PR part 2: The award winning Harrison Polites
What you need to know about working with a PR
Mehdeeka is for solo marketers or small teams working in the B2B, SaaS, startup, and tech spaces. Check out the previous issue: PR part 1, an interview with tech journalist Gina Baldassarre. Help me grow Mehdeeka by sharing it with a friend or colleague!
I’ll start with a disclaimer, Harrison Polites is yet another dear friend but also Perkbox’s (i.e. my day job) PR. I’m obviously a huge fan of Harrison and his work because he’s incredibly good at what he does — backed up by the fact that he just won the David Hellaby Best Media Relations Award at the 2020 IT Journalism awards.
Prior to setting up The Media Accelerator, Harrison was also a journo himself, worked on That Startup Show, and generally was just being an all-round over achiever. Part of that over achieving is providing excellent answers to my interview questions, so let’s just get straight to it.
Kayla: How do you identify stories that your clients might have overlooked themselves? What kind of information is useful for you to have access to/updates on?
Harrison: That really depends on the client and their PR goals. For consumer-focused news that’s tricky, as there’s no hard and fast rule on what makes news and what doesn’t.
For business news, it's much easier. Business news usually revolves around a few set things: deals (M&A, capital raising), senior appointments and partnerships. So you constantly ask clients about these things and hope you catch them before they throw it up on LinkedIn and essentially break their own news — really diminishing its value for journos.
My advice to marketers would be to over-brief your PR. Tell them more, bring them in the tent. The more they know, the more they can work with. But a good PR should be naturally curious and ask questions during your meetings.
K: A lot of your success as a PR is based on your relationships with journalists, which is built by not sending them crap all the time. How do you tell a client (or for newsletter readers, your boss) that what they want to pitch is not newsworthy?
H: That’s true. Without meeting a journo, the best way to have a relationship with them is to be useful to them. But it's always better to meet them in person. There’s always a difference between what they have to write (what their editor and audience wants to see) and what they want to write (their passions). I’ll give you an example: I had to write about cloud computing as a journalist, but I wanted to write about video games. So if somebody pitched me a yarn that aligned with my interests, I’d be much more likely to write it. You can only get a real sense of this from meeting the journo in person.
To the crux of your question, which is client management. It can be tough, particularly for new PRs or journos moving into the sector. It’s harder if the client has their heart set on a particular story that just won’t stand up in the media.
I’ve never regretted calling a spade a spade. I’ve built a reputation of being frank with my clients about my thoughts on their stories. I’d rather invest time in things I know will work, and not waste journalists’ time either.
But the trick isn’t to just shoot things down all the time, you need to offer alternatives, keep the PR moving with ideas and other opportunities where you can.
The worst part is you’ll at least once be proven wrong, as someone else will get that story that you turned down away somewhere, and then your client will inevitably send you the link and ask why you couldn’t do that. But each story comes with its own unique set of circumstances and you just need to make a call depending on what you hear and what you know.
K: What can marketing teams do to make the whole PR process easier? What tips would you give them to ensure that once they have an opportunity, they capitalise on it?
H: Great question. My first tip would be to understand that there’s a difference between marketing messaging and PR. With marketing, the underlying assumption is that your message will reach your audience. You are paying for it to hit your audience. With PR, your message needs to go through a gatekeeper (the journalist) and they need to see merit with the story you are trying to tell. More often than not, they won’t write the story and certainly not if it reads like a marketing brief. Classic example: It’s a bit hard to accept that everyone is a “leader” in their market when every company says it in the first line of their press release.
This will change the messaging for PR and the way in which your audience sees your business.
You need to work with your PR to understand this and accept that the media will not say exactly what you want them to say.
But that’s why the media is trusted and is so influential, and I personally wouldn’t have it any other way.
That aside, when you land an opportunity you need to be quick. Journos will move on, don’t give it a day. If the PR needs to line up an interview, then help them arrange an interview. If they need to talk to your CEO, let them. The easiest way to do this is to set up some form of chat channel — be it Slack, WhatsApp or anything — and communicate regularly on it.
PR often sits in a special spot within large organisations. Unlike many other areas, it needs the ability to level jump and skip past hierarchies to get things done. Savvy businesses understand this, and a lot of high-level PRs often end up having excellent relationships with CEOs because they talk to them that often.
K: When should marketing teams look to hire a PR, freelance vs in house? At what point does PR give the most value?
H: That really depends on your situation as a company. If you can afford it, I’d hire an inhouse. But don’t pay them peanuts. There is a handful of excellent PRs in each field, they are hard to find and even harder to hire. You will most likely have to poach out of agency or from a rival.
It’s classic to see companies offer PR roles at something that’s close to a graduate salary, but then expect this amazing candidate to pick up the mantle because of the “incredible opportunity”. Don’t waste your time or theirs. Simple rule: If you can’t afford a six-figure salary, hire an agent. Only spend less on a PR if they are a secondary hire to support the head of PR, and therefore don’t need as much experience.
With an agent, you can choose to go for a freelancer or an agency. Agencies are more expensive but have perks. For starters, you generally have more heads thinking about your media with an agency, which can be helpful. Also, if you have an account that needs continual servicing (always on PR, because you are getting inbound media all the time) you may be better suited to an agency. That way, when your account lead takes time off, it's the agency’s problem, not yours. The downside of an agency is that depending on how much you spend, you may end up with someone very junior running your PR. You can’t choose your account manager, and that’s often the key factor in determining whether you have a positive experience with an agency.
If you want to work closely with one gun PR, then freelancers are the way to go. Many offer retainers now like agencies and operate exactly like an agency however they cap their workload. You also know exactly who you are working with, which is a huge (and often underrated) bonus. People move around in agencies a lot, don’t expect to have the same account manager for more than a year.
The downside is if that freelancer gets really sick, or needs to take a holiday, you don’t have a PR function. For many companies, that’s not much of a risk. But for some, it's a consideration. Plan accordingly.
When to bring them in is very circumstantial. In most instances, you should have a marketing function in place first, that way you can effectively capitalise on the PR you receive.
For B2B companies, PR is often required when they are starting to secure large enterprise deals or are looking to grow their pipeline. The halo effect positive PR provides can be instrumental in giving your client the nudge they need to trust you during the sales process.
For startups, this is typically when they clear or in the lead up to their Series A round. Only bring on a PR when you can afford to keep them on for at least 3 months, with an eye for a much longer relationship.
K: How do you personally continue to improve your skills? Where do you go to read/learn?
H: That’s hard. PR is a skill you improve through experience and more often than not fail. If you want to meet someone who knows how to cop a failure on the chin and move on, talk to a PR. The more you fail, the more you figure out what works. The best PRs often come from environments that let them fail initially in order to then succeed.
My journalism background has also been incredibly instructive, and I rely on that a lot. One habit that I formed from that is I always read the news. I do this daily, if not hourly. How can you insert a brand into public discourse if you aren’t across it?
You also need to collaborate. I may be a freelancer, but I’ve set up a network of like-minded industry professionals who I bounce ideas, leads and opportunities off. I always take the opportunity to network with others in my field as well as journos. It’s incredibly important and useful. PR is and always will be a team sport.
Finally, perhaps the most fundamental piece of advice towards my success is to have empathy. I read this classic business book Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People very early in my career. It’s changed the way I deal with clients, journos and just about everyone, I credit my success to some of the advice I got from it. Super basic advice. Very easy to understand, but so relevant in an era where so many people either communicate like robots or place their own interests above everyone else's yet expect everyone to do what they want.
To summarise: You learn from failure, a broad background and career experience, collaborating with others and from broader reflective readings. I wish there was a simple course or TED talk that I could refer to, but this is the most honest answer I could muster on this.
Links to bits and bobs
Is AI going to take over the jobs of copywriters? Probably not, but there is now an AI that will write your FB ad captions.
Some visual/arty inspo, an Instagram account that posts a weekly art challenge and then posts random submissions. They’re quite good!
Via Dense Discovery I found this free brand guidelines generator - it’s very simple but kind of cool?
LinkedIn released a (very) clickbaity list of 10 movies every marketing professional should watch and I’m slightly interested in maybe 2 of them.
There’s a new marketing book on the block - Subprime Attention Crisis - which 1. I do want to read so I might pick up a copy, and 2. reminds me how amazing The Big Short is. That should be on the LinkedIn list of good movies to watch (because how were subprime mortgages not a result of messaging and positioning?)
I’ve been consuming a lot of sales content lately so here’s a preview of what I’ve been reading, but this clicks section has already gotten quite long so I’ll save it for next week!
Next week
Part 3 in this 3 part series! Ed Pollitt from B&T will be dishing out his favourite campaigns of the year and what makes covering the media so unique.