There’s an old saying that tells us it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it. We’ve all heard it, no doubt, and many of us might have thought it in the past, during moments when feelings were being deliberately or inadvertently hurt. For example, if you’ve ever been told by someone that your home was cosy, it may be that he or she really meant it was small. As for whether they meant to say it, that’s up to you to decide. A friend (now an ex-friend, obviously) said it me once and I was instantly offended. I was living in a Lilliput-themed bedsit at the time, but that’s not the point.
Here in the glitzy, ultra-glamorous world of B2B PR, we tend to think more in terms of it’s not what you say, but when you say it. Our ever-loyal band of happy clients likes us to shout from the rooftops at times, but only when the timing is relevant. There’s no point, for example, in making a song and dance about the way they wowed the masses at a trade show if that trade show was six months ago. To use an even more dramatic example, January 28th is National Kazoo Day in the USA, as you no doubt already know. If we decided to charge around the centre of Burgess Hill in August playing our kazoos, we’d just look silly. Our hard-earned glitz and glamour would surely fade a little.
In a similar vein we all know that time management is crucial in the world of PR. An agency such as ours has a fabulous client base, and the only way we can keep them all happy is by making sure we allocate the right resources at the right times. It might seem a good idea to allocate more hours than you should for a particular client, but by doing that it could mean you short-change one or two of the others.
Time waits for no-one…well, almost no-one
Of course, we’re not talking here about holding a stopwatch and immediately closing a folder when the buzzer goes. That would be counter-productive, and we don’t actually have a stopwatch here, anyway. Effective time management means different things to different people, of course; there are some who claim they are ready to leave the house then twenty minutes later they’re still looking for keys, purse, phone and more. I’m not mentioning any names specifically here, of course. I wouldn’t do that.
Managing time in the office can be something of an exact art for many, while for others it can be a more fluid arrangement. Ultimately, it’s all about getting the balance just right. Here in Rosy Towers an average day (as if such a thing ever existed!), could consist of finding media coverage for a safari park, publishing a case study about home ventilation, scouring social media feeds for inspiration, speaking to delegates at a local business event, creating content about hydrogen cars, making coffee and eating the doughnuts brought in by our founder Aneela Rose. I really don’t know how we fit it all in.
In conclusion, if you see an efficient PR agency working smoothly, think of it in terms of a duck majestically floating on a pond. The visible part appears to be coasting through with a minimum of effort, while under the waterline its little legs are paddling furiously in a bid to be first to get to the piece of bread. Or the doughnut, obviously.
