Last Word: PR: In the right gear at the right time

Public relations is a car with five gears. It's remarkable how easy it is to drive, but you just have to make sure you're in the right gear for the circumstances in which you find yourself. And, of course, if you select the wrong gear, you're going to hear some crunches.

Each gear is a different approach to public relations, a different way of communicating depending on the desired result. In many ways, external factors will influence the choice of gear as well, just as it does when you're driving. And, in case you were wondering, there's no automatic gearbox!
The five gears are: proactive, momentum, competitive, reactive and crisis. Think of the last one as reverse!

Proactive public relations is taking the initiative to promote your agenda, getting out there and shouting from the rooftops. It's like first gear: lots of torque, lots of acceleration – really driving things forwards.

How you do it is totally dependent on who you're talking to and what you're saying of course, but the idea is to push your message out and really drive for attention. This is where the fun is: the launches and the big bang campaigns, promotions and outreach are the name of the game and success is easy as long as you've planned smart and you're well prepared and on top of your game.

Momentum public relations is a harder game to play: cruise control. Once the big fuss has died down, you're faced with an audience that's heard it before. They know you're there, they're aware of what you're offering. Now you have to stay relevant, keep interest levels high and build deeper understanding. The trick here is to stay relevant to your audience, to keep their attention.

Target

And it's worth remembering that if you want to promote deeper understanding, then you have to offer depth in return: relevant, factual, useful and informative material that builds your case with your target audience.

Competitive public relations is where the fur really starts to fly.

The trick to competitive PR is to know when to take an aggressive position, but to always have a defensive position as a fallback. Often, in truly competitive markets, a defensive position is actually an active one, attacking on a different front. This type of campaign work is where reading Sun Tzsu and Clausewitz pays off. But nothing pays off as much as smart planning, keeping your head and being fast to react – you're in racing mode!

Reactive public relations is where the focus is on managing incoming interest. In many cases, reactive situations are negative ones: a competitor has attacked, a product has failed or is under fire, a deadline has been missed and people want to know what's happening.

Quiet

This is where an organisation will typically 'go quiet' and focus on managing the incoming rather than sustaining a proactive approach.

The key here is to provide answers: match enquiries with information and explanation. Reactive situations are frequently damaging, so the trick is to limit their span by providing the fullest factual answers as quickly as possible and getting back to proactive work. We're talking neutral here: it's ideally used as a short hop between gears!

The most talked about aspect of the PR car is crisis public relations. This is, at least in part, because PRs find crisis communications is an easy attention getter for feature articles! In truth, crisis PR is the hardest of all to execute properly and the easiest of all to neglect before it's too late. Do you have a crisis plan in place?

A great crisis plan anticipates every possible contingency and defines procedure for managing crisis communications, including policy and crisis team members and processes. What's a crisis?
Crises aren't always burning buildings and crashing aeroplanes: they're often much smaller events that are only given the potential to escalate because they have been mismanaged initially.

A network goes down and customers can't use ATMs, a piece of software is shipped without a necessary file on the CD, an employee is hurt. Life is full of dramas: the trick is not allowing a drama to be turned into a crisis.

Executing great public relations is all about ensuring positive and effective communication with your audience, building understanding by communicating appropriately. In other words, being in the right gear at the right time.

The writer is a senior PR practitioner in the UAE