Public Relations to the Corporate Executive Rescue: Proving Our Worth in Innovative Ways

A recent Booz & Company study finds that a company’s internal message is being lost and that business leaders are finding themselves worried over a variety of communication-related issues. Chief among them:

·         64% said they had too many conflicting priorities

·         54% do not believe their company strategy will lead to success

·         53% did not believe their corporate strategy was understood by employees

·         33% felt company strategy and company capabilities were aligned

While these internal struggles often make our jobs as PR professionals more difficult – how can we draft an effective press release if the company doesn’t know what it wants to say or how to say it – I believe it’s also a valuable opportunity for our industry.

Always eager to demonstrate our communications worth, as PR agencies we must market ourselves as objective strategy sounding boards as well as networked media professionals. To some extent we do this all the time – hand-holding and coddling our most challenging clients.

But rarely do we market these evaluative skills up front. Too often we fall into the trap of “yes-ing” clients to death, spinning our wheels in failed response to internal client confusion. Considering all the talk of late of how PR agencies must adapt to new realities (faced in some cases, with the severing of 80-year-old client-agency partnerships), becoming diversified communications agencies versed in multiple channels and multiple ways of telling a compelling story might be only the beginning. Add to that our very adept skills at executive coaching and direction-finding and we may yet turn an internal corporate disadvantage into a new PR agency strength.

So has your PR agency already taken on new responsibilities as a quasi-executive coach – a prospering industry in its own right? What, specifically, are you doing to achieve that aim? And how are you balancing these expanded responsibilities with traditional PR? Share your trials and tribulations with the ThinkInk PR community in the section below.