Clients often sit on great stories – it’s up to PRs to unearth them

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I’ve often felt there’s a passivity around media relations work. We tend to wait for clients to come up with something they want to say, advise on how best to communicate it, and then do our best to generate press coverage. But I think we often miss a trick. Clients in my experience tend to be much more interesting than they might first appear. They generate data, ideas and insights that have the potential to make strong media stories. Yet few do so because clients are not good at recognising their PR value. Consultants need to do more to prise out information nuggets. This can be achieved in a number of ways. Fundamentally, it’s about being much more proactive in terms of sourcing potential news lines from clients. Regular story ideation meetings with departmental heads, access to internal communications channels and monitoring of senior staff’s work-related LinkedIn posts and tweets are just a few ways of the building up a stock of media release material. If organised efficiently, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming and if it becomes so, the justification for extra budget is a strong one.