When clients make PR mistakes.

 I often fear taking on new clients. Why? Well, in our industry we have three different types of clients. First, you have the overly involved clients who want to speak with you daily and know when you are and aren’t working on their accounts. Then you have the “I don’t care” clients who pay on time, barely speak with you, and are busy doing everything but updating their PR team with news. Finally, you have the self-sabotage clients (the third group). While there are many pros and cons associated with the first two groups I mentioned, the third group is the one to look out for.

 Why the third group is dangerous; the "parental-fixation" syndrome. What is it? Parental-fixation syndrome is when you become so focused on your company, product or service that you forget a bigger world exists out there. The third group of clients have this syndrome and, for them, everything in their lives deserves a media release and contains press value. When things don’t get picked up, they want to know where you magic wand is (or worse)! I hate to say this, but there are many publicists who also have this syndrome. How? Well, it can show up when you treat reporters as if their sole purpose is to tell your story. In reality, most of the time the media will be only slightly (if at all) interested in your news or what your clients have to say.

I am writing all of this under the title of “When clients make PR mistakes” because it is important, for us publicists anyway, to inform clients about the realities of day-to-day publicity efforts and what their reasonable expectations need to be. If not, the mistakes your clients make (especially in group three) will leave you with unhappy clients.  Communication is key. Neither group one or two will be a perfect client. You have to let clients know upfront what will be expected of them in the contract for services as far as communication goes. With group three, you need to be extra careful about over promising and under delivering.

All this said, clients can make mistakes about their involvement and PR assumptions. Not information your clients about the realities of PR is a common publicity mistake. Please take this information and learn from it.

Until next time,

Coco the CEO