Welcome back to another edition of Unpitchable, where I share my PR, marketing, and comms hot takes (ranked 🔥, 🔥🔥, or 🔥🔥🔥 depending on the level of spice and hot-take-i-ness scale).
This is meant to be cathartic, punchy, and fun. If you get offended, don’t. It’s all in good fun (mostly). Have any takes of your own? Drop a comment.
ICYMI, Unpitchable #1 is available for your reading pleasure here.
Calling PR people PR’s: 🔥
I don’t like when people refer to PR or comms professionals as “PR’s.” What are we, Public Relations? That’s the industry. No one calls doctors health cares or lawyers legals.
It’s almost always used condescendingly on LinkedIn to address the whole industry. You can say PR firms or comms people or marketing teams or any number of other terms that are normally used. You don’t need to make up weird abbreviations for no reason.
Panic! at the press release: 🔥🔥
Whenever anyone panics, I immediately think of Pulp Fiction. I just want people to be cool.
Genuine crises, when shit really hits the fan, are quite rare. I’m reminded of something I wrote in my magnum opus, Slide decks suck:
The Navy Seals have a saying: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. The emperor Augustus (how often do you think about the Roman Empire?) made a similar phrase popular: Festina lente. It translates to, roughly, “make haste slowly.”
Both address the same concept: When doing something, if you take your time and do it deliberately and right the first time, you’ll reach your destination or achieve your goal more quickly than if you just go without intention, making little or no progress forward.
Most emergencies aren’t. I’ve personally had innumerable experiences where someone said “oh GOD we have to do this RIGHT NOW drop everything and IMMEDIATELY HURRY,” only to find out that panic was completely unnecessary.
Did an embargo break? Did you have a major cybersecurity incident? Did your robot crash? These are genuine crises from a PR perspective, and they still don’t warrant genuine panic. Instead, rely on the incident response plan you’ve prepared in advance (or if you don’t already have one, you can pay me for that) and you can be like Honey Bunny: Cool.
Goallessness: 🔥🔥🔥
“We want more!” is a cry that many a comms flack (see, you don’t need to call us PR’s) have heard in our lives from clients. But more stuff does not necessarily mean better. It can — there are rare, strategic reasons to accept a dip in quality of coverage for pure, unadulterated quantity.
But for startups who are selling to other businesses or the government, (B2B or B2G), the more common scenario is closer to what I wrote in The Media Mosaic:
The people who will actually drive growth and improve the health of the business — directly and indirectly — often represent a tiny, miniscule, nigh infinitesimal sliver of the overall population.
Executives’ wantonless desire for more “comms stuff” without consideration of goals is, in a word, suboptimal. I recognize this is unlikely to be earthshattering advice but, when you do something, you should have at least a rough hypothesis as to what you’re gonna get out of it.
Have some goals. Be able to answer the question, “to what end?” If the hypothesis is wrong, that’s fine! You’ll learn. But stuff for stuff’s sake (like pitching random crap to a reporter so you can say you pitched) isn’t good.
Stop asking for more. Ask for better.
That’s all for this edition of Unpitchable. What did you think? Do any of these hot takes get your blood boiling like mine currently is? Do you have any hot takes of your own? Let me know in the comments.
Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out her website to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.