It has been a long time coming, but your customers and clients have finally spoken up, and what they are telling you is that they want to have a relationship with you. Not your lawyers. Not your outsourced customer service people. Not managers who can’t help them precisely when they need to be helped. Not the people behind the register who likely know nothing about you. They only know how to sell your product.
Most of all, the thing your customer’s most want to avoid is your PR. This is because your PR is not authentic, it speaks with no authority. You may think that your PR works for you, but you would be wrong. Your PR works for itself. Even if it is internal. They have a message, and that is all they have. Anything else confounds them. This may indeed always be the case.
What happens when a customer asks you something on your Facebook wall? Or on Twitter, in full-view of thousands of other customers? Your PR shuts down, they don’t know what to do. Because they’ve lost the message, which is the only thing they ever had. Even if that customer outreach is positive, it isn’t controlled, it isn’t manipulatable. It gums up the works, all those months of planning and creative briefing. The careful messaging that takes place; this is what the customers or reacting against. They don’t want to be told a message. They want their questions answered. They want to know WHY you do what you do, rather than a steady stream of WHAT you do?
We sell Popsicles! Great! But Why? If you can sell Popsicles, you can sell anything, so then why Popsicles?
PR cannot tell your customers why you do what you do. They can only tell them what you do and how you do it. Well. we sell Popsicles, and here are our store hours.
Only you can effectively communicate why you do what you do.
Image courtesy of Pink Sherbet Photography on Flickr
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree that customers don’t want to talk to inauthentic representatives of your company or brand. Whatever department or business function that representative comes from. And I agree that some PR pros are not equipped to deal with “the next question” that puts them off script. In my experience, however, it is the PR function that is best equipped to answer the follow up question that comes when you put a message out there. If your PR person gets lost when the topic shifts from the message they intended to share, you need to change PR people. PR should be the *best* equipped to share all the stories of your business and brands. Whatever you do or make, they need to know how to fit it into the outlet’s coverage.
And I agree … it’s all about authenticity. PR that hasn’t figured that out yet needs to wake up!
Robin
Thanks for coming by and for the comment. I want to agree with you, but I think that no matter what, the owner of a business will always be the best person to communicate the vision. It is their product after all. PR is just pretending, in a good way, but ultimately it is not theirs. They are mercenaries. Better IMHO to work with businesses to teach them the tools and protocols for how to communicate their vision on their own.
Thoughts?
Z
As a PR pro that’s always learning and evolving, I DO know how to answer the FB questions and tweets. What I know is the story, and it’s my job to help that business owner share the vision. Like you said, I teach the tools and protocols but clients often don’t have time to seek out or follow every pitch, every blog. Sometimes they have the passion, the vision.. but not the talent to share it effectively with the audience. That’s where a talented PR pro helps; let the communications pros do what they do best, and the business owner do the same–run that business, make the best Popsicle ever.
To Robin’s point about communicating beyond the message and talking points, I agree. The PR pro should know the story and have worked with the client (media training) well enough, to enable them to shift the messages back to fit the story, the media outlet. As to authenticity, it’s something I’ve embraced as I’ve seen the need to integrate PR and social media. But there’s a catch.
“Why do we sell Popsicles?” is a valid question, and one obvious yet authentic answer is “because that’s how we make our money.” Better one, and an answer that the PR pro can help the business owner identify and verbalize is “because when I was a kid, our Aunt Glenda would have us over to the house, create all these cool different flavors.. never seen that anywhere and I wanted to share them with my kids. The business started there.” FWIW.
Davina,
I agree with a lot of what you say except for the “shift the messages back to fit the story,” I am not sure, but I don’t think I can agree with that. Why not address what your customer or potential customer want’s addressed (within reason of course?) Why the need to manipulate them back into the arena you or the business owner prefer? One thing I’ve learned online and in the social web is that no matter what we don’t know our audience, so why would I tell them what I think they want to hear. That kind of sounds lazy.
Also, yes the PR pro can help that business owner verbalize their story. But I don’t think that its worth 5k a month into infinity. At least for most small businesses.
really appreciate you coming by and leaving your thoughts.
Z