The Biggest Mistake I’ve Made as a PR Pro

There are two types of mistakes you make as a PR professional.

The obvious ones — the ones that get Tweeted about. (You read that correctly).

And the quiet ones — the ones you carry around for a while before you realize what they were.

I’ve made both.

Early in my career, I sent a mail merge where every email addressed the reporter by their last name. Not even their full name. Just:

“Hi Thompson,”
“Hi Goldberg,”
“Hi Nguyen.”

A reporter from GigaOm tweeted out my mistake publicly and tagged my agency at the time. It was absolutely mortifying, and I’ve never sent a mail merge since (probably for the best, tbh). I thought I’d get fired. I thought I wasn’t made for PR. I thought I was going to have to give up my apartment and move down by the river. I was thinking about all the irrational things that float through one’s head when they are humiliated by an honest mistake.

But if you asked me on a deeper level, the biggest mistake I’ve made wasn’t an erroneous mail merge. It was the way I measured my value.

For a long time, I took every outcome personally. If we didn’t land a story, I assumed I didn’t pitch hard enough, write well enough, or perform at the level I should have. I shouldered 100% of the results, even when I didn’t always have what I needed from the client to be successful.

With a few more years of wisdom under my belt, I now realize PR doesn’t work like that. I now know that the ingredients my client brings to the table play a huge role in the results we’re able to achieve.

What Success Can Look Like in PR

Think about PR as the highlighter you take to a textbook. You draw attention to what’s meaningful, interesting, and unique about an organization. If the book doesn’t have much written in it, it may sound familiar to several other books you’ve read before. Or if it’s just not that interesting, there’s not going to be much to highlight - therefore not a lot to work with when it comes to creating an interesting PR strategy.

That doesn’t mean you’ll never get an interesting story. It just means the story needs more before it’s ready.

A big part of becoming a strategic PR pro is learning how to name that early on, and say things like, “if you want this kind of outcome, here’s what we need. And if we don’t have it, here’s what’s realistic.”

These days, I don’t make promises I can’t back up. I don’t try to will a Tier 1 feature into existence with sheer enthusiasm. And I don’t define my value by press hits alone.

Some of the best work I’ve done doesn’t even come with a metric. (I know that will make technical Founders and/or Marketers cringe. I’m sorry - that’s my truth!) It looks like helping a client understand their story and what type of results we can expect with what we currently have to work with. Or helping them clearly articulate their differentiation that leads to a pivot in the way we’re branding ourselves. And sometimes I provide the most value when I’m simply educating my clients on how this work actually gets done.

That is especially true with the current media climate. It’s always been hard to land a story in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, but now more than ever, you need the right ingredients at the right time.

Mistakes will still happen, but I’ve learned to stop treating them as a sign that I’m bad at this job. I know now that mistakes teach you how to set expectations, communicate what you need, and ultimately help set my clients up for success.

The early mistakes taught me how to pitch better. The later ones taught me how to think better. And every time I’ve gotten clearer, more honest, or more effective in this role, it’s because I messed something up first.

So if you’re in PR and you’ve made mistakes? Good. That means you’re doing it right.

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