How do you know it works?

1. One thing that needs to be clear from the start is measurement. It may be impressive to be able to hand over a bulging book of press cuttings to your managing director, but anyone who thinks that great media coverage equals a loyal and devoted customer base is traveling blind. Business to business trade press coverage can be a fickle thing and is unlikely to give a clear vision of just what customers think. Tracking results in the trade press and key issues will help to give an idea of trends, but you are going to have to assess customer perception really to have a clear idea of what they actually think. Tracking like this also helps to define your public relations goals. If you find out what they like and don’t like you can then set about correcting false impressions and measure more accurately the results of your labours. It also ensures better targeting of your resources at exactly the issues which need addressing most of all.

2. Remember that Rome took longer than 24 hours to build. If big radical changes are planned look for key stages where various target measures can be set to assess the speed of change and just these as appropriate. It can become demoralized by a sudden succession of poor stories and very negative coverage. At times like those you need a sense of perspective and balance.

The trade press

1. The trade press is worth taking a closer look at not least because in the specialist areas of business to business communications they incorporate a wide variety of styles and approaches, from the small, dedicated one person operations to the vast established ‘industry bibles’.

2. The trade press is often a career starting point for many journalists and turnover in young staff is to be expected (one good reason for treating journalists on trade titles with the same respect as national writers is that you never know where they’ll turn up next). This can cause problems for any public relations practitioner, since it constantly means you are having to get to know new faces and explain what your company is all about. On the other hand, the trade press is also full if highly experienced commentators with years of industry background who can pick holes in the most seemingly well-reasoned and researched arguments with ease (these people will turn the above criticism of the trade press on its head by pointing out that your turnover of public relations staff has been abysmal over the last 15 years).

3. Bear in mind too that many national stories will start their lives in the trade press; don’t try to comfort yourself that a story has ‘only’ appeared in what you consider to be a minor trade title. If it catches the eye of a specialist correspondent then it might well be front-page news in days – or on the radio that very evening. This can also work to your advantage, of course, in attracting potential national interest to a story which may have been passed by first time around, but which suddenly catches the eye from a different angle when seen again in the trade.

4. On that note, remember that all communications internally should also reflect the organization’s external position. There are many stories about occasions when journalists have picked up leads from staff newspapers left on buses or trains – even of one journalist who got his lead by reading a story over the shoulder of an employee who was traveling on the same underground train. It’s vital, therefore, that internally the same story is being told as externally. This is also true the other way around. There is no point having a comforting story from the chief executive on the front page of the staff journal when the press have just got hold of a leaked memo that indicates the organization is preparing to sack half the workforce while doubling the value of the chief executive’s share options package.