When the Trouble Shooters Come Calling!

March’s luncheon presentation featured WOAI TV’s Trouble Shooter team Brian Collister on “Trouble Shooting Your PR Approach.” Collister has been an investigative reporter for WOAI for years and has fine-tuned his advice to public relations practitioners on the do’s and don’t’s of working with a reporter on the investigative side of the news house.

Here are his top five tips.

1. Don’t try to defend the indefensible. If your company has made a mistake, admit it. But first, he also suggested you pay attention to the next four tips.
2. Do NOT downplay the dollar amount. Particularly in the public sphere and especially in this economy.
3. DO prepare your interview subject. That’s your job as the PR person and Collister expects that when he requests an interview. Surprisingly, though, Collister’s experience shows that far too many of his interview subjects are ill prepared.
4. Seek forgiveness from the beginning and the process will be so much smoother for all involved.
5. Poor Public Relations strategies are obvious to all. Think through your objectives and their consequences and remember that in the public eye, perception is reality.

Collister used two key analogies during his presentation that really sum up the way investigative reporters think.

The first was the analogy of three doors. If two doors are open to him and one is closed, he will always attempt to take the closed door. If you're in PR, you want to make sure your door to reporters is at least ajar!

He also used the analogy of ripping off an old bandage. It's far less painless if you do it quickly, than slowly. In other words, for PR people, get on the issue and resolve it fast.

Here's a short video from Brian Collister with tips on working with investigative reporters.

PRSA Announces New Definition of Public Relations

In an effort to modernize the 1982 definition of public relations (the last one was developed on 1982), PRSA created an interesting crowdsourcing process using social media. Professionals were invited to submit comments to the “Public Relations Defined” blog. PRSA then created a word cloud to see which key words appeared most often. From that, three definitions were developed for professionals to vote on, again through social media.

So here’s the winning definition:

“Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

See the announcement, “A Modern Definition of Public Relations,” to see the other two finalists and related discussions. There is also some reflection about why the word ethics doesn’t appear in the definition.

The whole initiative is not PRSA’s alone, by the way. It was developed out of a collaboration among several PR related organizations. 

So what do you think? Will this definition stand for decades to come?