As a PR professional your goal is to help your client or company to eloquently convey the correct information to the public. Public relations requires excellent communication skills, which you cannot completely control in regards to the company executives, but you can help to choose the best spokesperson to share information. You can also help them by creating an excellent template and script to follow.

As the public relations specialist, manager, or team, it is up to you to coordinate press conferences, interviews, and appearances. Ways you can help to make them easier and less stressful is to create a speech or script for your spokesperson. The spokesperson can be the CEO, COO, someone from IT, or even someone from the PR team. The important thing to remember is to ensure that the spokesperson knows the topic they are talking about and that they have enough people skills to make them personable, responsive, and calm.

When choosing a spokesperson, consider the following:

From Strategic Public Relations, here are some questions to ask:

• Are they great communicators?
• Are they passionate and enthusiastic about your organization’s work?
• Are they likable?
• Do they have good listening skills?
• Are they insightful enough to understand what’s beyond the question?
• Are they patient and willing to educate?
• Do they value the media and the role it plays?
• Are they comfortable and prepared?

(pg. 100-101)

Your spokesperson should understand the company message and be able to convey that to stay on that message. They should believe in what they are talking about; it is easier to share that information if they are fully behind the message and idea they share. Believing in something can also help to ensure that they are passionate about it. Moreover, finding someone who can communicate, has interpersonal skills, respects the media and their time (and understands why the media is important), and feels prepared.

A great way to ensure they are prepared is to help them become prepared. That includes helping them to feel comfortable talking openly and being honest. Being open and honest makes it easier to feel and come across as being comfortable; being the opposite is often times visible to reporters and the public. Practice their speeches with them, give them possible interview questions, and let the reporter know some topics that you would like to be covered in the interview. You can even ask for the reporter or journalist to offer questions they plan to ask.

Some key points to remember when composing a speech:

• Be truthful. Honesty is vital. While you may not be giving the speech personally, you are responsible for the reputation of the client or company. You
• Do your homework. Talk with the spokesperson you have in mind and practice the interview so that they can be prepared. This can help you to write the speech based on their own responses and can also help them to feel more connected to the speech; reading something someone else wrote for you may be a little difficult.
• Do some research. Learn about the event they will be speaking at, the topics they will cover, and the reason they are there. This can help you direct the speech in the right direction.
• Speeches are tools. They can be used to inform, advocate, or perpetuate an idea, company, product, or service. You can use the speech as a way to correct information, to announce a new venture, or to help advocate a great cause. These can help generate PR and WOM (word of mouth).
• Choose an interesting topic. Get input from the speaker. Choose a topic that is interesting to them so that they can be better involved in the speech, making it a better speech to hear for the audience.
• Make it personal. The speaker should be speaking in first person as if telling a story about themselves, their involvement in the company, and why they are giving the speech. This makes it easier for the audience to relate to the speaker and makes it, well, more personable.

Lastly, remember to make the speech conversational. In most cases the speech should be like a conversation between colleagues or peers. Keep it light and short; less is more when it comes to a speech. Attention spans can be rather short, and hearing a short, quality speech can be much more memorable than a lengthy, fluffed speech. Remember too that as the PR professional, giving a speech or 2 (or 20) in your career is normal. It is your responsibility to address the public at times, and even partake in an interview.

What are some tips you have for writing and giving speeches?

Writing is a large part of the public relations professional’s job. (OK, almost all of the PR pro’s job involves writing.) That means that you must be an exceptional writer, proofreader, and conveyor of information. Though a lot of what is said about you online and offline depends on what you write, customers and readers of publications will ultimately read the work of another individual, such as a journalist, reporter, or blogger. With that, your responsibilities as the PR person expand to include the monitoring of that information. Being aware of what is being said about you gives you an advantage over the companies who see little importance in doing so.

Some benefits of monitoring your company’s buzz or WOM (word-of-mouth):

1. The ability to respond when something said about you is inaccurate or improperly portrayed.
2. The ability to compliment, share, or congratulate when you enjoy an article written about you or your client.
3. The ability to react to complaints from customers or clients.
4. Overall, the ability to curb or avoid a crisis.

One way you can do #1 and #2 is to write a Letter to the Editor. These are used primarily for #1 to help correct mistakes (which can poorly affect your company), but using it for #2 is also a great way to perpetuate and promote good WOM and can help to encourage a positive rapport with the media who covered your company.

From the Public Relations Writer’s Handbook by Merry Aronson, Don Spetner, and Carol Ames, here are some great rules of thumb when considering writing a letter to the editor:

When writing a letter to the editor to correct a mistake, be sure to include the following:

• The date and location of the incorrect article
• The information that was incorrectly printed
• The correct information that should have been printed instead
• The name and title of the writer of the letter

Additionally, when writing to criticize the conclusion a reporter may have come to (inaccurately portraying the company or client) stick to the following recommendations:

• Avoid being emotional in your response
• Support your statements with facts
• Keep the letter brief
• Avoid threatening litigation
• Make yourself and your opinion clear and succinct so that it is easily understood
• State your case in a professional and tactful manner
• Maintain a good rapport and relation with the media

(Public Relations Writer’s Handbook, pgs. 260-261.)

Keep in mind that a critical letter to the editor is to be used with caution; the last point above, “maintain a good rapport and relation with the media” is key to your PR success. If you do send a critical letter, try not to alienate them with abusive, emotional, and overly critical comments. Moreover, if a story or article features a critical aspect of your company that was true, do not write a letter to the editor about it; this may perpetuate things and draw more attention to the story.

Letters to the editor can be great tools, however; it can show the media that you are in tune with what they (and other media outlets) are writing about you. It can also improve your media relations when you send a complimentary letter to thank the author for writing the story. Lastly, they can be used as a publicity tool to “present a positive positioning statement about the company’s strengths versus its competitors. Letters to the editor often present excellent opportunities for positive publicity, whatever the initiating context or pretext.” (pg. 246)

Have you experienced some benefits from writing a letter to an editor?

With more and more of your customers coming online to talk with, shop, read, and research, being easily accessible online is vital to your company’s success. Customers come online to read about you from other customers, the media, and your own website. With so many places for them to find out about you, ensure that you are monitoring the WOM (word of mouth) being generated about you. Since it’s a bit difficult to control the WOM your company receives online, you can control the content your own site or blog produces. Creating great content on your site can help to influence the other WOM media or bloggers share about you, and it can also help customers to see the whole picture despite some negative WOM they may have read about you elsewhere. This requires that you actively monitor other sources of information and that you are actively participating on your own website.

4 ways to help customers find you first:

1. Use keyword rich copy. Learn what customers are searching for by using Google Alerts and the Google Keyword tool to see what keywords customers are searching for. Though this will give you a large list of keywords customers search for regularly, remember to pay attention to the longer keyword sequences, or the long-tail keywords. These are keywords and phrases that fewer customers search for because of their length. The main thing to remember here is that searches made in an online search engine like Google are often times brand new searches that web users have never searched for before. This is important to remember so that you can avoid competing with the millions of other blogs trying to be found through some of the most searched keywords. It is hard to differentiate yourself as it is, so why not do something small that will make it a bit easier?

2. Optimize your images. Just like the title and the rest of your website’s copy, you can optimize your image titles. Since search engine spiders (who “crawl” the web, documenting the Internet’s content) cannot “see” images, having a great picture on a website might not do much to help your customers find you. It may help to make their visit more pleasant once they get to your site, but in order to increase your chances of being found in a search engine results page, save your image with the same keyword-rich title you give the webpage or blog post. This will help search engine spiders to see the importance of your image and also help to increase the search engine results that your blog post or website appear in.
3. Use multiple vehicles to share your information and content. This means creating videos, blog posts, and audio recordings to share your information. With people learning in different ways, a blog post may become more interesting for someone who prefers to hear someone talk rather than read themselves. Creating multiple methods for people to “hear” you can greatly improve your chances of reaching more people.
4. Share your content. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS feeds, etc., to share when your blog is updated or when you add a new video resource. This can also increase your reach. Your target audiences may be on different platforms or different social media sites so use all that are applicable and relevant. Moreover, RSS feeds may be useful to readers who read all of their favorite blogs that way.

Overall, remember that your audiences are unique and may have different search methods or preferred methods of consuming content. Make as much available as possible, and incorporate SEO (search engine optimization) tactics (using keywords customers search for) into your website content to increase your chances of being found.

Writing is an essential role of the public relations professional. In order to reach customers we write for blogs, websites, and social networking accounts. We also reach them through video, podcasts, and images, and writing well can help to make those better. We can lose the attention of readers by writing poorly or offering content that is irrelevant to our audiences’ needs. In order to capture their interest and to keep them on our sites, we must become better writers from the beginning so that our writing will better with time.