Enlightenment Powers PR and Creates Rainbows of Influence
Enlightenment is the lifeblood of public relations. Before your ideas can sink in, you must first learn how to land them like rainbows striking those you want to inspire colorfully.
To impress and hold what is so precious in this world — people’s attention — your news needs to flash and sparkle with as much color, wit and wisdom as you can muster.
Where do these rainbows come from? They begin with credibility, knowledge and insight, which you must first acquire yourself. Then you need impressive ways to share it.
More than just attracting readers and viewers, your news must contain knowledge that stimulates action — doing something, being someone, going somewhere and, ultimately, buying something.
That is why the headline and first sentence must strike a chord, grab attention and be as enlivening as possible. Otherwise, in PR you are dead in the water.
What attracts many of us to PR is an instinct for sales — for selling concepts and ideas. For me, it was an instinct for resolving crises.
I had a knack for helping clients steer through rough, sometimes turbulent waters. I found ways to prevent their business from sinking after scorching media coverage of a mistake or CEO misconduct.
Perhaps it stems from my time as a lifeguard rushing to save kids caught in rip currents. Today we call rescuing corporations crisis management.
It means responding forthrightly and persuasively to virulent attacks to avoid reputational damage, rising to the occasion rapidly by addressing charges, but always doing it truthfully.
In the PR process, I have helped some of the largest corporations in America regain respect, customer confidence and restore integrity and brand loyalty.
The process requires adeptness, which usually takes media training. That means teaching executives how to get up off the floor, tell what really happened and explain why it will not happen again.
One night I literally got off the floor myself and decided to switch careers.
I was a newspaper reporter covering a protest rally in Philadelphia when someone coldcocked me — literally into another line of work.
After teaching journalism at a few universities, I decided to go into PR. First at a major firm in New York City, then at ABC, then at NBC, where I became vice president and assistant to the president, before starting my own public relations firm, TransMedia Group.
Our first clients included the largest company in America at the time, AT&T, and the biggest city, New York, whose mayor then, Ed Koch, thanked me for promoting fair housing in the subways.
Today TransMedia Group serves clients worldwide, including some whose founders and CEOs it helped become billionaires.
There is nothing more effective in creating those customer-enlightening rainbows around products and services than public relations.
