PR Skills for Any Season

No matter where you are in your career, we hope you are always seeking to learn something new, whether it’s sharpening your existing skillset, meeting with other professionals, or taking on an entirely new challenge. Join us for this episode when we talk about honing your PR skills in any season of your professional life.

 

Transcript

Michelle Kane (00:01):

Thank you for joining us for another episode of That Solo Life, the podcast for PR pros and marketers who work for themselves like me, Michelle Kane, with VoiceMatters, and my wonderful co-host Karen Swim with Solo PR Pro. Hi, Karen. How's it going?

Karen Swim, APR (00:17):

Hi, Michelle. It's going really well. How good doing this week?

Michelle Kane (00:21):

Hey, can't complain. Can't complain. Things are moving along, so it's good. Even during the sleepy months of summer, things are popping, so I can't complain. <Laugh>,

Karen Swim, APR (00:33):

Definitely this summer has been anything but sleepy, let me tell you. <Laugh>.

Michelle Kane (00:38):

For sure. For sure. And you know, what we want to talk about today is something that sometimes you rely on those sleepy moments to catch up on, which is professional development. How as busy solos do we make the time to keep our tools sharpened? So I'm just going to touch on some points of things that we've been talking about as far as in what areas should you be seeking to learn more? Just learn more about, it may not be something that you practice on your own, but to just have knowledge of it so we can best serve our clients.

Karen Swim, APR (01:16):

Yeah. I always like to think of professional development in two buckets. One as personal satisfaction, you know, to sharpen skills that I really enjoy or that I just really have a desire to get better at. And then two, to either acquire or improve skillset where it's going to matter most to the clients that I serve. And so I think that's really important because the way that you can protect your ability to develop business and to develop higher value business is by understanding what are clients searching for? What do they need? Are there any gaps? And what types of skills are they looking for? Easy way to do that is to read job descriptions and see what people are putting out there, see what people are talking about, and that'll give you a clue as to what really is in demand.

Michelle Kane (02:09):

Yeah, that's so true. So true. And one of the things we've been thinking about as public relations becomes a more integrated practice, you know, you'll hear it the phrase “integrated marketing and PR.” I mean, that's how I present myself, that's how I came up actually. But even if you don't practice the marketing end - knowing about it, the basics, what's new out there right now, you know, what isn't so new, everything comes around again, or as I always preach to my clients, look, we went from fax blasts to email <laugh>. It's like, it's nothing necessarily new, but you should be familiar with some of the tools and just the basic principles, and there are plenty of resources out there. You don't have to kill yourself to get there.

Karen Swim, APR (03:07):

For sure. I absolutely agree. I was speaking with a PR pro last week that had a good reminder because this professional had said, with all of the social media channels that have popped up since, you know, Twitter has been going through whatever it's been going through <laugh>, there has been a fatigue among all of us, and you just are sick of it. Like you're over it. We join all these things because we're communications professionals, but they had joined Threads immediately and started to play around with it, tested and understand it, and shortly thereafter, a client had sought their counsel on Threads and they were like, I'm so glad that I had actually been there, had gotten the lay of the land and could actually give wise council. So it's things like that, it's being ahead of your clients, right?

And, you know, looking ahead to what you believe, because we're smart people. We have the ability to envision what's going to come and what trends we expect to see. Let that be a factor in what skills you decide to develop. You may decide that there are some skill sets that are worthy of taking certification courses. So maybe it's, you know, a series of workshops over the rest of the summer to get certified in something. Maybe it's something that you want to go and take a class at a, you know, local college, or maybe it's a conference that you want to go to that is going to help you to develop those skill sets, but, you know, be strategic about what you're developing, because I know that many of us love to learn things, and that's great, but we all also had a finite amount of time. So you want to be wise in developing things that are really going to enrich your personal satisfaction in your career, but also increase your value to your clients.

Michelle Kane (05:09):

Yeah, that is so true. And also because I know we've all had this happen at least one time across the span of our careers, when that new shiny thing comes out, and there's the client that's gung-ho and just wants, oh, I saw all about this. I want to be in on the shiny thing now. And

Karen Swim, APR (05:25):

Yeah.

Michelle Kane (05:26):

You know, not that it's the end of the world if you're caught off guard, but it's nice to be able to say, well, <laugh>,

Karen Swim, APR (05:32):

Absolutely. That's the best feeling in the world. Yeah. And I celebrate that particular professional because I love when that happens. But that's who we are as solo PR pros. And, let's not forget, one of the bits of our job is to be able to acquire new skill sets and move into new directions quickly. In other words, we're very agile. And when you're in a traditional type setting, you really don't have the ability to do that. You can't just go off and learn whatever you want and decide to incorporate new things into what you do because you don't have the time. And then it's not like you can go change departments on your own. You can't do that. You have to go through channels. And so I love that about us, is that we can quickly respond to market changes. We see something coming and we can hop on it and learn it. Of course, you know, we can't take about, talk about professional development today without addressing AI.

Michelle Kane (06:32):

Right. Speaking of things to keep track of. And, the essence of that is knowing how to use it, right? Finding out what prompts can serve you well, not just to help you work smarter. Because, and, and I know we've talked about this plenty of times before where it's, at first it felt like cheating, but when you realize that the quality of the output still needs you, it's a huge, huge help. So how can that help you think of new ideas help refine your proposal, help refine your, your strategies, your plants, just so you're not starting from scratch every time?

Karen Swim, APR (07:15):

Yeah. You can use AI to do any number of things, but here's where your value really begins to increase, as well as you learn to use AI for not just the simple, not just for ideation, not just for coming up with maybe some brainstorming headlines or brainstorming content. You start to understand how it works.  And then you begin to understand how to counsel your clients in incorporating AI. Then you're ahead of the game when clients are like, well, can't we just have AI write our blog posts? And then you can counsel them on the strategic way to incorporate AI and how yes, you can have AI be like a little writer's assistant in developing content. So how much of human time and how they can streamline? So put yourself in the position of really learning this tool, understanding what it can and cannot do, understanding the limitations, understanding how to counsel clients through the databases that AI is pulling from the things that they need to check for how they can you, you know, refine AI to really deliver content in their brand voice and aligned with their brand messaging.

So the better you get at it, now you're a strategic counselor in that area too, and you don't have clients coming to you saying, well, can't we just use AI to do PR? Or can't we just use AI to do this? And it's like, yes, you can absolutely use AI as a tool in all of these situations. Here's the best way to do that. And then got them through that, and then bring them into the world. If you were using AI in smart and strategic ways, they're share that with clients. Like, here's what we did. I think that transparency is really important.

Michelle Kane (09:08):

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I totally appreciate a lot of the reticence against it, but it's here. So you definitely want to be the PR pro who knows about it and knows how to use it, even just a little bit, get your feet wet.

Karen Swim, APR (09:27):

Here is the true reality. We do talk, we have this concern about AI taking away jobs or clients prematurely believing that AI technology can replace a human being. This is not new in the history of mankind. Humanity has evolved. Humanity has developed so many things technologically. So with every new tool there came a new way to do things. Some jobs have gone away. We no longer have certain jobs. We no longer call 411 for information to get someone's phone number. We hit Google when we're looking for a number. We don't even use a phone book. So operators don't exist anymore. And if you watch old movies, you know that there used to be operators that actually had to connect actual calls. They sticking those things into the plugs and connecting one call.

We don't need that anymore. There's something that no longer exists, but with jobs going away, new jobs enter the marketplace. And so it's clear that it's up to us as PR pros to upskill ourselves. Companies need to do this with their workers and present opportunities to upskill them as well and prepare them for future work. But for us, that's our job. And so, not just learn AI a little bit, get good at it, learn ai, learn what you can do with it, push it, you know, check it, you know, you can't break it, but you can really learn a lot. And I would say become really astute. Like I am gobbling up courses, workshops, every information, every time somebody releases prompts, I'm like, okay, that's great. Let me try that. Lemme refine that because I don't want to be left behind.

Here's the other area of AI though, that doesn’t get talked about a lot. Learn about the ethical consideration so that you are able to, with confidence, guide your clients in its use. There are some things that I'm seeing that are frightening, and I feel that communicators and professionals need to advocate against those types of uses and we need to stand up for perfect example is what's happening in Hollywood now with studios wanting Yeah. The forever rights to someone's image. This hits intellectual property issues, copyright issues and just power, you know, the power of, you're taking away the power of people to earn a living. So I think there are so many things in this area that if, if this is an area of passion for you, ethics is one of my passions. Become well-versed and what's happening in this, in this area of technology. And you can, again, use this in your client work or in your personal branding work.

Michelle Kane (12:39):

That's so true. So true. It's here, so get good at it. Do yourself a favor. It's kind of fun. I know I'm weird, but whatever.

Karen Swim, APR (12:49):

I mean, here are some other things that you might not be thinking about. Maybe you are bilingual or trilingual and maybe your language skillset sets have fallen by the wayside. Practice your non-native language because

Michelle Kane (13:04):

Oh, I like it.

Karen Swim, APR (13:05):

Especially if you’re thinking about moving into different markets. And you know, one of the things that we can do when there's economic turbulence in a region is that we can just deliver business in other regions.

Michelle Kane (13:17):

Yeah, that's true.

Karen Swim, APR (13:18):

Maybe you serve a local market, but maybe now you're going out into a different demographic. Maybe you're only US. And are there opportunities that, for example, in other countries that you're missing out on. So, your language skills could be another professional development thing that you do that allows you to now open up and grow your business in a different area.

Michelle Kane (13:40):

That's a great idea. And another thing that I know we've talked about, but it doesn't come to mind right away when you think professional development, is that we are all business owners, so brushing up on our business owner skills, spend time with other entrepreneurs. I have to tell you, our local chamber recently had a forum where it was four founders, business owners, and they just shared their story. And three out of the four, I was nodding my head thining, oh my gosh, you two really, you know, like, oh, we started out and it was dodgy and well, this, that and the other. We weren't sure, but we learned and we did, and blah, blah, blah. Try and seek out those kinds of forums. I'm sure there are Ted Talks or things online, or if you want to hear this one hit up, indianvalleychamber.com, it's on their YouTube page.

It was people from totally different industries, but they all had the same experience when they were starting. And also talking about kind of like how it started, how it's going. Spend time with other business owners and learn from each other. That's where, you know, sometimes we silo ourselves in our PR and marketing worlds. And of course we have to keep up with our industry, but spending more time, you know, what's the word? Horizontally across different spheres of professions is going to help you as well.

Karen Swim, APR (15:07):

That really excites me, Michelle, because you're right, business acumen is another skill that is worth developing. You know, I, like you, I also try to put myself in the room with people that are further along that are smarter than me always about business and really looking at, you know, my financial management of my business and, you know, really seeking to improve, like really starting to look more closely at like profitability, getting better at me, you know, how I measure success and getting better at managing and being a CEO. Those are skillsets. That's professional development as well. And also the soft skills of business. You know, yes, we're all communicators, but guess what? Learning, upping your speaking game, becoming a better public speaker, becoming a better writer. These are things that I know that we do, but we are, we should always be learning. We should always be growing and developing. None of us will ever reach perfection. So there's always room to go to grow. So don't forget about the things that you might be taking for granted. I know that we're great writers. I know that we're great communicators, but it doesn't mean that we can't get better.

Michelle Kane (16:25):

Yeah. And I know for me, I have to tell myself this, you know, ask someone out to lunch. If it's someone that you know is doing something in business that you really admire or you think you might be able to learn from, everyone's got to eat. Even though, no lie, I'm usually doing the desk picnic, which isn't the best thing in the world. <Laugh>.

Karen Swim, APR (16:47):

I love just meeting with people. And you know, sometimes it's been by Zoom, but I will tell you in was that last month, I'm getting my months mixed up, but at some point I got to talk to a bunch of solo PR pros in a single month.

Michelle Kane (17:03):

Yes. I remember that.

Karen Swim, APR (17:05):

It was amazing. I was so inspired. I was also very tired because I had some other stuff going on and then I got really behind in work. But I was so inspired by everyone that I spoke with and it really gave me motivation as well. I was there to listen and to encourage, but I got as much as I gave and may and I would say even more. And so don't discount getting together even with another solo. And if you live far apart, do it over Zoom. I am going to try and organize some Zoom network meetings in the fall. I'm going to need August to recover <laugh> <laugh> have a little summer downtime. Plus we're working on some new programs for Solo. But yeah, talk to people. It's, you would be surprised at what a boost it is because I think in this post-Covid era and whatever times we're living in right now, it's easy to forget that we've hit a little bit of a comfort level and we're in a groove. And you may be going back to in-person conferences, but we're saying even on a smaller scale, just grabbing somebody and saying, you know, let's have coffee over Zoom, or Let's meet for coffee. Let's meet for lunch. Let's take a walk together and chat.

Michelle Kane (18:28):

Yeah. I think that's so important. Well, we hope we've inspired you today. Tickled your brain a little bit. Got you thinking about new and different ways that you can work on your professional development. And if you do value this, please share it around, share it on your socials. Hit us up with your comments at soloprpro.com. And until next time, thank you for listening to That Solo Life.