As a PR professional you need to wear different kinds of hats at the same time. This makes this profession a challenging one.
Following are some of the aspects that make this one of the toughest job in the world:
1. Handling Multiple Stakeholders
As a PR professional you are required to handle multiple stakeholders at the same time. Be it the client on one side, the journalist on the other, or your team on one end, you must make sure you are able to deal with all of them efficiently as well as fulfill their needs so as to achieve the desired results. It is a difficult task if one is not used to handling the pressure of being able to fulfill different kinds of expectations, but it is only with experience that one can develop the required skills to handle all these multiple stakeholders at the same time. Thus, Public Relations can be a high-pressure job making it one of the toughest job in the world.
2. PR Professionals have to be Jack of all trades
When we talk about being a jack of all trades in this context, we mean that you need to be able to adapt to changes quickly and learn different types of skills rather than just being able to excel in one or two skills. Public Relations professionals need to have an understanding of not just how media works but also how other kinds of communication tools work because as a PR professional you have to ‘rely on’ or ‘work with’ different kinds of communication channels as well, for example – communication, branding, advertising, etc. Thus they need to have a little bit of understanding of everything that revolves around their work.
3. Handling Crisis is a really big part of PR
Quite often when a crisis breaks out, it is the PR professionals who are roped in. A large part of crisis management is not actually managing a crisis that has already happened but avoiding a crisis that could happen. Thus, as PR professionals you must always be alert about the things that can create risk for a brand or an organization and have a game plan ready for managing that crisis. This is a profession that requires you to be on your toes all throughout. You are also required to constantly counsel your stakeholders for eg, the CEO, Corporate communication head, media spokesperson, or other media head. Thus, it is very important for you to be able to have a clear understanding of the business as a whole as well as the surroundings in order to be able to counsel and give the best advice in times of crisis as well as in order to prevent any crisis.
4. A seat at the table comes almost immediately
PR is one of the few professions where you almost immediately start counseling senior leadership of organizations. Even as a young PR professional, you might be sitting across from the CEO at the table and telling them what they should or should not say, what kind of narrative or storytelling style should they be using, and so on. It becomes client-facing really fast and a lot of senior people are relying on you for reputation management. PR professionals are generally responsible for reputation management, which is one of the top priorities and roles of the senior management, therefore making it a high-pressure job at a very initial stage of your career.
5. Being accessible is of utmost importance for a PR professional
In this profession, you have to be on call more than in any other profession. This is because crises can happen at any time, opportunities can come about at any moment, and threats can come from any direction, thus you have to constantly be in touch with the latest news. You have to constantly keep a pulse of your target market, what they are thinking, experiencing, the kind of content they like, and the kind of stories they like so that you can not only better understand threats and risks but also map out opportunities. A brief/idea doesn’t always come from the client, generally, it is the PR team’s job to see an opportunity and say what the business should be doing or what the focus of communication must be. Thus, it is important to be alert and accessible at all times.
6. Challenges when it comes to measuring PR outputs
By and large, the output of PR is a story that comes out in the newspaper, which creates two kinds of challenges. Firstly, you don’t always have control over whether the stories come out or no, because it is a function of many things. Whether a journalist or a thought leader writes about you or not, is a function of what the news cycle looks like or whether your stories are exciting enough at that point in time. Thus, results can be difficult to measure in the short term. In the long term, of course, it is the PR professional who is controlling the narrative. But in the short term it maybe difficult to make the clients understand these functions. Secondly, PR activities are a little difficult to measure in quantitative terms. When looking at a digital campaign, we can look at the engagement rate and check how successful it is, but in PR there are no quantitative values to measure the outcome thus it becomes a challenge for PR practitioners to justify the impact they are creating (this is only for the short term). Because in the long term, It is the PR professional who is to be thanked for the reputation of the brands.
These were some of the aspects which make Public Relations a tough career to take up. But at the end of the day where is the fun without any challenges, thus it is advisable to just dive in and learn along the way.
