Effective Personal Communication Skills for Public Relations
Andy Green
PR in practice Series
Published by Kogan Page Limited, London, UK, 2006
“Word of mouth and networking = part of public relations practice.
You communicate by the way you think also, not only by the way you speak or by your gestures.
Having a self awareness and understanding of yourself makes it possible subsequently to develop fully your intrapersonal skills.
If you are unclear in your mind about how you feel and understand about an issue, the probability is that your subsequent communications will reflect this uncertainty, or fail to convince.
The starting point for your journey in understanding and becoming an outstaying public relations communicator is to examine what shapes your thinking and how it is manifested in your communications.
Your data gathering at an unconscious level is more effective than your conscious mind in absorbing larger volumes of information and also more profound, higher-grade data.
A key characteristic of outstanding public relations practitioners is they always, always trust their instincts.
A simple tool for helping to provoke and articulate intuitive feelings is to first frame the problem you face as a Yes or No option. Then toss a coin to make a decision – heads you do it, tails you don’t. If the coin flips to heads it might prompts the voice in your head to think, “Maybe I should toss it one more time”. This is your intuition advising you either that this is the wrong decision, or that it is the time to make a decision.
No two outstanding public relations communicators are the same. Your mental map is different from the mental map of anyone else you are trying to communicate with. Your maps are useful but not necessarily right in their interpretation of the world around you.
The backbone of the way outstanding public relations practitioners act is their core beliefs.
The question to ask of any belief is, “It is useful and does it serve me?”
There is no failure, only feedback.
The meaning of communication is the response you get.
The intention of other’s people behavior is positive.
As a communicator you need to identify the extent of your beliefs, or your organization’s, and those of your target audience.
“The PR industry has a low self-confidence. We pitch far too low, whether it is the fees we charge as consultants or about the impact our product contributes to business success. “ David Yelland, the former editor of the Sun, and now senior vice chairman of Weber Shanwick.
A value is best defined as something you will do even if it hurts.
If you have a number of tasks, the things you do first tend to relate to the higher-order values.
Your complacency zone is a good way of defining your values; defining what you are not helps defines what you are.
“[…] we have published our own “Little book of values” to ensure we all understand how important the values of this family business are to achieving our many goals.” Andrea Law, brand communications manager at Warburtons, UK.
The reality, and shortcoming, of much public relations communications is that it focuses on the information level. The communicator needs to engage with underlying beliefs and values in some way to effect a change in attitudes.
Whenever you communicate, your actions and the way you handle how you receive feedback will be framed by your attitude state.
Your body posture will shape the way you think. If you are slumped, with your head hanging down, you are less likely to be as positive and self-assured as someone adopting a more alert stance.
Different situations will require different types of thinking.
The four communication quotients: IQ – Intelligence quotient; EQ – Emotional quotient; VQ – Vision quotient; AQ – Adversity quotient.
Facts are truly powerful tool for persuasion.
Perceptions are more often based on emotions rather than facts
A vision can be likened to having a destination on your horizon which you intend to reach on your journey.
“If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make your dream come true?”
The fastest way to change how you feel about anything is to change what you are focusing on.
Pessimism is unhelpful when it is made permanent – creating a mindset of “thinking it will never happen”.
No matter how strong and potent your vision is, you will inevitably run into obstacles, potential barriers that prevent you from reaching where you want to be.
Adversity quotient is the will to succeed, your resilience, the ability to bounce back, not be deterred in your quest. Outstanding communicators confront difficult people when necessary on difficult issues.
In order to achieve any success a task must have meaning.
The language you use expresses information from you, but also can betray your inner thinking and also can predict how you are going to perform.
Having rigid, limiting mental models will hold back your communications and your life.
When facing rigid mind ask yourself the followings: Who says?; So what?; Why not?; What evidence have you got?
As a public relations communicator you are a bridge builder.
Communicare (Lat.)= to share together, to make common-> begins with understanding the needs of your audience
“treat people the way they would like to be treated” – your worlds will be different
How do you communicate to different minds/ maps?
- Actions
- Strategies to achieve trust and integrity
- Body language
- Other dimension to “language”
- Active listening
- Active presenting
- Assertiveness
Great communicators realize that their actions carry a message.
“Tell the truth and prove it with action”. Arthur Page, former head of public relations at AT&T
(a forthright definition of public relations)
Integrity means avoiding communication that is deceptive, or beneath the dignity of people.
Personal integrity generates trust.
Key strategies to employ to build integrity include:
• Become genuinely interested in other people by having the belief and value that everyone has at least one thing interesting about them. (A good ice-breaking comment is, “What I really like about you is…”);
• Make other person feel important and do it sincerely
• Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view
• Help the other person be happy about doing what you suggest
• Have an abundance mentality and let others have your ideas, by not being precious about ownership of “your” idea.
• Understand and visibly live out your values.
People buy trust first, products second. Trust is the gel holding together the loose and the informal in a fast moving world, where relationships are moving towards being flexible, adaptable and non-permanent.
The importance of the dress.
The state of your shoes is always a good way to judge a person’s character.
Active listening. People prefer to talk rather than listen. Your ears will never get you into trouble. You learn through listening. They who listen are in control. Let others talk first. It is important to withhold your evaluation of what you think until the speaker has finished. Ask questions for clarity. At the end of the dialogue paraphrase what you understand the person to have told you.
The power of listening is a crucial skill.
As a public relations practitioner you need to manage your assertiveness by being honest about your own feelings and being clear, specific, and direct in what you say.
When giving criticism seek solutions rather than commenting on the personality traits of the other people involved in the situation. Assertiveness is not just about dealing with negative situations. When there is something positive to say, say it, and respond to positive feelings expressed by others. Be on the mission to give genuine compliments, and accept compliments gracefully. Self-deprecation by admitting mistakes or personal shortcomings can help make others feel at ease. Make it your responsibility to initiate and sustain interaction.
By using assertive skills you can avoid others taking advantage of you.
A meme acts like an invisible currency, enabling effective exchange and trade of information between individuals. Memes are the communication equivalent of what biochemical genes are to DNA.
The ability to successfully create and harness effective memes, and meme-friendly messages, is crucial to successful communications. Characteristics: Longevity, Coherence and Copyability. The more coherent and copyable you make your message, the more likely it will be replicated. Once you propel your message into the outside world you lose direct control over it. The more you can do at the outset to make your meme as robust as possible, the greater its changes for survival.
All cultural products, including all content generated by public relations professionals, including press releases, speeches, sound bites, brochures, jingles, catcjphrases, brand identities and websites, are ultimately memes. (like a software virus) Examples: “wheel, letters, calendar, Hamlet, the latest fashion, the Teletubbies, post-modernism”.
Memes propagade by leaping from brain to brain via imitation. If the idea catches on, it propagates itself.
Spin doctors – “master of rotational medicine” – is believed to originate in the USA from baseball
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the term as “a political spokesperson employed to give a favourable interpretation of events to the media ”. It has come to be seen as a pejorative term, laden with implicit abuse, implying someone being untruthful, deceitful and desiring to manipulate perceptions.
By understanding that paradigms exists, you have a flexibility in recognizing and manipulating them. As a result the effective communicator can gain significant advantage over those stuck in “same-box” thinking.
In his or her professional role a public relations communicator could be defined as someone who is a one-person brand who investigates communications between a brand and its context.
Brands are made up of: icons, values, and information.
Marketing guru Seth Godin (2003) argues for a new “P” to be added to the marketing lexicon of product, price, promotion and place: “purple cow”. Organizations need their own equivalent of a “purple cow” to make them remarkable, getting them literally to stand out from the herd.
If you want your message to achieve impact and be sustainable, fundamentally you need to check that it contains a memorable icon. The fashion company French Connection profitably capitalized on this process with its brand “Fcuk”.
Note that an icon must tell you more about something.
The most important word in the world is your name. When something is named it becomes “thinkable”.
Communicators do have a responsibility to be neologists, to create new names to add to the general vocabulary to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding world. By creating a name you potentially create a clear-cut label to make the element you are describing distinctive and memorable.
When establishing your values and values hierarchy you should ideally have no more than five individual value statements. People cannot remember more than five things. Any more than five values and you will have difficulty remembering them, making them less copyable as a meme, and undermining their sustainability.
The challenge in creating an effective positioning is to establish a unique position with an appeal that is not too narrow.
“Plant your flag on the highest mountain you can”.
Key requirements to achieving change in your communications are:
• Reducing dissonance;
• Meeting a need;
• Starting from the present;
• Selling benefits;
• Using influencing facts to persuade;
• Delivering your message with brio;
• Make your message bespoke.
If an idea, or meme, seems well-founded to most people exposed to it, non-hosts will adopt and retain it because it does not create dissonance. In communications it is essential to analyse the potential dissonance your communication might create.
If our lower needs are not satisfied we concentrate exclusively on satisfying them.
- Any message should minimize any perception of risk
- A need for uncertainty, seeking surprise and variety in their lives
- Significance, where people want to feel important and unique (if people feel patronized, they will resist your message)
- Love and emotional connection
- Growth, the need to nurture new within the old, recognizing a natural momentum that if you stop growing you start dying
The fundamental starting point for communicating is not deciding what you want to say. Rather it is identifying what people want to hear. […] By adopting this process you can enable your targets to embark on a journey, moving from their existing position to a new point of view.
You also need to ensure your message is addressing what marketing expert John Timperley calls a “considered need” rather than an “unconsidered need”.
In order for a message to be perceived as credible it must have a “legitimizer”. Legitimizers in a message area ideally hard factual details, such as previous track record, size and scale of the offer, expertise, blue-chip customers or individual connections. The status of the person or organization delivering the message is important than one from a lowly executive. How the message is presented is also relevant.
Visibility can also provide a legitimizing influence.
For successful word-of-mouth (w-o-m) you need a “story”:
- Short and simple
- Interesting, exciting, new, different, unique, worth talking about;
- In story form
Seth Godin (2002) emphasizes the importance in any successful w-o-m, or idea virus, of “smoothness”: how easy is it for an end user to spread particular messages. In shaping your messages to boost their smoothness, potentially strong angles to be exploited include:
- News: genuine news will be of interest. (Note, it does have to be genuinely new and not just a tired reformulation of the old.)
- Unique results, effects or activities, appealing to “What’s in it for me?”
- Sex – a core human motivator
- Secrets – capitalizing on the scarcity rule
- Helping others – appealing to curiosity and reciprocal altruism
- The “Fortean factor” – how unusual, odd or different is it you target’s normal experience
- Personal – “legends” of exceptional performance are more attractive than statistics.
- Celebrity linkage – using a well-known personality to provide further brand coherence to your message.
Research in selling reveals that it requires up to seven quality contacts before a salesperson successfully land the sale.
We live in an age of liquid modernity – a fluidness extending to every aspect pf life. The rapid speed of communications means you can be more vulnerable to other people and their memes stealing your share of space in your prospects’ minds.
The age of new communication means that you will never be out of touch, whether you like it or not.” Facebook? 
Sursă imagine
[Cumva, ca un răspuns la o întrebare primită nu cu mult timp în urmă: Ce te motivează să faci un anumit lucru?] Sunt oameni care mă energizează doar prin modul în care scriu, prin modul în care-mi zâmbesc sau pur şi simplu prin prezenţa lor, fizică sau nu. Un apel telefonic ar declanşa aceeaşi emoţie din partea lor. Sunt lucruri care-mi dau energia pe care nu mi-aş fi imaginat-o atât de accesibilă, sunt activităţi care fac acelaşi lucru, cum ar fi unele lecturi, cum ar fi alergatul, dansul, aceeaşi frumoasă poveste şi în privinţa lor. 
