Why a Great PR Person is Many People at Once

I once had an outstanding employee who lived in two bodies. Or maybe what I mean is that I had two employees who might have been outstanding professionally if combined into one person. Let me try to explain about Joe and Mary.

Joe had zero people skills and could be arrogant in person or on the phone, but he wrote such brilliant pitches that reporters raved about him and would run with virtually any story he sent them.

Mary could barely match subject with verb. Some days I wondered if she could spell her name. But when Mary opened her mouth the angels sang. Through the power of her oral communications genius, Mary could place any story anywhere.

Walking by their offices, alternately overhearing Joe type furiously and Mary cast a spell on whomever was on the phone, I sometimes wondered: What sort of creature would emerge if I could play Dr. Frankenstein and mash them into one corporeal frame – a complete PR professional, maybe?

My experience wasn’t that unusual. I know many a Big 10 agency staffed with pitch people who can’t write, writers who can’t pitch, tech subject matter experts who are aloof from the PR team, and account managers who are assigned to tech clients even though they’re clueless about technology.

Seems like each professional knows one trick. My favorite specialist team of all time was the pair who sat side-by-side behind an artist’s drawing board at a New York ad agency. Curious, I asked what they did. “We’re the BIG WORD guys,” they explained in unison. “We come up with the BIG WORDS on the covers of annual reports, brochures and so on.” They went back to work drawing large box letters with crayons. I’m not making this up.

While it’s hard to find a person who can do it all, here are some potential traits of the “Renaissance PR person”:

• Risk-Taker: When I’m interviewing somebody I skip right to the end of the resume and look at the job candidate’s personal interests. If his or personal life is a yawn, chances are their professional performance will be, also. I’m drawn to people who are active, or even better, don’t mind taking a chance: mountain climbers, motorcycle enthusiasts, equestrians, kick boxers, etc.  If you can shoot a penny off a fence with a pistol at 50 paces on a cantering horse, call me. I like ballsy. It means you can be counted on in a crisis.
• Creative Artists: If you’re not bubbling over with incredible ideas, and if you lack the ability to express them via great content, find another profession. In PR you’re expected to have fresh inspiration every day, and as importantly, to express your ideas in ways nobody else ever thought of.  Writing, of course, is the most basic required skill. What you write has to jump off the page and make the reader jump out of his or her chair and take action.  A J-school background is good for starters – though not a guarantee of creativity. “Joe,” from the above anecdote, was a software engineer whose writing talents were revealed almost by accident.
• Content Marketer: This is not your father’s PR. Increasingly, traditional tools of the trade, e.g., press releases, are dropping away.  Today, the content is the thing. You not only need the chops to create it, but total immersion in the social PR tools to spread the word, the video and the voice to audiences that matter.
• Door-Busters: Sales experience is invaluable in PR. Contrary to the popular image of being gabmeisters, great salespeople are really masters of listening.  They tune in to “the customer” (reporter & editors) and then tailor “the product” (news/features/blog & byline placements) to each one’s needs. PR people with a sales background aren’t afraid of or deterred by rejection, and can even turn a “no” into a “yes” — they know to close the sale and get results. My “Mary,” who couldn’t write, was a former door-to-door salesperson and an artist with people.
• Technicians: Not too long ago, you could be a technical boob and still get a PR job in some mature, dying industry like shoe leather. These days, virtually every business has a strong IT component – it’s inescapable, thus all PR is tech PR to an extent. PR people must immerse themselves in their companies’ and clients’ business and develop expertise in the technology behind it. For example, today everybody claims to be some sort of Internet expert. If you can talk intelligently about the OpenFlow standard being advanced by Microsoft, Google and Facebook and expected to transform IP networking as we know it, people will know you’re for real.

No doubt there are half a dozen traits of the ideal PR person that I’ve overlooked. Additions and corrections are welcome.

The challenge: being all those things at once.