PR Housekeeping Chores for Each New Year

The first week in January is a difficult one for most editors, because the holidays left them with fewer days to get their stories done and more than the usual difficulty in reaching the people they need to contact in order to be able to finish their stories. These weeks are a jot less hectic, which makes this a good time to perform a few of the chores that can make both their work and our work a little less laborious.

Your dossier.

The first thing to work up is a company fact sheet. At a minimum, you need to include a press contact name, address and phone number; you may also want to consider a press contact's home and mobile phone numbers and e-mail addresses. For the company, it helps to list fax numbers and direct lines or extensions for quotable, accessible officers, technical support and customer support numbers, company electronic mailboxes, Web sites and so on. You may also want to consider including information capsules (about a paragraph) on each of your major products or product lines, including prices, resale channels, trademarks, current version numbers, date of introduction and so on. You can either send this broadside to your mailing list, or include it with your first few releases, or broadside a postcard (even better when you send it with a postage-paid, individualized reply card) to your list, or include the postcard with your first few releases, if you still m ail releases.

Defile.

This is a good time to clear last year's clip and action files and set up a new drawer-full. Go through the old ones, if you get a chance, for a sense of the things that worked best and worked least last year; for the journalists who did best by you, drop a friendly thank you note, with an invitation to call any time and catch up on what's upcoming. If there's a weak activity, let everybody who's involved know, but in a very constructive manner; one good approach is to ask them to help you find solutions to the special challenge of improving that particular result.

Your reading.

Review the most significant publications you deal with. Make sure you have a current media kit on each, and current issues, and do what you can to be on their subscription lists. Pledge yourself to keep track of more than just your own clips; keep an eye on your competitors and on the market overall for the earliest warning on trends and shifts in the winds of commerce. And no matter what, find three or four or five of what you think are the best of these publications, at a minimum, and no matter what, read those few the day that each arrives.

Shuffling cards.

Check out your own card files. We'll bet you find some people who aren't where you show them any more, and maybe some publications that aren't around any more. Have you checked for area codes that changed? Have you noted the beats these people are on now? Their e-mail addresses? Any personal notes on hobbies or likes and dislikes to help your phone calls stay friendly and familiar? If you get these in order now, life will be a lot easier when the rush hits in a month or so. And it's a great excuse to make a call now; that might even lead to a friendly chat about story ideas.

Sales success.

By the way, a lot of your customers spent their end-of-year funds at the end of December, and are spending their new-year-budget funds in early January. So somewhere between your sales operations and your resellers, there are some just-ripe success stories waiting to be told, and a new planting of application stories that can be ready to harvest in just a few months. When you send your "Well, it's a new year, isn't it" correspondence out to the field, include a few words about the kind of information they can return that can best help your publicity efforts return on your investment in them.

Calendars.

Is your trade show participation calendar in place? How about your upgrade and new product calendars? Your marketing promotion calendar? Company event calendar? Milestone anniversary calendar? These are good information for developing news pitch angles, for your field operations and, with a smidgen of forethought, for your dealers.

Other dates.

While you're at it, make a few notes on your personal calendar. Is there a small handful of journalists who cover you regularly and fairly? Call their publication personnel departments to learn their birthdays, mark them on your calendar, and send a card. (Be careful about sending flowers or gifts, though, since they may violate publication policies; ask that same personnel department contact about any guidelines). And just to keep you out of trouble, add your own personal and family birthdays, anniversaries and special dates, and make sure your administrative assistant has a copy of everything, just in case.

While we're on the subject of the home front, consider the impact that your holiday schedules may have had on family members. From the hectic season before the holidays when you were hardly ever home on time to a few weeks of relative normalcy and maybe even some extra days with them, how much time are you spending with them now? If you can, try to avoid cutting yourself off from them cold turkey (an unfair term, by the way, since the cold turkey leftovers often outlast our January hearth-side evenings); the hectic time will be soon enough upon us, grant them a little of yourself now to make those times easier to take. They'll love you for it.