Time to set the bar higher

One example was of a PR phoning up without a real grasp of the pages they were hoping to get coverage in.

Another was of receiving a press release with such a positive glow it looked more like a piece of high class merchandising than a news story.

A final one was of someone trying to place a story three weeks after the event actually happened.

I don’t want this to descend into a diatribe about PR faux pas because plenty has been written about that. And let’s be honest – we are human and we all make mistakes.

But the comments did get me thinking.

I’m a huge believer in learning from our mistakes. But at Grayling Scotland we also learn from our successes. It is just as important to us to capture exactly why something – a press release, a pitch document, an event, a roundtable discussion, whatever – exceeded expectations, as it is to grasp why we tripped up.

Perhaps that’s where the problem lies: if more PR teams analysed why their work was successful, they might start to eradicate the unforgiveable practices that so infuriate journalists. After all, not getting coverage isn’t a mistake: it’s a failure. And nobody wants to learn about failure, do they? Or, more to the point, nobody succeeds by using bad methods.

When we have had a good result, we will sit down and ask some searching questions about the way we worked together, how the media reacted to the story and what we can learn for the future. It might be an internal process, or we might include the client – it depends. But we do so not because we didn’t understand the process itself, but because by formally acknowledging the reasons behind the success, we never stop pushing ourselves to achieve the same again. The bar stays high.

Perhaps analysing, building on and ultimately nurturing positive performance is a mantra we could all do more of.