The Communications Consultant's Foundation

Leveraging Public Relations Expertise for Personal and Client Success

Roger Darnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000438246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consulting
• Index: Business

For all professionals and students who want to improve their prospects in business, this book prepares and positions them to build dream careers, giving them the education and guidance required to develop vital soft skills, and work remotely and independently.

After establishing a foundation for solid professional communications on a personal level, it quickly opens doors to business insights and opportunities that are exciting, inspiring, and highly sustainable. Immersing readers into the key realms of business success and exploring the full spectrum of essential communications practices, they gain knowledge and trade skills of immense value, including:

• The basics of positive, proactive, strategic communications for individuals and organizations

• What it means to be a PR expert in the creative industry and to do great work

• An introduction to essential business imperatives, with high-level instruction on creativity, strategy, leadership, management, marketing, and much more

• Customer service and all it entails

• Extensive exploration of the PR toolset and its application in real-world marketing scenarios

This book brings home all instruction with sophisticated questions and challenges, ensuring readers have every opportunity to comprehend and grow, step by step.

Part 1

Foundations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177951-1

Topics Covered

Reputation Management and Ethics

Creativity

Strategy

Personal Brands and Branding

1

Reputation Management and Ethics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177951-1

When I was a bright-eyed 17-year-old, I had some extremely ambitious career aspirations; they were all summarized brilliantly by the United States Air Force’s world-famous slogan: Aim High.

That is just one of many good reasons for selecting reputation management as the first topic in this book. Time and again, executives from different companies – and even different countries – tell me that a main goal of their new PR program is to ensure that the company’s reputation precedes it. Of course, none of them were talking about any of the negative buzz, like gossip from their holiday party or the mixed reviews posted on their Facebook pages; they were exclusively wanting to spotlight their best work, their grandest accolades, their charitable activities … and imagining future business meetings where every attendee would already possess a solid understanding of the company’s strengths, capabilities, and the most positive aspects of its character. To be clear, when they talk about their “reputations,” they only mean all the good stuff.

Like most other consumers, even when I am wearing my hat as a communications consultant, I look at many aspects of a company to get a sense of its reputation. Certainly, if something bad is known to have happened in the past, that is absolutely one of the key ingredients … and that is never easy to offset. In fact, there are many PR firms specializing in handling exactly that type of situation, well known as “crisis communications.” Even startups are responsible for telling their own stories well. Most people expect to be able to research a company and assess it quickly and accurately. If one is to be rewarded with our money, it must pass our tests for shared values.

Every area that contributes to a company’s reputation can benefit from proactive communications efforts to educate the world and potentially shape perceptions. We all know that bad news travels fast, and history shows that overcoming negativity requires many elements … generally including taking responsibility, making and sustaining corrective efforts in good faith, and sticking to the corrected course over time.

These points underscore a fact many take for granted: Companies and individuals require positive reputations to succeed. In the corporate world, recent studies place the value of good reputations even higher than lines of bank credit.¹ The Harris Poll Reputation Quotient elegantly illuminates the many factors that make up a company’s reputation by identifying these six dimensions: social responsibility; emotional appeal; products and services; workplace environment; financial performance; and vision and leadership.² Reputation management is the process we employ to ensure that people will think about companies and people the way they wish to be perceived.

The Anatomy of an Influencer

Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People first appeared in 1936, and it was based on a 14-week course taught by Mr. Carnegie himself, which aimed to help individuals put themselves on the right track toward success. Whatever is implied by the expression “straighten up and fly right” seems to fit with the model behavior Mr. Carnegie taught others in his methodical approaches toward becoming reputable.

Designing this curriculum involved a great deal of analysis regarding my mission and responsibilities as a communications consultant. Across the successes, one specific piece of feedback reflects a daily internal focus which has ultimately paid massive dividends. In the words of creative director, director, and photographer Justin Meredith, “One of Roger’s defining characteristics is keeping both internal and external communication positive.”

With that in mind, my attraction to Mr. Carnegie’s optimism-in-action is easy to see. To absorb the discussions to come, I feel one should embrace the basic tenets of professional etiquette and be able to apply them personally. Further, to me, the ability to remain positive in all situations is mandatory for anyone seeking to manage reputations for others.

Each of the discussions to follow is built on a foundation of personal conduct that is essentially impeccable, and of undeniable integrity. By successfully taking this training to heart, you will be in the position to offer excellent counsel to any business executive on any subject where you have established your expertise.

Mr. Carnegie spent 14 weeks bringing his students to the point of being solid, interesting, influential people. If you have never been exposed to good leadership, I encourage you to read How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, as well as career guidance workbooks like What Color is Your Parachute, and to have enough conversations with smart, positive, respectable people about yourself, to have a good grasp of these two things:

• You are proud of yourself.
• You are willing to take on a proactive role to communicate with the world.

This emphasis on professional personal conduct directly addresses the fact that many people think of public relations as reputation management. To be fit for such service, one must measure up to very high standards.

Commitments to the Audience

In the advertising industry, the debut of the annual AICP Show in New York City is always a big deal, drawing attendance from agency executives and the Who’s Who of commercial production professionals worldwide. Attending one year, I met an executive for a massive ad agency, where I had often engaged with his VP of Public Relations, and knew him to be quirky but friendly. When I asked if the PR VP was in attendance, my question immediately caused him to bristle. “He’s not the kind of guy I typically hang out with,” was the reply. To me, that represented another level of proficiency to aim for.

Although this standard may be impossible to meet, I take it as my challenge to be the type of person people will be happy to associate with. With the increasing difficulty of gaining attention, this subjective aspiration remains a benchmark for me. Being at least worthy of someone’s time – in a word, interesting – puts the right emphasis on what the job of a communications consultant entails, at least to me. To summarize:

• Being a good communications consultant means interacting effectively with others and making that process as interesting as possible for them.

I will offer two more pearls of wisdom here. The first comes from author and former presidential speechwriter James Humes: “The art of communication is the language of leadership.”³

And distilling some of Mr. Carnegie’s teachings, taking interest in others may be the best way to earn their esteem.

I also have strong feelings about having a personal mission and pursuing it diligently over time, which is a main reason this book exists. Feeding one’s personal development through ongoing education, and by challenging oneself to grow, are vital in becoming someone worth knowing.

The importance of staying informed about others and making efforts to understand their cares and concerns (especially those affecting the workplace) cannot be overemphasized. Communications are all about the audience; as we devise strategies and translate them into action, we attempt to drive certain responses. Only by being well versed in others’ mindsets, motivations, and particulars can we hope to be successful as communicators.

Helping a Business Take Aim

Understanding the basic meaning of a business reputation, and considering what goes into managing one, it is easy to see the power of the world-class skill set at the heart of this book. The next part of the equation is about strategy.

If you have any experience working for a small business, no matter what your job was, you probably have some sense of the source of the cash-flow, or how the money came in. In the big picture, a main strategy for any professional or business is typically aimed at helping to support cash-flow, which usually comes down to sales, fundraising, underwriting and/or deal-making. Well-managed brands with long-term vision and deeper resources engage in brand-building and – in the best cases – socially responsible campaigns, knowing that their fortunes generally rely on positive reputations. And in the beginning stages, most businesses must start with a name, business cards, directory listings, often a website … because without them, they have no credibility. By defining the bottom-line objectives for a business, (for example, (1) try to attract new customers; (2) take excellent care of existing customers so they will continue to buy from us), you can then start to understand what their strategy should be. We will be covering all of this in more depth, but I wanted to highlight strategy’s essential role before talking about another key aspect of communication, which has to do with discerning right from wrong.

Ethics

I was retained by global creative agency ATTIK in 2003 to serve as its PR agency of record. For my small business, it was one of several prestigious accounts that motivated me to be among the best PR consultants in the creative industry. Over the next couple of years, I can think of very few scenarios which put me on the spot regarding my values, making me question whether I wanted to take on an assignment … but there was one.

During that era, ATTIK’s UK office was retained by Japan Tobacco, Inc. to rebrand and reposition its Camel brand of cigarettes, aiming to optimize its brand perception worldwide. When I was being briefed on the idea of trying to generate some media coverage through a PR campaign focusing on ATTIK’s work, I was surprised at how the conversations struck my nerves, producing some negative sensations. Could I tell my client that this was a project I did not want to touch? My solution was to provide an action plan to frame up the strategy and proposed tactics, but I made it clear to my boss that I would prefer not to pitch it to the media, and I did not want my name attached to it.

In another instance, I was hired by the owner of a production company to help him generate media exposure around a project he had produced, which was about to win an award. I wrote the story according to his specifications, but when I told him we needed to get client approval, imagine my surprise when he told me, point blank: “Fuck them!” Based on my experience working in the creative industry, I let him know that I was uncomfortable distributing a story to a trade media outlet that tells only one side of a story, does not give everyone involved due credit, or may be inaccurate. Unmoved by my insistence that forging ahead distributing that story without the main client’s input and approval would be a bad idea – I told them it would be like giving a journalist a gun that we were likely ...