Reflection

PR is a complex profession and requires many different skills, people do not tend to realise the extent of the effect PR has and it often gets associated with the glamour of Samantha from ‘Sex and the City’, 

Or the manipulation of the truth that is associated with Max Clifford.

In reality PR deals with everything from crisis management to launching or maintaining a brand, it can differ from Marketing PR to having a seat in the boardroom in Corporate PR. 

This module has been really useful at giving an insight into the everyday tasks of a PR practitioner. I think the assignment itself has given us a good grounding knowledge of what it takes to brief agencies and also to pitch back to companies, it has allowed us to put knowledge into practice which I personally find more useful than simply learning theory. 

I think the information I have received on this course, and also the practical application of presenting and blogging skills will be very useful for the rest of my time at university. Strong presentation skills are not only vital at university, they are highly important in the PR industry. I think that my presentation skills have improved greatly at university and will hopefully continue to do so. Blogging is also an up and coming PR venture, and may be something I would be asked to do on behalf of a company. 

I personally value communication skills very highly, whether on a personal level between friends or in a very public way such as presenting at work, therefore these skills need to be finely tuned to be used to the best of my ability. This is definitely something I plan to continue to work upon. 

Opening Foul Pitch and You're OUT!

Pitching is an important tool in the PR practitioners tool box, you need to be able to pitch ideas and most importantly pitch yourself. For our assessed pitch, we became PinkBo[x]  PR, we followed the brief given to us by ‘Carry on Events’, they wanted us to look into their company and work on improving their reputation. Their events company manage ‘Carnage’ hence forth improving their reputation in the local community was not going to be easy. 

‘Carry on Events’ advised us that their key objectives were to;

• Build relationships with local residents
• Encourage responsible drinking at their Carnage events
• Increase social networking
• Become the #1 events company. 

We felt this was relatively difficult as ‘Carnage’ is not an event that is appreciated by the local community hence forth we needed to build a crisis management plan to improve the reputation of ‘Carnage’.  We utilised Anne Gregory's planning model as a guide for planning the campaign. 

We pitched a number of fresh ideas that would hopefully result in a more responsible image for ‘Carry on Events’, building local relationships, encouraging hydration whilst drinking and cleaning up after ‘Carnage’. These ideas were just a few that we came up with, we decided not to give ‘Carry on Events’ all of ideas in the presentation. This is because in the real world, companies can take ideas from the pitching firms and use them without commissioning the PR firm. We decided not to give a complete break down of our budget as we felt that in reality we would have discussed which aspects of our plan the company liked and therefore which proportion of the budget we would put towards each strategy. After our presentation, ‘Carry on Events’ said that they would have given us the job in the real world, which is of course what we wanted to hear! 

Entertainment PR were the group that we had given our brief to, they also pitched back to us this week. We were really impressed with their ideas, they made a brilliant presentation and really en-cooperated the personality of the brand we created. If they had pitched that presentation in a real life situation I have no doubt that I would have given them the job!

When pitching to a company it is important to include a number of things including, credentials, client base, communication, budgets and copyright etc. Copyright relates back to the concept of ‘stealing ideas from pitches’ that I mentioned earlier, For example some PR companies will decide to copyright any pictures they take for the company. 

The ability to communicate clearly and confidently is very important for anybody working in  the PR industry. Shannon and Weaver suggest a theory of communication that attempts to explain the path of a message between the sender and receiver. 

This suggests that noise can affect the message sent from the sender before it reaches the receiver. This could have played a part in our presentations for example, actual noise occurred in the form of trains passing by but also, noise can be considered in terms of confused meanings of the messages, for example, messages that are sent meaning one thing and received with a different connotation. An example of this could be when Entertainment PR suggested a breakdown of their budget, the way in which it was presented seemed to suggest they were going over the budget we set but in actual fact it was just the way they had created the slide. 

Pitching is a skill we all need to develop in order to have successful careers in PR, the pitches on Tuesday definitely proved that our presentation skills have improved since last year and will hopefully continue to do so. 

Managing Time and People

The saying goes that time flies when you’re having fun, but in my experience it seems to fly by even more quickly when you’re under pressure to complete an important task. Managing time and people is a really important skill for PR practitioners and is also very applicable to this project. 

Tench and Yeomans say that ‘Time is a finite commodity and the life of the PR practitioner is notoriously busy. Furthermore, PR often involves the cooperation of others, and getting them to observe deadlines requires firmness and tact’. This demonstrates how the management of both time and people tie in together and a successful manager of these elements would have the ability to make projects run smoothly. 

We didn’t have a clear leader in our group, we took on the tasks together and shared ideas and the workload, however Rhi did tend to have the final cut and smooth out the kinks. Typical completer-finisher! This strategy worked really well for our group, we managed our time well, spending full days on the brief and pitch rather than many separate meetings. 

In-house PR tends to be managed by one person if not a small team, and the management will make PR decisions including the use of outside agencies. Alternatively PR Agencies there will still be a hierarchy of management however different accounts will have different account managers. Management styles differ massively dependent on the culture of the company. Smythe et al cited in Harrison, suggest that there are 5 different management styles, instructional, informative, consultative, involving and participative. Instructional style tends to be a style undertook by authoritative bodies such as the police or military, this is because instructions need to be clear and understood. We undertook a more participative style in our group work as everybody’s ideas were important. Management style in the PR industry does typically take on a more involving style as the work the industry carries out thrives on creativity and ideas. 

Once we knew that we were all able to manage ourselves in terms of our group work, we needed to look at our time management, pencilling in our meetings to when everybody had a space in their diaries. Finding a time where 4 different people with different responsibilities can meet is a very difficult task, we had to factor in a number of aspects, such as part-time jobs, other lectures and seminars, people who went home at weekends etc. This is one of the most difficult aspects of group work at university. Although time management is obviously an important skill for a career in PR, it can be considered that in the ‘real world’ finding meeting times will be easier than at university because everybody will typically convene at the same office everyday even if it is just a quick 5 minute meeting that everybody is available for. Despite my complaining about finding times to meet, we managed absolutely fine as we were all dedicated to complete this project to the best of our abilities.