It’s a PR nightmare: A story appears that your client or boss thinks should have been about your company.
Sometimes it comes with a demand that you contact the reporter and get your company’s name added to the piece, or a challenge to find some other media outlet to tell the same story, only referencing you this time.
And usually, it means questioning about how it could possibly happen since, after all, it’s your job to get just this sort of story told. How could you let it happen?
Such moments reveal an internal communications breakdown for which you are at least partially to blame, whether by omission or commission. Here’s the deal:
If another company could tell the same story, it wasn’t your story to tell. Every company in your industry contends with many of the same issues, megatrends, or topics du jour, and the fact that you’re all addressing them is muddled by the reality that you’re all pretty much doing it the same way. Innovation deals with entrepreneurs. Greener products. Giveback to the community events. The brand names are interchangeable, so it doesn’t really matter who tells the stories. Nobody really cares outside the walls of your office.
People aren’t stupid, and they know the difference between filler and news. You really don’t want to be pitching the same stories that every other company is pitching; if you’re lucky and place one, it doesn’t establish the positioning that all of your marketing-ese blather specified — the requisite buzzwords that you plugged into your prewritten exec comments — but rather tells everyone who consumes your story that you really have nothing to say about anything in particular. Good luck trying to get anybody’s attention for something that merits it.
Instead, you should strive to tell unique stories, which means identifying activities or accomplishments that are not just different versions of what everybody else is doing, but truly novel. Things your competitors couldn’t do even if they tried or cared. Goals that really stand out for being bold and very possibly unachievable. Visibility into processes that aren’t perfectly finished and wrapped with ribbons and bows, but instead imperfectly underway and filled with failure, risk, and human drama.
Which means challenging your internal leadership and stakeholders to get real, and be serious about exploring content that’s really going to matter to your customers, the media. It starts with assessing what the ongoing narratives might be on any topic in which your company or client has some interest, and then pulling that reality into the company and challenging it to discover how it’s uniquely relevant (instead of taking topics from marketing and trying to push them out to an uninterested world).
Be ruthlessly honest; if a story is a dog, don’t roll over, but say so, and then come up with an alternative. If a news announcement isn’t as relevant to topic XYZ as you’ve been told, tell them what would make it so, or push back and explain that a bad press release is actually worse than no release at all.
Spend your time trying to develop stories that really should be about you, which starts with tempering your client’s or company’s publicity dreams with real and bluntly honest talk.
Otherwise, the next nightmare is just waiting for you.