New Year’s Resolutions for PR Agencies: 6 Steps to Evolve the Perfect Client-Agency Relationship

In a perfect world, public relations would involve a simple relationship between client and agency. The client would respect and trust the PR agency to maximize opportunities and not just reduce risk. And the agency would make sure the client stays involved in strategies and decisions. Sadly, this is not always how things go in the PR world.

What lessons and resolutions can agencies and their clients take into the New Year to make public relations a smoother and more effective collaboration? Here are 6 steps:

1. Root the client- agency relationship in trust:  Building a strong foundation from the get-go is key to a dream relationship.  The client signed your agency for a reason. Know what that reason is and make it the foundation of your relationship.

2. Figure out where your agency stands with the client: Is it more like a partnership or a division of roles? Will your agency be an extension of the client’s in-house team? Or is your agency playing more of a crisis management role?  Knowing the answers to these questions and relaying your expectations to the client leaves no room for doubt or unmet expectations.

3. Lay the groundwork for transparency, polite pushback and unvarnished feedback: PR is often about describing a client or their campaign in the best light possible.  Some call it spin. Whatever it’s called, the PR-client relationship must be robust enough to weather contentious moments when creative differences emerge. In the event of creative differences, it helps to remember that the client is challenging your ideas, not your agency.

4. How, Why, What, When, Where?:  We expect these questions from our clients, but why shouldn’t our clients expect the same questions from us? That means going beyond merely keeping clients in the loop. Explaining the process of why you are doing what you’re doing gives the client confidence in their choice. It’s important to remember that clients are not communications experts. That’s why they’ve recruited your PR firm to begin with. Therefore it’s critical that extra steps are taken to make sure clients feel like they are part of the PR process.

5. Ask questions:  It’s ok to go back to the client with questions if you are uncertain about any information provided. It doesn’t show weakness, but rather, it shows that you are thorough and committed to getting the job done right the first time.

6. Staying two steps ahead:  At any given point, you want to be two steps ahead of your client and their industry. More often than not clients need options and recommendations to determine what they don’t want. While that may be frustrating, keep in mind that they hired your agency. Listen to their needs and they’ll return the favor.

Ultimately, successful PR efforts come down to establishing a strong working relationship between the agency and client. Anyone in PR knows that some clients are harder to work with than others. What can distinguish your agency is how well you handle those challenges and still lead by example as PR professionals. The New Year is the perfect time to go the extra mile and break down these so-called barriers between agencies and clients.

What other recommendations would you add to this list to make the PR agency-client relationship stronger and more collaborative? Share your thoughts below.

Fantastic Collaboration?! Maybe Giving Up the F-Word Would Have Been Easier Than Ditching the C-Word?

Ahh, C-words and F-words. What a lovely way to start a Thursday blog. But considering the disturbing news week with bombings, poisoned letters and a fertilizer plant explosion, perhaps it’s the perfect time to write a follow-up on these lovely gems of the English language.

In February of this year, ThinkInk launched an experiment: could we, as a company, strike (or reduce to a minimum) usage of the word ‘client’ from our copy –especially if its usage was meant to devalue, demean or unfairly generalize the men and women who literally pay our bills and salaries.

Like ex-smokers in the throes of nicotine withdrawal, cutting back on our C-word count proved anything but easy. And, as many ex-smokers do, often we traded one harmful choice for another. Rather than using phrases like “client needs,” or blaming an entire organization for some creativity failure, we instead went the other route, overly personalizing our frustrations and directing that anger toward individuals. In some instances, we adopted new C-words or “curmudgeonly” when speaking about clients.

Curious to learn more, I also reviewed my inbox, searching for C-word references. Let’s just say the results caused an F-word or two to slip out. In dispassionate computer speak, Microsoft Outlook kindly informed me, “Your search returned a large number of results. Narrow your search, or click here to view all results.”

Thank you, Outlook. Granted, some of my staff have titles that include the word “client,” which of course skewed the results. But even an email I sent earlier this week was peppered with our favorite C-word.

Clearly we could have done better.

Perhaps it was the flaws in our original parameters that led to our flawed results. After all, client isn’t a bad word. It’s just how we use it that can hurt. The same goes with personalizing attacks. While it’s OK to disagree and disagree vehemently with our CLIENTS, it’s not OK to treat them with fuses so short that any minor tangle causes an explosion.

Think about how much more slack we give our friends. Do we want to call them F-words and C-words at times? Absolutely. Yet we don’t, because we know there’s a friendship at stake; there’s surge capacity inside all parties to absorb shocks and arguments. So we shrug our shoulders and move on.

Clients aren’t our friends. They’re business partners, cultivated over mostly successful PR results. They wouldn’t be clients, otherwise. But their feelings can be hurt just like anyone else’s. The reality is, if I’m finding a client conversation difficult, it’s likely they’re finding the situation challenging as well. Neither of us is happy.

So before we reach for an arsenal of C-words, F-words, expletives and snarky nicknames, let’s tweak our experiment. “Client” is back in play at ThinkInk but client-bashing remains off limits. Take a deep breath. Count to a thousand, eat a sandwich and channel your peeves into passion – steadfastly solving problems and finding solutions – don’t whine about them.

That way, we can all celebrate another F-C combination: Fantastic Collaboration. Three cheers for that!!!

When it comes to successful PR, those are words we should all be proud to say.

Why Ditching the ‘C-Word’ Can Improve Business Relationships and Company Culture

Say the word “client” (the other C-word) or use it in a sentence and what comes to mind? Forgetting its application to public relations, odds are that your mental list includes embellished dialogue from countless courtroom scenes either in film or novels. Jack Nicholson’s famous “you can’t handle the truth” monologue from A Few Good Men comes to mind as does Susan Sarandon’s impassioned defense and motherly protection of young Mark Sway (Brad Renfro) and his family in The Client.

In both instances, “the client” or “clients” are first seen as nothing more than machine-like elements of the impersonal legal apparatus: Sway is a child who witnessed a murder and the state requires the body’s location while Private First Class Louden Downey and Lance Corporal Harold Dawson are accused of murder.

Central to both plots, however, is the re-humanizing of these characters: Downey and Dawson were following orders; Sway’s reluctance to cooperate with the law protects his family. As the end credits roll the main characters are seen as people, not clients.

It’s fitting then that public relations – a profession that is fighting hard to prove its worth, thus my earlier blogs on the subject – has, over time, also adopted this clunky word.

As with the legal profession, PR client references have all the trappings of dispassion – or displeasure. The client is something to be serviced, like a faulty carburetor or misfiring engine piston. Signed, sealed, delivered and off to the next troublesome client meddling in the affairs of proper creative talent – i.e., us! Amid insane copy deadlines, we ask ourselves: what can the “carburetor” or “piston” tell us that is useful? 

Actually, clients can tell us a lot. You know, something extremely vital like where they see their company in the next five years and how their own internal team envisions a campaign. Oh, and what they expect of us.

A brilliant article by 72andSunny CEO John Boiler in AdAge recently called us all out on this troubling trend and suggested a much-needed change, one that ThinkInk is about to enact. Dropping the word “client” and its often-negative connotation can greatly improve the working environment, Boiler rightly argues. It’s common knowledge as old as the sales pitch itself but bears repeating. Identify with a person and the sale goes smoothly. Identify with the product or service offering, using words like client or customer and the phrase “used car salesperson” comes to mind. See the difference?

PR professionals don’t want to be perceived as used car salesmen and saleswomen (I doubt actual used car salespeople like the phrase either) and clients don’t want to be considered cogs in communicative wheels. So for the next two months ThinkInk is going to ban all uses of the word client – especially when its intent is to de-humanize and attack the organization we’re trying faithfully to represent.   

Studies show that creating a positive work environment for both your client….errr…the corporate team you represent and for your employees results in greater productivity and increased profits. A recent Gallup study found that unhappy employees (feeding, for instance, off the negative vibes created by client-bashing) cost businesses up to $300 billion a year in the US.

Don’t misunderstand. This isn’t about money. But it is about the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Treating people with greater respect starts with the little things. And cutting the word “client” from in-office conversations and copy will go a long way in improving our mutual relationships.

Now that’s a truth I think we all can handle.

We’ll let you know how our “c-word” experiment progresses and see if we communication pros can better calibrate our message and improve our relationships with you know who!