Brad Marley

One of the better public relations blogs out there is written by a “group of hacks” who all share a passion for social media and blogging.

They call themselves PRBreakfastClub.

I’ve been reading their posts religiously for a couple of months now, and, most of the time, I find their content to be timely and oh-so-relevant to what I am working on in my little corner of the PR world. I’ll even nod my head in vigorous agreement when they hit close to home, which is a lot.

Keith Trivitt, executive vice president of Sternberg Strategic Communications and a founding member of PRBreakfastClub, was nice enough to answer some questions for me. Six of them, to be exact.

Q: How did the PRBreakfastClub blog come together?

A: [Editor's Note: This answer written by @PRCog] We can probably trace PRBreakfastClub (PRBC) back to a tweetup last July – Masquertweet. As it turns out, all the founding members of PRBC were in attendance. I had the chance to meet everyone, but as it turns out, some of the other members didn’t. In fact, we didn’t get everyone together physically until early March 2010 – the same week as our six-month anniversary. From there, a morning discussion (centered originally around the hashtag #PRBreakfastClub, and eventually shortened to #PRBC because, you know, Twitter’s 140-character limit kept getting in the way) ended up taking place daily on Twitter among the communications folks. Once we had too many usernames on a tweet we adopted a hashtag … and the rest can be picked up from the PRBC about page :).

Q: When I’m reading your new blog posts, I’ll often think to myself, “Wow – we’re going through the same exact thing at our agency.” Assuming you can’t read minds, where does the inspiration from your blog posts come from?

Inspiration from our blog posts comes from a variety of sources. For the founding PRBC bloggers (e.g. those who started the site in August 2009), some of our inspiration often comes from our daily e-mail threads, which can often run up to 150-200 e-mails per day. Often, those are about industry-specific topics, especially in the tech and B2B spaces, since many of us work in those areas. In fact, a post I wrote last weekabout Blippy’s #EpicFail with the release of users’ credit card numbers actually came from an e-mail rant I sent out to PRBC founder’s e-mail group about how poorly Blippy was handling its response to the fiasco. From there, someone in the group (I believe PRCog) wrote back, “Good ideas for a post …” and thus, another PR-related post was born.

Other inspiration comes from what we know and love, both within the PR industry and in our own, personal lives, as well as inspiration from the many mentors we, as a group and individuals have. We have been very fortunate that while many of us are relatively young in the business (the average age of PRBC-ers would probably be around 27-30), we each have a terrific group of mentors that we lean on a lot for personal and professional help and inspiration. Folks like Arik Hanson, Heather Whaling, Jeff Esposito, David Mullen, Rachel Kayand many others I’m sure I’m forgetting, have been terrificly supportive of the blog and helped us in many ways during the past eight months.

Q: In your humble opinion, what are the big trends that are going to drive PR forward in the next, say, five years?

One of the biggest trends I think you will see in the coming year is the continuing blending of public relations and advertising (which I addressed in a recent video interview with Jeff Esposito), and frankly, not to hurt the feelings of my ad friends out there, but the re-emerge of public relations as the dominant force for brand building, brand affinity and reputation management for companies. One only has to look at Twitter’s “promoted tweets” to see how while yes, advertising will always play an important role in the development of brands and the successful means they reach and engage customers, PR is going to have to take a dominant role in this effort, as promoted tweets, inserted Facebook updates with embedded ads and some other social media ad platform we haven’t even heard of yet will all require really strong and successful messaging to reach their target audience and maintain a relevance (what Twitter is calling “resonance”) with that audience in order to stay atop our ever-growing social streams.

That messaging requires a strong public relations professional to develop and massage over time to ensure it’s reaching the proper audience and with the right tone, syntax and appropriate proof points in order to make an overall impact on a company’s growth and sales. In short, look for public relations to take a big leap over advertising in terms of the overall brand-building efforts for most companies. In the future, what companies say, and how they say it, will mean a lot more to consumers and customers than how flashy a company tries to portray its product/service.

Q: Again, in your opinions, what are the biggest challenges that we are facing in today’s PR environment?

Like any business, public relations and communications will always face some type of challenge or shift in priorities and practices at various points. Given the fact that a major portion of our jobs are focused on finding those shifts for our organizations or clients before they take place, I really feel PR pros are in a good position to always face any challenge that currently stands before us, or we may find down the road, and tackle those challenges in a proactive and strategic manner.

One of the biggest challenge I think we will face in the coming year is continuing to blend traditional PR practices (media relations, speech writing, etc.) with social media PR practices (brand engagement, social media education/execution, etc.), particularly since more and more companies are beginning to realize that nearly all facets of their business will need to become fully integrated traditional and digital/social practices to meet the ever-changing needs of customers, investors and primary constituents. Our main focus, and the main test ahead of us, will be to be at the leading edge of this movement, as we must always keep in mind that one of our primary value points to our employers/clients is our ability to provide strategic counsel, and that can often only be done if we are looking out for their best interest a step or two ahead of where the business is currently placed. That means we have to be proactively practicing integrated communications techniques, while also counseling other departments within an organization on how they can best incorporate integrated techniques into their work to truly meet the consumer and B2B needs of the business.

Q: Ten years ago, a dream placement would’ve been the front page of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. While those are still ideal, how is the term “success” changing how you, as up-and-coming PR professionals, operate?

For many of us at the PRBC, success still incorporates major placements in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. I don’t think that will ever change, as both those publications are most likely always going to be business and industry movers and shakers. What is more important, though, to many of us, is that we are providing our organizations and clients with a much more rounded and integrated approach to communications counsel. That means, yes, getting our clients into The Times or The Journal when warranted, but also creating and executing terrific core message platforms and points of focus for key audiences, delivering those messages across multiple social and traditional platforms and key constituencies and ensuring that in the ever more litigious society we all live in now, our clients’ best business interests are always kept top-of-mind, and I, frankly, don’t believe a complete focus on traditional media relations will successfully accomplish all of that. In order to reach these goals, it takes a far more strategic and holistic approach to public relations, one that blends traditional PR strategic and tactics with today’s leading social and digital strategies, and that’s what many of us in PRBC are focused on.

Finally, random question: If somebody was recreating the movie “The Breakfast Club” using you guys as the cast, which actor would you want to play you? (doesn’t have to be the original actors.)

I’d go with Emilio Estevez. Of course, I’d want him to play me in his pre-“Mighty Ducks” days . . . those were just odd.

###