Last week, I blogged about the hidden costs of having an internal public relations staff rather than hiring a PR agency. Today I’d like to explain the advantages the agency PR team has over the internal PR staff:
- It’s politically sensitive, and can be hard for a company’s communications staff to argue and stand up for a position or strategy wh
en senior management doesn’t agree. After all, the jobs of the communications staff depend on the opinions of those senior managers. However, a PR agency team is accustomed to giving advice to senior management and knows how to make it heard, whether or not it will be popular. This point is especially important for overseas-based companies, which usually have more rigid layers of authority and strict protocols for junior people to communicate with senior people. - The internal staff member gets to know a lot about the company, much more than the PR firm. However, that has its minuses as well as its pluses. After a while, internal PR people often lose objectivity and can no longer realistically compare their company and its products with competitors.
- There’s usually pressure from sales and marketing staff, and sometimes from senior management, to communicate in an overly promotional way, rather than in a way that will be credible to journalists and the public. PR firms have enough distance to fight this in order to do what’s best for the company. It’s very hard for internal staff, especially junior people, to resist this pressure.
- The external team benefits from experience working with other clients, whether or not in the same industry. The agency team members bring valuable cross-fertilization of ideas and experience to clients. Meanwhile, the internal staff person is learning only from experience with one company.
Some companies are neither hiring an agency or an employee to do PR, but rather giving that responsibility to existing staff. Unless the person who is handed the responsibility is trained for it, this is generally a losing proposition. The role that PR plays for a company is becoming more complex by the day and requires expertise in developing strategic communications plans, working with traditional and online media and harnessing the power of online social media networks.
The Japanese have an expression, “Mochi wa mochi-ya,” which translates to, “Leave it to the experts.” Sometimes doing what you can pay outside experts for represents more of a loss of time on, and potential income from, the core business than it represents a savings on outside fees.
Lucy Siegel
The newsletter has been a pet project of mine, due to my years of journalism experience early in my career, and I have personally written a lot of the content and edited each issue. Our Bridge newsletter has focused on international communications. Past issues and articles about international communications are in our web site’s 
