PR On the Brain

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The reporter works from sun to sun, but the PR pro’s work is never done.

There’s some truth in this…particularly when I find myself texting or emailing freelancers and assorted media at 11 p.m.or fielding requests on weekends. As both myself and my guest speakers often lament to my “Introduction to PR” Loyola students, if you’re looking for a 9-to-5 job, you best forget public relations as a career.

Even when I’m off the clock, I’m on it. For example, this past Friday my fiancée and I attended a show at Magooby’s Joke House (http://magoobys.com/) in Timonium—no, this is not the name of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Actually, it’s a comedy club. And the whole reason I was there had a lot to do with PR.

On a previous visit – my fiancée had purchased an online coupon for free tickets (there’s an example of promotion in action) – I took the liberty of depositing my business card in a jar for a free ticket drawing…and as luck would have it, later received a phone call telling me I had won!

That was great…though I was somewhat surprised to learn that I had won TWENTY free tickets for a show within the next week (this past Thursday, Friday or Saturday).

This made me consider an important public relations issue—the concept of AUDIENCE.

Whatever your company or cause, you always must consider “who is your target audience?” Who is most likely to find your product or service of interest, and how do you go about reaching them?

My experience with comedy night clubs is that the vast majority of attendees are “young people,” i.e. those in the 18-30 age range.

Typically, younger people are less likely to be married, to have children, or to have serious, high-level employment, i.e. may still be living at home, looking for work or better work than they currently have, have a large circle of friends thanks to social media, perhaps still being in school, still residing in the place of their birth, and likely are still heavily dating…just the sort of people to come to a comedy club for a Friday date night.

I’m 50, hold a post-graduate degree, and would say I’m fairly successful given what I have to pay in taxes each year. I hold a high-stress, full-time job, not to mention some sidelight jobs (like teaching at Loyola) and most of my friends are either highly busy, have children, are married or are married with children.

My point is, someone in my shoes is fairly unlikely to have 19 friends available to hang out with on a Friday night with less than a week’s notice. Despite several attempts to find available people, either work, study, previous commitments, children or cold/flu season left me arriving at Magooby’s this Friday with my fiancée…and nobody else. “Afraid you’re gonna have to sell those other 18 tickets,” as I entered the premises.

Why give away that many tickets? Half-price on Thursdays, they go for $17 apiece on Friday and Saturday evenings. How about offering a MAXIMUM of 20, so if you can find that many people, great, but if not, you don’t feel you have to scramble to find warm bodies…hey, you, atop the heating grate, in the refrigerator box…you wanna go see some comedians?

Then consider my Saturday evening, taking my fiancée out for a pre-emptive Valentine’s Day dinner at Ciao Bella in Little Italy…again, another online coupon comes into play, this time one I purchased.

It used to be that restaurant’s “special” was a lower priced item that was available just for a single evening…recall, the “Blueplate special,” defined by Wikipedia as “ a term used in the United States by restaurants, particularly (but not only) diners and cafes. It refers to a specially low-priced meal, usually changing daily.” (my bold and italics)

There were two specials: one, an Orange Roughy (we’re not much on fish), the other, shrimp wrapped in veal. The latter sounded great to both of us, so we went with that. Now how the heck three shrimp, even wrapped in veal, each about the size of my THUMB, cost $34 (so $68 for us both) is beyond me—and compared to regular menu items, this was just about the most expensive item on the list.

And of course, I get this. This is why wait staff always push you to order appetizers, to ask (as our waitress did), “Do you want a salad with that?” and “Do you want to order wine?” as all these things add to the final cost—and the bigger final cost, the bigger the tip, if you’re giving the standard 15-20%.

Yes, I get it. But I don’t like it. And perhaps I should have asked what the “special” cost. But I also don’t like to come across as “cheap” (no man does, at least not in front of his betrothed), and I’m guessing again that the staff is counting on that very fact, as I noticed they fail to “volunteer” this information.

In PR parlance, this is what is called, from the customer point of view, as a “dissatisfier.” Needless to say it will be a cold day in Havana before we return to this particular restaurant again. And the 20 minutes we had to wait for our car out in the freezing cold didn’t help matters.

There’s a saying, and despite all the stereotypes about “sleazy, lying spin doctor”-types, HONESTY is always the best policy. Honesty, in fact, is one of the six core values of good public relations practice, according to the Public Relations Society of America (the other values being Advocacy, Expertise, Independence, Loyalty and Fairness http://www.prsa.org/AboutPRSA/Ethics/CodeEnglish/).

If your “special” is the most expensive thing on the menu, you might want to let people know that. Maybe we don’t order it (hough my fiancée can always order anything she wants, and that’s how it should be), but if you’re honest, chances are we’re coming back. Now we won’t. And now you also have a negative blog entry about your establishment…

…which is another PR lesson. In the world of the internet and social media, where someone’s nasty comment on a after-dinner bill can be photographed, posted online, go viral and become national news (as has happened several times in the past year), you’d best remember to emphasize good customer relations!