By David Jenkin
While it may be tempting to spend downtime doing nothing, any investment of time now will likely pay off later. Be it strategising, house-keeping or skills development, it will be worth a lot more at the end of the day than hundreds of hours spent playing Solitaire.
Talk to the pressRoxanne Marais, senior account manager at Tribeca PR, offers some advice in her personal capacity on how to make the best use of a quiet period. For starters, she says, tap into your top five media connections. Journalists in the December period are also snowed under a blanket of low energy, but touching base with your top five media contacts, even if just to wish them a happy holiday, will nurture the relationship and will ensure that you are top of mind for industry commentary in the new year.
Writing for
PR Daily, Jane Callahan, president of JKC Communications, offers some details on how to land media coverage for a business in quiet times. She says that there are often opportunities to speak about the company’s internal policies, initiatives, or corporate culture. It’s also a good idea to think locally, acquiring coverage in local publications through a community-minded initiative.
Another option is to write thought-leadership pieces – “guest posts or op-eds that would have a timely or special interest appeal”, she writes. The advice post is another possible angle, tapping an experienced executive’s knowledge to provide tips, predictions and lessons.
Learn somethingMarais’ next point is to take a short course. “With the rise of integrated agencies and content marketing needs within the PR discipline, it’s essential for all PR pros to undertake some self-education,” she says, “And it’s even better if you can get certified without any costs involved.” She recommends
HubSpot Academy as a good place to go for free short online courses that can be done in a day, with subjects such as content marketing, email marketing and growth-driven design.
Francis Ingham writes for
PR Week that skills requirements in PR are changing while the investments in training often aren’t adequate, especially when it comes to digital and social media. “The leading sources of digital skills are expert blogs which are free to use and not time-consuming,” he writes.
Industry research is another valuable way to spend extra time, Marais says. “I rarely find the time during the year to take a solid few hours and research my client’s industries. Year-end allows me the time to reflect on big industry changes, understand who the major role players are, and look for trends to incorporate into our client content for the year ahead.” She adds that she also likes to reflect on the PR industry, and catch up on the big award winners and any changes or new trends.
Get organised Marais says she keeps a folder labelled ‘content ideas’ and at the end of the year she sorts through it and purges ideas that she has already used, and saves the ideas that could still work. “From small activations to exclusive sell-ins, these ideas help me start a new year with some pro-active content ideas to share with my clients,” she says.
Her final point is to evaluate professional goals. Everyone works towards some version of KPIs and review systems to ensure delivery and grow capacity, and she advises using quiet times to reflect on areas of growth going forward.
“I also like to go through each line item of responsibilities and find evidence in my e-mails of where I have achieved success, and identify the weaknesses I need to work on,” she says. “It’s an honest way to approach the new year and allows me to quantify my professional goals with input from my mentors.”
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Image courtesy of Sarah under creative commons attribution 2.0