It’s not easy to write a book about PR, at least one that’s revelatory. If you’re the rare author who can discuss how PR pros and engineers are working with Virtual Reality (VR) concepts to create an artificial spokesperson to speak on behalf of a company during a PR crisis–Will a VR spokesperson be more successful if it looks female or male? What should its voice sound like? What should it wear? How old should it seem? What ethnicity? –have at it, the field is yours.
On the other hand, the majority of PR concepts have been explored ad nauseam. And PR can seem easy. For many, it’s seen as a ‘soft’ part of business.
The industry’s fundamentals haven’t shifted much in decades. Though PR-related technology is changing rapidly and practitioners increasingly are seen as strategic business advisors, the essence of the communicator’s job remains stable.
The Job in a Nutshell
The PR pro creates clear, compelling messages that position a company properly, build and maintain its reputation in good times and at moments of crisis. In some cases, PR’s positioning efforts can bolster sales and employee recruitment. And the communicator employs good business practices: she is honest with and about those she represents, meets deadlines, makes data-informed choices and understands and creates good relationships with the media.
Even if PR fundamentals have changed little, it’s how they’re executed that separates routine communication from more successful efforts. The books below offer, in varying degrees, insight on PR basics.
Our hope is that you’ll spend some time during your summer vacation reviewing the basics. Armed with insight from these books and a week or so away from the rigors of your job, you should return to work refreshed and ready.
Create, Simplify, and Adapt a Visual Narrative For Any Audience by Janine Kurnoff and Lee Lazarus, 276 pp. Wiley, $35.
This is the rare PR book that presents fresh material. Janine Kurnoff and Lee Lazarus know the PR pro’s situation well. Usually, you don’t have a lot of time to assemble a presentation. And the material you’re presenting isn’t sexy. More than that, hours before you go on, your boss tells you her boss cut your presentation time from 20 minutes to just five.
Despite the urge to slap together charts–far fewer than you’d prepared–and revise an edited-down, droning monologue, these sisters from Silicon Valley argue persuasively that communicators should take another route. In every instance, they say, communicators must tell a cohesive story with visuals, data and an active headline (never a heading) that advances your narrative.
Fortunately, Kurnoff and Lazarus make their case with how they’ve organized this book. Using informal language, few words, graphics and data, they take the reader on a journey, which, of course, is a key part of a good story.
At the end of each chapter is a recap, composed of text in large boxes. They’ve even taken notes for you, summing up each chapter in a ‘In Short’ blurb. This simple, building-block approach makes it painless to get through the book rapidly without missing key ideas. As such, even veteran PR execs owe it to themselves to at least browse its contents and consider its four-step method.
The book begins convincingly. The authors offer a quick introduction to research on right- and left-brain thinking of Nobel Prize winner Roger Wolcott Sperry. ‘Say Hello to Roger,’ a heading reads, next to a pencil drawing of Sperry’s head. The connection to storytelling is that we use both the right (visual, conceptual, intuitive) and left (logical, analytical and verbal) to reach decisions. Stories must address both hemispheres.
Then, they drive home why their brand of storytelling is important. A Stanford Business School professor asked her class to present. One in ten used a story in their talks. The others used data only. When it was over, just 5 percent of the class remembered any statistic, but 63 percent could recite the story.
Yet, it’s not as simple as story+data+visuals = storytelling success. Don’t overload your story with data, a major issue in today’s data-driven business world. And, they write, make sure data and graphics map back to your story.
Their storytelling elements aren’t necessarily new: setting, characters, conflict and resolution. But they explore them extremely well, offering insight that will benefit new and experienced PR pros. For example, they add a fresh look to the well-worn ‘So what? Why now?’ writing tip.
Importantly, they don’t forget they’re addressing a business crowd. Still not convinced they’re talking to you? Consider Chapter 15: “You’ve Got Five Minutes with an Executive…Go!”
Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap by Margot Bloomstein, 249 pp. Page Two, $24.95.
In this age of disinformation and misinformation, it’s not a surprise that people don’t trust companies, government or media. They don’t even trust themselves, especially when it comes to evaluating content and making sound decisions, argues Margot Bloomstein, a veteran content strategist.
This lack of trust in themselves is critical to Bloomstein’s formula for companies that want to regain and build trust. So is hope. First, companies must restore consumers’ self-confidence. Consumers are “smart and hopeful” and want respect from companies to “help them become smarter, and affirm their hope.”
Her prescription is traditional, though much easier said than done. Instead of “an impenetrable wall of jargon, thick copy blocks and dense information design,” companies should address the public honestly, use plain language, humility and a modicum of words.
Yet Bloomstein’s advice is nuanced. Some products, she writes, benefit from “detailed technical imagery” and extensive evaluations. More content, though, “isn’t always more effective,” she adds. “Long descriptions, layered infographics and multiple” CTAs can overwhelm an audience, “undermin[ing] their confidence in both themselves and in you.”
Another tool in Bloomstein’s belt is vulnerability. Companies, she says, will gain much from revealing challenges and hard truths. Again, though, Bloomstein isn’t a naïve theorist. “By operationalizing vulnerability, you expose your brand to criticism…in the hope of reaping greater rewards.”
Certainly, her advice about vulnerability applies to crisis communication. “Your company is at its most vulnerable when critics, shareholders, customers and the media clamor for an explanation and apology for bad behavior and mismanagement.” Smart brands, Bloomstein writes, “seize the opportunity to build trust through a public accounting.”
She’s correct, though the majority of C-Suites seem to delay, until media coverage grows more negative by the second and falling share prices spike investors’ blood pressure. That’s when so many heed Bloomstein’s advice on vulnerability. By that time, it’s often too late.
Make It, Don’t Fake It: Leading with Authenticity for Real Business Success by Sabrina Horn, 195 pp. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, $18.95.
If you’re less interested in reviewing PR fundamentals and craving a good success story, Sabrina Horn’s new book could make for an amusing summer read.
And since too few women are represented in PR’s top jobs, despite dominating its ranks, her inspiring story about founding Horn Group, now part of Finn Partners, remains relevant.
Indeed, this successful PR entrepreneur knows how to tell a story. It includes lively characters–as a teen in 1945 Germany, Horn’s mother and her sisters disposed of a firebomb that the Allies had dropped on the roof of their home.
And there are people like Steve, a client, who insisted on a lunch to discuss his dissatisfaction with Horn Group’s work. “For him, apparently, “discussion” require that I repeatedly feel his hand on my upper thigh–until I ordered a hot cup of coffee...and tipped it onto his lap.” Steve never asked for another lunch and his complaints “vaporized.”
And her timing is good. In a chapter about crisis, she pairs the discovery of an employee who was bilking her company for years with the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, thus illustrating two kinds of crisis. To her credit, Horn admits she could have been better prepared for both.
Too often, successful CEOs’ books skimp on emotion and are dry recitations of business examples. Horn, though, writes from the inside out. This is critical, since the best part of her book covers the earliest days of her company–when its total physical assets were business cards in her briefcase.
Horn admits having many doubts as she entered a large boardroom to do her first pitch for work, in 1991. At 29, she was the youngest person in the boardroom.
Fortunately, Horn found her confidence during that pitch, owing largely to preparation. Horn tells us she had “writ[ten] down every single question they might ask…and every objection they might raise.” From there, she worked on her answers.
Important for a book with the word authenticity in its title, Horn tells us, “There was no BS in my pitch.” When an exec asked Horn if she can do investor relations, her answer was no.
“As a one-woman band, I had to be firm and realistic about the extent of what I could do.”
Another exec asked, ‘Can you get us into BusinessWeek?’ Instead of “eagerly shout[ing], ‘Sure!’” Horn said it was likely she could, but several things would need to happen first.
Overpromising, though tempting, “would have been grossly exaggerating the truth and setting them up and myself for major disappointment.” Horn won the business from then-startup PeopleSoft, a company that eventually became part of Oracle, made its founders billionaires and cemented Horn’s new venture.
Though Horn’s narrative contains useful business and PR tips, some readers will want more depth and less narrative.
And some may question her decision to inform only select people–her advisors, partners, board and leadership team– about the fraudulent employee.
“...I much preferred to take a possible hit for lack of transparency than to risk damage to our culture, clients’ potential loss of confidence in our firm or a leak to the industry through the press.”
But before her initial success with PeopleSoft, Horn called her parents to tell them about that first win.
Her father, an experienced venture capitalist, said, “‘Sabrina, I don’t think you can do this.’” She lacked an MBA, had never run a company and couldn’t balance her checkbook.
“For the record, he was right on all counts,” Horn writes. She was devastated, but only temporarily. How Horn stared down her fears and other lessons she acquired are the meat of this inspiring, business-related memoir.