10 Yetis Insight Blog - 8 Qualities You Need To Possess To Work in PR

We're looking for a new PR account executive at the moment to join the Yeti family, so it got me thinking about what it takes to work in PR.

Working in PR is not for everyone and it takes a certain kind of person to be able to make it (or fake it 'til you make it, as I once heard a wise man say). Surviving the industry is easier if you have certain traits and qualities; and, no, I don't just mean being able to drink your body weight in white wine spritzers and measuring your worth by the number of Twitter followers you have.

I've worked agency-side for more than seven years now and it's fair to say that I'm not the same person I was when I started at 18; I have definitely adapted to my field of work and toughened up a fair bit.

Here are the 8 qualities I think you need to work in a PR agency, within an in-house team or just in the industry in general:

1.Creativity

Luckily, I've always been a bit on the creative side. I'm not saying that everything I create is any good, but I do like to create. Growing up, I loved writing stories/poems, making up shows for my poor Nan to sit and watch every time she babysat and making things out of egg boxes and pipe cleaners. When you work in PR, having creativity is vital.

It's such a competitive space that whatever ideas you put out need to be unique, different or a bit on the controversial side. Some of the best digital PR campaigns we've done for clients recently have had creativity at their core; it doesn't matter if the campaign is PR for SEO or just a general brand awareness campaign. Creativity = links. Creativity = coverage.

2.Drive

To work in PR, you need to have drive and by that I mean a burning desire to succeed... for yourself, for your clients and for all of mankind. You know, like when you're trying to battle your way through a large deep pan pizza, alone, and you're determined to finish it all? That kind of drive. If you aren't driven, you can be prone to giving up too easily and that's something you can't do in PR. If a client project or PR campaign isn't doing as well as you predicted or hoped it would, you need to regroup and make some kind of change to move things forward to make it work. Being driven means that your ideas, campaigns and PR projects stand a better chance of success.

3.A sense of humour

If you work in PR already, you've probably been involved in situations in which you didn't know whether to laugh or cry. What's that... the journalist ran your client's story, didn't include a mention and is refusing to add one in? Hahahaha. Oh... a client's threatening to sue you because you only got 100 pieces of coverage and not 106 like they want? LOL.

You can't take yourself too seriously when you work in PR, because something will probably go wrong at some point and you'll have days when you just want to set your out of office and run away to join the circus. You need to have a sense of humour and the ability to laugh things off. If a journalist gives you attitude during a phone conversation and you know that it wasn't deserved (forgive them, they're busy people and get call after call from people like us) just try to brush it off. A good sense of humour is also handy when coming up with creative PR campaigns, because you'll have the knack for knowing what will make people giggle and funny stuff is always more shareable.

4.Positivity

A job in the PR industry is one with extreme highs and extreme lows, so you need to have the ability to remain positive. You might feel like it's the end of the world when you lose your favourite client or it's an hour after you sent a press release out and it STILL hasn't got any media coverage, but it's not. Positivity also makes for a better working environment in the world of PR and will attract success. When you can remain positive, you're likely to be more proactive in your attempts to get results, so it'll have a knock-on effect.

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5.People skills

PR is under the wider 'communications' marketing umbrella, so this is a bit of an obvious one but it certainly helps to have people skills. You need to be good at talking to people (i.e. clients, journalists and anyone else you might encounter as part of your day to day job or at networking events). If you can build a good rapport with potential clients, it might make all the difference when it comes to winning their business; and if you can create solid relationships with journalists it could improve your chances of getting coverage for clients. So, people skills are a big yes in the PR industry.

6.Confidence

Part of the job that some PR people hate is picking up the phone and pitching stories. It takes a fair bit of confidence to make these calls and I've met plenty of seasoned PR people who still hate doing it... but they get on and do it with confidence and you'd honestly think it was the favourite part of their job. You also need to have the confidence to push back if a journalist says no to an idea your trying to pitch, but only if you know that it's something they will genuinely be interested in because you've seen that they've written about similar topics in the past.

Having a confident demeanour is one thing, but you also need to have confidence in your ideas when you work in PR. If you come up with an idea and, from the off, think it's not going to perform well you either need to scrap it and go back to the drawing board or have a bit more confidence in the whole concept. Get a second, third and fourth opinion if you aren't sure and if everyone else likes it then it's just a case that you need to be more confident.

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7.Initiative

Some of the best PR results can come from something that's reactive or off-the-cuff, so you need to be able to use your initiative to spot piggybacking opportunities for your clients.

Using your initiative is also a must when it comes to targeting the right journalists and media with your stories. Reading the magazines you're likely to be going after for your clients to get a feel for what the content is like and what the writers might want to receive... that's initiative. Using Twitter to spot coverage opportunities for your PR campaign and portfolio of clients, such as following the hashtag #journorequest... that's initiative. You get the gist.

8.Thick Skin

Having a thick skin goes hand in hand with having a good sense of humour. You're going to experience knock-backs when working in PR, whether it's a resounding 'no' from a journalist when you pitch a feature or story idea, or when you've put every ounce of your energy and time into a pitch process only to find out they choose the other agency. You just need to have a thick skin and move on.

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So, if you're a creative, confident, driven, thick-skinned, positive individual with a good sense of humour, initiative and people skills... please come and be our new PR account executive.

If you don't have those traits, all is not lost. Working in PR has a way of giving them to you!