My Advice to PR on How to Communicate With Marketers
Posted on July 7, 2010 by Tac Anderson — 2 Comments
Use PowerPoint, not Word. Seriously.
I know you were expecting some answer like use more data or numbers or talk slow, but one of the biggest problems I’ve seen when PR tries to integrate with marketing is that they aren’t presenting the message right. When I first started at HP in a Global Marketing Unit (GBU) I wrote my first report in Word. I thought I had committed a cardinal sin. My manager told me to put it in PowerPoint and never do that again.
Social media is continuing to blur the lines between PR and marketing. Waggener Edstrom has traditionally been a PR/communications agency, but over the past several years we have shifted to doing integrated communications. Which means we are just as likely to work with marketing as we are PR. But still, most of our clients are in PR.
The first thing I noticed about PR vs. marketing was PR’s propensity to use Word. It makes sense; most of the stuff PR does (or used to do) was done first with typewriters, then with word processors (the hardware devices, not the software), then Word.
PR people usually come from a writing or journalism background. They write. Marketers don’t do that. Formal pricing documents like SOWs and initial RFP responses are usually done in Word, but that’s it.
My advice to PR people who find themselves working more with marketing is to use PowerPoint and lots of visuals like charts; they like charts.
Marketers don’t read; they just want pretty pictures.
Kim on July 9, 2010
You make a very valid point, social media has definitely blurred the lines between traditional PR and marketing. I love the closing line, “Marketers don’t read; they just want pretty pictures.” Too funny (and very true).