge when it comes to explaining what PR is all about, I heard news on some new PR-centered reality show produced by Kim Kardashian and showcasing two of her male BFFs. Yes, that is male Best Friend Forever.

So after finally getting to a short, sweet and powerful speech explaining how PR is not exactly what Samantha seemed to be doing, after occasionally explaining that Samantha’s translation of “I’m in PR” was just a funny example, not the real dead, I am now facing a new challenge. How will I respond to “So, you’re in PR! You do what those guys on Kim Kardashian’s TV show do?”

Skipping the “who is Kim Kardashian” part, I’m sure Google is helpful there, let’s move on to analyzing who the so-called PR gurus (People.com calls them that! Beware), Jonathan Cheban and Simon Huck are. Fist, their company’s site. Command Public Relations has a site no decent PR company would ever come up with: commandpr.com (yes, I cringe at the thought of linking to it). A one page… thing, music, flash of course, no way to stop said music, annoying as that might be, oh, and yeah, no real information. Client list? About us section? Services? Who cares about that? Just listen to the rad song explaining that the singer has told may lies and needs to be freed from oppression. I wonder if the “I’ve told many lies” line is their mission statement. Or if the song’s senseless speech, repeating the same idea over and over again, in two languages, is their idea of effective communication.

I dug deeper and read about this Twitter account for Jonathan Cheban. Yes, a master communicator who believes in dialogues, that’s why he follows 38 people and 20% of those are the Kardashian clan. Then Everything PR linked to this Washington Post article about Cheban. Which made me realize my impression of him was not wrong: he cashes in on his famous or semi-famous friends, he’s a party boy that also makes a buck while partying, and he should thank God every day that his celeb friends still love him. The day they stop, he’ll be royally screwed!

But to get a clearer picture on Cheban, here’s what other people say about him:

“If he told me that the sun was hot, I’d try to keep in mind that the sun was paying him to say that[..] Is he a self-centered narcissist staring at himself all day in the mirror? Yes. Is he a name-dropper who checks his pager all the time? Sure. But it works for him.” – Timothy McDarrah, US Weekly editor.

“We’ve actually been following Cheban on Twitter for a few weeks, and the publicist’s Tweets are definitely heavy on the “OMG LOL” style of writing, if you catch our drift.” – Joe Ciarllo, PRNewser

Why are his celeb friends in on this? Well, lots of freebies for the start of course. It works out great for everyone.

Yes, people are free to create all the TV reality shows ever! I am sure Kim Kardashian’s fan base will watch it religiously. I am sure there will be plenty of girls to fall in love with Cheban’s tan. And I am sure there will be kids out there, dreaming to work and party with Command PR.

But as they have their freedom of speech, I also have mine. And I would like to tell you that my life in the PR world and that of all the PR and Marketing people I know (yes, I know a lot of them), has nothing to do with what these people do every day!

And if you don’t believe me, see what other PR people have to say about it. Yes, these people could be rightfully referred to as gurus!