Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

We all love lists, especially “best of lists” related to our own profession. It is even better, of course, when people we know actually make the list—and when we make the list ourselves. A number of “best PR blogs” lists recently surfaced. InkyBee, Cision and CyberAlert all weighed in, tackling the ranking in different ways using a variety of criteria....

I believe in the premise of amazing, interesting, human, wacky, irreverent, or timely so much that I co-wrote a book in 2010 that is partially devoted to it—especially the human and timely components. But here’s the truth: I’ve worked with more than seven hundred companies as a marketing consultant, and I’ve come to realize that while “be amazing” can work, it’s also extraordinarily difficult.

Telling someone to be amazing is like telling someone to make a viral video. There’s no such thing as a “viral video.” There are videos that become viral, but they are few and far between. The marketing of “be amazing” is the marketing of the swing-for-the-fences home run hitter. There are two by-products of that approach: an occasional home run, and many strikeouts.

You can do better. You can break through the noise and the clutter and grab the attention of your customers by employing a different approach that is reliable, scalable, functional, and effective. It’s simply this: stop trying to be amazing and start being useful....