This Week in PR Takes

Happy Thursday (I was going to post tomorrow, but I just had to hit the “publish” button since there are so many great takes)! Parts of the country are experiencing frigid temperatures, and I hope that everyone is staying safe and warm. I have flagged lots of great takes below, but I am sure that there’s some I am missing throughout the course of each week. If anyone sees a great PR take on LinkedIn or elsewhere, please tag me in the comments so that I can make sure it makes it into the next TWiPRT.

With that, I would be remiss if I didn’t flag a call for PR takes from PR Daily’s Editorial Director Allison Carter. She wants to hear the hot & spicy.

As always, thank you for reading and let’s get right into it!

Take of the Week:
This week’s Take of the Week comes from Zeba Ahmad and hits on one of my PR passion areas - measurement. She posted about struggling to show PR’s business value and how the work impacts investors, sales, and yes - crises. I have long believed that the debate around the value of PR maps back to measurement and metrics. PR professionals measure success in different metrics than the rest of a marketing team or business. We think in terms of placements, features vs. mentions and share of voice. These certainly matter, but the rest of an organization is thinking in terms of different business outcomes like leads, time on site, new visitors and others. Even if the data may not be perfect, if we can directionally map PR’s body of work back to these types of business outcomes, the better success we’ll have in proving out its value.

The Rest of the Takes:

• Lindsay Dodgson may not be a PR person, but she vented about her PR pet peeves and I am sure she’s not the only journalist who feels this way.

• There was a strategy and request for 180 press releases for a year, writes Scott Merritt. Yes, really.

• There is always a flurry of media list request for major events in PR/Comms Slack groups; but Christian Potts thinks that too much mis-pitching for events and not doing homework is having a negative impact.

• Jasmin Hyde wrote about journalists who transition into PR.

• Should pitches be long and detailed, or short and concise? Julius Omokhunu dives into this question in his post.

• “If your strategy still revolves around blasting press releases and praying for coverage, you’re playing a game that ended years ago” is Jana Garanko’s take that I wholeheartedly agree with.

• In-house or agency, or both? Anna Ewer dives into why we should all try in-house at least once.

• “Don’t pitch the beehive, pitch the beekeeper” is a must-read from Sarah Kissko Hersh.