Five Ways Being in PR is Like Running a Group Blog

A brief note before we really get into today’s post – you may have noticed a trend in our posts since Monday – all the posts are lists of metaphors explaining why PR (or social media, metrics, analytics or some other aspect of the biz) is like something else.  The great metaphor post – only we’re doing ’em in series.  If you’d like to offer up your own contribution to the effort, drop me a line.

In the 2+ years I’ve gotten plenty of questions about how we “manage” to get the blog published every day, usually on time, and how things are scheduled, setup, arranged, enforced, etc. etc.  Most of those secrets are in the vault with the KFC original recipe recipe, but it’s occurred to me, not infrequently, putting this show on the road every day is quite a bit like working in PR in general:

  1. You can’t do it all – You may try sometimes, but by doing that someone, somewhere is getting shortchanged.  For it all to move smoothly splitting the weight is key, but the buck still needs to stop with someone.
  2. You’ll learn things by mistake – Out of nowhere you don’t need to learn the circulation (or UVM) of that go-to media outlet for the next briefing book.  Similarly, you’re suddenly typing in that wonky WordPress URL without needing to look it up or link to it from somewhere.
  3. You’ll need a mentor/advisor – You won’t be able to know it all. Given the range of things you’ll need to know – available tech, editing, writing, planning, writing, editing, metrics, money management (in some form), etc. – there’s no way you can go it completely alone.
  4. You’ll give away a lot of ideas – You’ll get people offering to help but needing ideas, or needing “packaging” for an idea they’ve already got.  You, of course, can’t use all your ideas (See 1, above) so you’ll “give away” something you’ve got backburnered, and happily.
  5. Some things will take much longer than expected, others much less time – That blog post or media outlet research you expect to take no time suddenly takes hours to get the way you want, and those longer projects you stall on since they’re so big, may turn out to be NBD (No Big Deal).
[recent posts]