In our own elevator speech, we refer to ourselves as being most successful for “entrepreneurial organizations that want a high profile in their own industries and the markets they serve.” The key word is “entrepreneurial,” a term we think is often misunderstood. It does not connote whether a company is large or small. For instance, our GE Interlogix, Kalatel account produces substantial revenues yet acts entrepreneurial. We have a small, non-retainer account that is very bureaucratic.
Among its many accoutrements, PR is an art that is based on meeting deadlines. When things must go up and down channels, approvals are multiple with each person having to assure they’ve shown others they did their part and made changes, and emails must all carry 23 cc:s, nothing much is going to happen very quickly. “Oops, we missed the deadline. Now, that bad competitor of ours will get more press.”
Entrepreneurial organizations, on the other hand, seem to have enough confidence in the people that are on staff or on retainer to let them do their jobs. The reasoning is this – if they don’t do it, we’ll fire them. That’s fair. Entrepreneurial organizations also work under the theory that, if you don’t screw up a little now and then, you’re probably not working hard enough.
Example: Calling Joe the Manager of Marketing does not change the spin of a press release when Joe is actually the Director of Marketing. In an entrepreneurial organization, this is not a big deal. It’s worth a 36-inch email chain in a bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy gives us the chills.
We recently worked with another PR agency on a project. (To protect the innocent, let’s pretend we have two partners…one our client, the other is their’s.) Very formal, they were. Lotsa memos. They were very prompt on getting out their “recaps” and in great length…very great length. We’re entrepreneurial so we said, “Let’s let them do what they do best…write memos and recaps.” So, we drew up a PR plan, executed it by contacting editors, found out what they were looking for and presented the media with that information.
Want to guess who got the most press? Right…the entrepreneurial account. However, both clients were happy. One got press; one got memos and that’s what each held dear.
We noted that a publication called Military Engineer was highlighting security in its May issue. “Well, that’s worth a pitch email,” we thought. After all, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. So, we got a feature for Delta, a feature for GE Interlogix, Kalatel and a feature for IR Recognition Systems.
Also landed articles for Kaba Benzing in Paytech, additional articles for Kalatel, IR Recognition Systems and Delta, issued guru releases (we’ll do a newsletter on guru releases sometime) for nMetric and Realization, got a major article hit for Zebra Eltron and landed articles for IR Security & Safety. We also put Psion Teklogix on the guru release path (must do that article!).
