How you look determines PR success

This post is not about what you look like. It's about how you look...

How do you look at problems, opportunities, celebrations, etc.? How do you view situations and progress for your organization or client?

This is a photo of my son back in July in Yellowstone National Park. And yes, that's Old Faithful in the background. (Cute, huh?)

Public relations professionals have to look at things like our communities see them. We must see what they see. As individuals and as a group. Our views need to include those of our audience in order to have any hope of reaching them. We need to be able to step back and take it all in. A PR person's ability to have that wide-angle lens view of things is one of his/her greatest assets.

We may not always be able to be advocates 100% of the time for stakeholders since our roles require our allegiance to the communication and business objectives of our organizations. However, we do ourselves (and our organizational leadership) a huge disservice if we ignore how things look from the outside. We can doom ourselves to fail by choosing to only concern ourselves with one-way organizational messaging.

How wide of a view do you have? What do you do to gain that crucial perspective?
How do you look?