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.
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