10 Yetis Insight Blog- Working In PR - A Day In The Life Of

I have friends ask me all the time, as a PR person, what it is I actually do with my work day and now they won’t have to because I’m going to write about it and send them all a nice link to this post!

When you work in a digital PR agency you often find yourself working on a large range of tasks for different clients in one go, which can be extremely stressful. Having said that, working in such a fast-paced atmosphere does make for very interesting day to day activities, and there is never a dull moment as far as I’m concerned.

When my mum heard I was going into a PR role after graduating with a degree in Journalism, she assumed I would be partaking in alcohol-fuelled liquid lunches every day and schmoozing with celebrities like something out of an Ab Fab episode, but things have somewhat changed since this incorrect 80’s stereotype originated. No longer do PR account executives, like myself, spend their day tipsy or joking around with clients. The reality is not nearly as glamorous, but it’s still a good laugh and extremely fun. So here’s what you can expect your average PR worker to be doing with their day in 2016...

Checking emails

With the beautiful invention of computers, communicating with people has never been easier and emails have made it so incredibly simple. This does sometimes mean you’ll spend the vast majority of your day replying to, chasing or typing up emails, talking to clients and checking through hundreds of journalist requests to ensure you’re doing everything you can to get your client high levels of quality coverage.

Email checking can also become addictive. WARNING: You may just find yourself checking your inbox every night and at the weekend to make sure everything is okay and your world isn’t about to combust outside of work hours because a piece of great coverage your client got hasn’t got a follow link.

Intense coverage searches

There are so many tools available to help you keep an eye out for coverage, but sometimes you may need to actually go out there and do the searching yourself.

Occasionally search terms slip through the cracks, with and without the use of paid-for monitoring service, for one reason or another, and so a fair chunk of a PR account executives day will be spent Googling every possible term which their client might have got coverage under and trawling through pages and pages of irrelevant stories to hopefully, maybe, find some amazing coverage.

Google alerts are also a lifesaver, however this can mean scrolling through pages of alerts which used your clients name but actually has nothing to do with your client. Especially if your client has quite a common name.

This can be pretty emotionally distressing!

Being creative!

We PR people have to be creative and we will spend a lot of our day-to-day life going down the rabbit holes in our minds to try and think of the best possible ideas for new campaigns. Usually this entails whole teams getting together and picking each other’s brains so that we can bounce off each other and evolve any ideas which were lacking.

You will also find the typical PR worker often frantically writing down notes so as to not forget a great idea they just had when they have their next brainstorming session.

Keeping up-to-date with life

Watching and reading the news is going to be part of most people’s day-to-day routine, but we live and breathe it in PR, just as much as any journalist arguably.

Feedly.com is a great tool to keep up-to-date with multiple channels in one place and you will often find me scrolling through it.

Taking and making phone calls

If you aren’t confident on the phone, you soon will be if you’re working in PR. We often find ourselves on the phone with a client, a journalist or, more frequently than we would like, cold callers.

These phone calls can be pleasant and can sometimes make your day, but they can put you on the verge of tears and leave you wanting to bury your face in cake.

Fairly often we find ourselves needing to phone journalists to sell-in releases, this means we have to develop a strong skin as well as a bit of charm, or at least we like to think so.

All of the writing

No surprise here, those in public relations will be spending a lot of their day writing. If you love writing, like I do, this is amazing as it isn’t just press releases you’ll need to write but copy for a variety of channels.

This leads to your writing skill to improve literally every day which is fantastic to witness and keeps you motivated to continue writing and getting better each and every day.