In the modern world, PR is all about knowing how to respond to crises in a fast and efficient fashion. However, while running the business and handling day-to-day operations, you might find it difficult for your business to truly be able to step up and make a genuine difference.
This is why it helps to develop a more fleet-of-foot and agile PR approach, one that’s able to provide solutions efficiently and easily. Whether you work in PR or are simply interested in the industry, this guide outlines a few key ways that you will be able to provide these more agile solutions. Read on now in order to get the full overview.
Firstly, it might be worth asking:
How does agile PR compare to traditional PR?
Traditional PR relies upon tried-and-tested methods for getting the message out there. They may rely on having a yearly schedule when it comes to figuring out the methods for promoting a particular brand or company, and consists of ideas such as press releases, creating specific events, and making sure editorial pieces end up in the right places. They would do this while being aware that they will need to respond every now and then to a particular crisis regarding a particular client’s image. This was the way of conventionally doing PR work, but it has become quickly outdated in the modern world.
Conversely, agile PR allows your business to become more adaptable, which is an important quality in today’s world. The goals would be necessarily more short term, but they would give you a quick overview as well as the means to be able to pursue them in a quick time-span before allowing you to review them on a case-by-case basis. This also means that an agile PR firm may have more adaptable goals and to be able to move with the digital times in order to properly achieve results. Nowadays, most PR experts believe that this approach is a far more effective one when it comes to promoting a business in the best possible way, as it enables quick improvements, and changes with a moving market.
Rather than a set-it-and-forget approach to PR, whereby communications goals are set annually and tactics agreed and laid out over a year, agile PR is constantly refreshed according to the changing business environment.
Now that is cleared up, read on for an explanation of how your business can actually provide these more agile PR solutions.
Use 3rd party software
Agile PR is all about reacting, then adapting. As a result, it is incumbent upon an agile PR firm to have the tools at hand to be able to continuously monitor the results of any kind of PR strategy. Without implementing the right 3rd party software, your business is actually going to have an incredibly difficult time seeing how it’s performing and then being able to adapt to any issues that might come its way. Whether you have just started out as a PR manager or have been running a traditional firm that is looking to offer more agile PR solutions, there are a whole series of technologies out there that allow you to monitor the latest developments and respond. Take a look around for a technology that works best for your business.
Embrace spontaneity
To be a truly agile PR company, you will have to let go of some of the old ways of conducting operations. The most important convention to rid yourself of is expecting clear results and a standardized workflow. Instead, agile PR is all about embracing the different ways that a PR business can change on a day-to-day basis and being able to respond to them in real time, like the response companies had to make to the coronavirus crisis. This means changing the mindset of your company to be able to deal with this kind of world. If it seems hard for your business to embrace this type of thinking, it might be worth dedicating a day to bringing in a dedicated consultant to explain the ways in which your business can move forward in a new and exciting fashion.
Constantly monitor social media
If you want to know what people are saying about your business, then it is definitely advisable to constantly monitor social media. As the recent Netflix debacle surrounding a new stand-up special has shown, businesses suffer when they don’t study social media for how people are affected by their business practices. That’s why your business should be doing absolutely everything in its power to look across all five social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok, to gauge what people are saying and then find a way to respond to this.
The important part to remember, is that if you are a business trying to help someone or a company that is suffering from PR issues, don’t telegraph that you are trying to be accountable directly, as this can come off as desperate and cringeworthy. Rather, it’s better to truly have a grip of what people are trying to say and then putting actionable policies in place in order to be able to deal with them. By engaging in this policy, you are likely to have a more success in being agile.
Use sprint mode
Instead of thinking of your PR strategy as this one big task that should be completed over a year or two, it might be more worthwhile to think in terms of sprints. What this allows you to do is to break a project into smaller chunks that allow you to try and test results along the way. What this does is help you to create a feedback loop that enables you to understand what is working, what’s not and how to change and adapt for better results along the way. This is far better than just having one task that you feel you have to stick to for its entire duration because you have already started it a long while back!
Have daily stand-up meetings
One of the best ways to ensure that your business truly is agile and able to adapt to whatever the situation is by having daily stand-up meetings. What you don’t want is people not up-to-date with your business operations, or people who don’t know what they are supposed to be doing on any particular day. The way to make sure that never happens is having a quick 10-minute meeting that can allow you all to take an overview, then delegate new responsibilities to every single member of your team. Just make sure that you have points you want to consider before each meeting so no time is wasted and keep in mind that this approach might not work for everybody.
Conclusion
This guide outlines a few key ways that your business might be able to move from a traditional PR approach to a more agile one. While this definitely cannot be characterized as an easy decision, as the above guide has shown, it can definitely bring a whole host of advantages to your business. It all true boils down to flexibility, allowing your business to work in real time. If you are ever stuck in the future about how to make your business more agile and flexible position, take another look at the guide for a refresher.
