Great Relationships Are in Your Future

Confucius wrote a lot of cookie fortunes before he died. The one you rarely get after your Kung Pao feast regards his most fundamental principle: reciprocity.

Effective relationships are all about reciprocity – both parties give a little to get a little. If one person gives a lot but gets little in return, the relationship falls out of balance. It becomes exploitive. We have friends like this – the high school sweetheart with a knack for calling just in time for a favor, the college roommate interested in you primarily as a crutch during emotional distress, the sibling or cousin who pops up only in financial crisis.

Just as you don’t appreciate being treated that way – and recognize it when it’s happening – our colleagues in the news media don’t appreciate it if you show up only when you need a story for a client. Journalists take their jobs seriously, and deserve respect for their unique perspectives:

• Information is an important – if not the primary – contributor to people’s personal, professional, and economic well being.

• Information is fundamentally different from news, and journalists are an important – if not the primary – gatekeeper, filtering information into news so the public does not drown in vast, uncharted seas of miscellany.

• News publications – print, online, broadcast – are charged with a unique obligation to serve the public by distinguishing information from news, and reporting it without the gloss or spin that we communications professionals impose on it.

Some practitioners of public relations try to invent news by hoarding mere information on a topic or client. Because information and news both yearn to be free, journalists perceive a gross violation of this freedom when flacks limit the supply of information to create demand for news.

Fortunately, a few simple investments can make our relationships with reporters and editors both more reciprocal and rewarding:

• When you read an interesting or valuable article – whether it’s about your client or not – email the reporter and tell him or her why you thought it was great. Everyone needs positive feedback, and reporters get it very rarely.

• If you know the reporter’s editor, email your praise to the editor and cc: or bcc: the reporter.

• When you read an article that is particularly relevant or insightful about your client’s industry (not just your client), email it (or, a summary and URL) to the reporters, editors, and analysts on your client’s lists with a brief note. Journalists are buried in releases and never have time to read their own publications, much less the other publications in the industry.

• Consider recommending that your clients create and distribute to media and analysts a monthly or quarterly digest of the most interesting and relevant industry clips. These are the kinds of value-adding documents that get distributed, filed, and used later, and help establish Springbok not just as a source about our clients, but about the entire industry.

• If you encounter an interesting story or angle that’s unrelated to your clients, or Springbok’s, let an interested reporter know about it. There’s no easier or more powerful way to let a journalist know you’re more than just a flack than to tell the reporter you understand and care about what he or she covers even when it doesn’t benefit your client.

Take a moment to recall how you felt the first time it dawned on you that your significant other wasn’t reciprocating the efforts or feelings you were plunging into the relationship. Unless you’ve made an effort to develop a reciprocal relationship with the journalists and analysts you work with, you risk bestowing that same feeling on them every time you send a news release. Confucius say, “Practice a little reciprocity in your relationships, and you’ll enjoy the fortunes bestowed on you.”