You may be asking yourself, what exactly is a PR champion? Is that someone that knows everything there is to know about PR? Not necessarily. It wasn’t until after listening to a recent Vocus webinar, “The Eight Techniques of the New PR Champion,” that I began to understand the inner workings of what makes a great PR champion.
Deirdre Breakenridge, CEO of Pure Performance Communications shared her eight PR personas that provided excellent insight on how important it is to integrate social media into the rapidly changing world of PR.
- The Policy Maker: This champion creates a social media core team of visionaries and strategists. These are the people that need to collaborate with one another on addressing and evaluating the company’s social media platforms. Questions they ask, include: What’s being said about the company? Are we properly engaging with our target audience?
- The Internal Collaborator: This person’s key question is: What kinds of information are people sharing and or talking about within the company? Their job is to find out the needs of everyone and establish real-time collaboration.
- The Pre-Crisis Doctor: This is a champion that develops a crisis plan – before there is a crisis. This person should be monitoring what is being said about the company, the positives and the negatives in advance of any crisis. It’s very important to be quick and efficient when a crisis hits.
- The Reputation Task Force: This champion analyzes the company’s reputation. They consider company ethics, serve as brand police, and create a social voice. They are also charged with setting the tone and emotion of the content.
- Master of the Metrics: This person tracks the quantitative and qualitative results of all the social media efforts going on within the organization. This will help with measuring the overall success of the company as well as understanding its social media objectives and goals.
- Relationship Analyzer: This person determines who your audience is, and who’s connected to whom. By recognizing how relationships are built, and with whom they are built with, this champion allows a company to better understand their key publics.
- Communications Process Organizer: Leave it to this champion to determine how people working within the company are communicating? It’s crucial to share information between departments so that everyone is up to date on what’s going on.
- Technology Tester: This person immerses the company into technology. He or she tries out new social media platforms and brainstorms creative ways in which it could benefit the organization.
PR is constantly changing, and it seems to be moving more and more towards social media. Breakenridge provides us with her eight PR personas, but do you have any to add? We’d love to read yours in the comments below!