Results were mixed, but generally most people found ideation and outreach more difficult.
Raising awareness
Raising awareness is difficult, and understanding what journalists want and don’t want is difficult, especially for those new to the game.
Try to figure this out on your own and you will be inundated with conflicting information from both your colleagues and the journalists themselves. The game is incredibly subjective and no two journalists, PRs or publications are the same.
Knowing when to properly insert your client into a story effectively and tastefully requires a lot of understanding of the media landscape. What can only be learned by constantly interacting with the media.
My “news sense” is something I have honed after years of working in and consuming media. There is no quick fix to improve your media literacy. Being a good digital PR requires constant consumption of news content.
That said, it’s the kind of job where being “very online” can be as good as a college degree. Just like SEO, some of the best digital PRs I’ve worked with never studied digital marketing and never learned the craft on the job.
Ideation
The second most difficult thing is the ideation. I’m not surprised; one of the most challenging things in this role is constantly coming up with new and fresh ideas.
Presenting a client’s website to the press in a way that entices them to write about it and, above all, link to the web page is, at times, exhausting.
Having to be a constant source of new, fresh ideas in a world of high-pressure link KPIs can sometimes seem overwhelming, especially when asked to do it on the spot during a meeting.
Almost all of my best ideas come to me when I’m not sitting at a desk or in a conference room. Instead, they happen when I’m out for a walk, at the grocery store, or when I’m scrolling through TikTok late at night.
We also don’t help ourselves by only talking about our successes. Rarely will you see us sharing hundreds of unopened emails and discouraging unsubscribes on LinkedIn.
We don’t share campaigns that haven’t launched, no matter how we try to realign or repurpose them.