Public Relations & The World’s Deadliest Animals

Don’t worry there won’t be any smart remarks about PR people being similar to sharks or mosquitoes in this post. This isn’t supposed to be a traditional post either, it is not built to be a five paragraph essay, just some thoughts to share with you.

Take a walk with me for a few and let’s talk.

In today’s blogosphere you can’t ignore the power of images. The field is crowded, cluttered and noisy. Your blog is competing with millions of others for eyeballs and one of the most effective ways to do that is with an image. Great images can make the difference between a person pointing and clicking their way to the next article.

It is part of why infographics have become so prevalent. They are easy to make and you find them all over every one of the major social media platforms and quite a few of the smaller ones.

I have a love/hate relationship with infographics. When you are trying to build a blog and generate traffic infographics are great because they are the fast food of online story telling.

You can read, chew and digest them in moments and they are exceptionally easy to share. But they make me a bit crazy because I don’t like contributing to the instant gratification movement that says anything that takes more than a minute is too time intensive and because I worry about the accuracy of the information they provide.

That is problematic. If you want to establish yourself as an authority the last thing you want to do is destroy your credibility by presenting misinformation, intentional or otherwise.

Public Relations & The World’s Deadliest Animals

That list above reminds me of some campaigns I have worked on where the client was so focused on the big cats they saw roaming the plains and the crocodiles swimming in the water they forgot that it was the small details that would give them the most and longest lasting problems.

If you want your PR/Marketing professionals to be effective you need to give them the tools and resources to do so. Part of that comes from not forgetting that those tiny irritants always seem to be the ones that really get under the skin.

For example if you are introducing a new car to the marketplace it makes sense to make sure there are no glaring safety issues or any for that matter.

You might have a great vehicle but if you discover after the car comes to market that filling up the tank is an issue because the gas cap is difficult to work with you can create an issue that could have easily been avoided.

Sure it is a minor thing, doesn’t prevent the car from running and it is unlikely that it will cause serious harm to the driver/passengers. But people fill their tanks on a regular basis.

The last thing you want is a weekly reminder that there is a problem with the car.

Mosquitoes may not be as scary as sharks, but they do a lot more damage, don’t they.