The mistake often made is thinking that the simple ability to open one’s mouth, having an extroverted personality, being a media worker, or being a master of ceremony automatically imbues one with the ability to be a public relations expert or practitioner. This could not be further from the truth. Public relations expertise is multifaceted and built overtime. To be truly effective at PR and understand its value, one must have lived through many unpredictable crises and challenges.
To that end, PR is a thinking exercise because it requires one to fix a situation gone wrong and perhaps even more challenging, to help maintain a good reputation from being soiled. Sometimes, PR tactics do not always go according to plan. So, the ability to recover is critical. This requires an agile, skilled, and experienced mind that knows how to deploy the various PR tools/platforms at one’s disposal.
PR also means understanding the effect of propaganda whether by or against you. When providing PR counsel, it is important for the expert to explain this very clearly to a client because more often than not, the client expects the party they are in dispute with to act in a gentlemanly manner and are genuinely shocked when the opposite happens. So, one recovers by acting quickly against the disinformation or pre-emptively by keeping in touch with key people, especially the media, the “enemy” will definitely get in touch with. I call this “intelligence gathering”. Sometimes, information about the activities of the other side falls on your unexpectedly from well-wishers. Were “advance information” is provided, it is the duty of the PR expert to act as necessary to deter or flat foot the other side. There are a number to do this. The PR expert should also have the ability to maintain a cool head in the midst of a crisis because in most cases clients panic and prefer to hunker down. However, when you hire LumenPRC you will be in the right hands.
Seize the light.
