It all started so well. 2020 was full of promise - a new decade reflecting on all that the previous 10 years had brought us. Like avo on toast, prolific smartphone usage and celebrity culture. Pandemic PR couldn’t have been further from our thoughts despite what was bristling on the distant horizon.
This isn’t so much a post about how to do PR during a pandemic. It’s more about how quite often you’re doing PR already, whether you realise it or not.
2020 was a year where PR in its truest sense - public relations - really came into play.
Public relations is reputation management in action
Most businesses invest in PR to get their name in the press. But as I’ve harped on about before, media relations and press coverage are just the tiniest pieces of public relations strategy. They’re one element of building a reputation for your business in the eyes of your stakeholders (audiences, customers, investors - take your pick of target).
2020 put many businesses in jeopardy, mine included, but it put even more brand reputations on the line.
Preparing for crisis
Building a strong reputation enables a business to handle crisis when it hits.
Public relations is the sum of everything a business says, does and projects towards its ‘publics’, i.e. its audiences. Whether a business is talking to its staff, its investors, its prospective customers, or lapsed clients, everything counts.
When the crap hits the fan and crisis lands, this reputation gives you essential thinking time and breathing space. Your audiences already have a feel for your brand values. They trust you. They’re loyal to you. They might even forgive you for being slow to respond to said crisis because of this.
Did anyone plan for pandemic PR?
Let’s make the whimful assumption that you haven’t decided to do PR just for the press coverage and you had a broad public relations strategy that included crisis comms planning. It’s likely that only the biggest brands with the most generous budgets had planned for a pandemic, although definitely only maybe.
In January, those of us active on social media were creating funny images of how different our social profile pictures would be on different platforms ranging from LinkedIn to Tinder - imagine the fun we were having unbeknownst that those social channels would become lifelines for our social and professional lives
Come February, I was helping places market themselves as wedding venues. That certainly didn’t pan out as planned…
Also by then, there was increasing chatter about a virus sweeping the Alps and wiping out skiers not because of the apres ski or the black runs. Reality was setting in. And still, we sat and watched.
A crisis is an evolving situation
As the pandemic unfolded on home turf in March I wrote what went on to become my most read article of 2020: “What to say when it’s no longer business as usual”.
If the onset of lockdown taught us anything, it was to remain nimble. And even if you had done crisis scenario planning, those plans had to be very versatile in allowing for variances.
Pandemic pivot
By April, Ross and the sofa on the stairs jokes were already wearing thin and the use of the term ‘pivoting’ was part of our everyday vocabulary.
The nation was knee-deep in pandemic panic and national lockdown. And like many businesses, we were having to pivot to stay afloat. I had to find time to be present online and to open new work doors.
Once again my professional network came up good and I found connection and conversation across LinkedIn and my B4 membership.
Showing up
By May, amidst my own chaos of being a terrible home school teacher and watching the majority of my clients pause their retainers, I chose to invest time getting to know people better, and be more helpful to my followers on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Showing up consistently isn’t easy, but it is effective. I’d spent the previous weeks advising clients to keep talking (there’s nothing worse for your reputation than going quiet in a crisis). Now it was time for me to heed my own words.
The result? A new client with an intuitive instinct to pivot - I knew this was going to be fun and the press coverage rolled in, from all around the world.
Reputation longevity
Come June, with the hope of summer travel on the horizon, I was back on BBC News discussing what travellers needed to consider and what hope there was for a faltered travel industry.
Between this and Instagram, I was back in contact with a couple who I met probably 10 years ago through my then job in travel PR. I’ve been working with their holiday home business since summer 2020. Together we’ve enjoyed the results of implementing a more active email marketing strategy and creative social media activity.
Brand voice
As venue doors opened in July and we succumbed to public life behind masks, I was invited to chair a gathering of Oxford’s event venues as they shared their highs, lows, hits, and misses of keeping their businesses alive during the pandemic.
The energy amongst the group was palpable and to share a rooftop with them was one of my highlights of the year.
Downtime
August was partly about downtime and partly about putting remote working into absolute practice. A month spent largely by the sea wasn’t quiet on the work front.
Having prompted small businesses to start thinking about Christmas in July, I was busy helping another new client pitch their project to Christmas gift guide journalists. Then another project landed, on recommendation from one of my earliest clients, to create a social media strategy for a festival.
The perspective of a change of scenery was healthy for heart and head.
What’s in a name?
The enormity of relief that came with schools reopening in September is indescribable. It took me a while to settle back into a working rhythm but I was grateful to have enough work to fill the school hours and to invest in a Facebook Ads course that would begin in October.
But that change of scenery had also helped me take a small but important shift in my public presence - to change my profile name on Instagram from Coconut PR to Coconut Comms. Why? Because in reality, PR is just one of the services I offer - it’s an integral part of the marketing mix not to be silo’d on its own and not to be misunderstood as purely about press coverage.
Women in business
In October I got to walk with some of my favourite and most inspiring Oxfordshire business founders. We met a few years ago at an International Women’s Day and ordinarily we’d meet face to face a few times a year to share the good, bad, ugly and helpful of business growth.
I always come away from these meetings wishing I had a product to sell, and so in many ways, these ladies have inspired me over time to find a way to ‘productise’ my skills. Look out for products from me to help you get your head around your marketing in 2021.
That Facebook Ads course I invested in? I was too busy to take part in it by the time it kicked off in October. You win some, you lose some.
Collaborative community
With my Instagram community going from strength to strength and another national lockdown in place, November saw me introduce ‘live’ collaborative conversations with others in my community. The idea behind these live ‘lunch and learn’ conversations with a journalist and an acclaimed blogger was to further reinforce some of the PR messaging I had been talking about in other posts, and to bring people together, somehow.
Marketing and PR tips
With the season of goodwill upon us, the lovely Lou Ellis suggested I did an Instagram advent calendar of tips. Little did she know that I would run with that idea to the extreme of recording those tips for each of the 24 days up to Christmas.
Because I’m a spontaneous soul, I cobbled together a graphic, wrote a blog post and recorded the first tip in a rather short space of time. And as exhausting as producing daily video content was, the reward of receiving grateful and joyful feedback was absolutely worth it. Yet more relationships built, more people helped.
Pandemic reputation builders
And so upon reflection, what is it that professionally has helped me come through 2020 with a business intact albeit it reshapen? Being responsible for my own public relations and reputation.
These are the four things that I believe have been pivotal in my pandemic PR year:
Finding time for virtual networking built my reputation with people who were previously second and third degree connections, and led to work in more diverse sectors
Hosting virtual workshops and webinar speaker slots helped me help businesses see through the chaos while positioning me as a marketing expert beyond the travel and hospitality sectors
Maintaining a regular (although not frequent) presence on LinkedIn supported the above - sometimes posting, but more often than not simply interacting with the content posted by others
Choosing to dedicate time to Instagram and continue to help small businesses with marketing, communications and PR tips has been a slow burn yet rewarding investment in building a wider network of businesses and service providers
Everything you say, do and project as a business adds to or impacts your reputation. This reel created for Instagram really does only just touch on the main threads of the year, month by month, but it certainly tells a story of the year our lifetime will never forget.
Need someone to help you see the wood for the trees and get your reputation in shape? Let’s start with a no obligation chat