Insights from the other side
By Leo Valiquette
For the first time in almost eight years, there’s a different employer cited on my voice mail and e-mail and that comes as a far greater shock at this point than realizing my transition to the Dark Side is complete.
If you have had a chance to read Francis’s post below, you already know my background as a journalist, most recently as editor of the Ottawa Business Journal. Last week as I bid a fond farewell to the OBJ, my former colleagues teasingly referred to my career change as “The Quest for the Bling” with a mock front page that featured me as Frodo in a still from “Lord of the Rings.”
Well, I can’t say that income had nothing to do with my decision to take the leap, but of far greater importance was finding a shop with good people with whom I shared a common philosophy in terms of how PR should be done. The technology sector was obviously a key area of focus for the OBJ, but the paper is not a trade publication. How technology works, the minutiae of bells, whistles, and compatibilities, is not the focus of the paper’s coverage. What’s important is the business case for a particular product or technology. What need does it fill in the market? How does the company intend to exploit that need and build a sustainable stream of revenue? Those are the kinds of questions we wanted to explore at the OBJ.
When I started casting the net for career options, it didn’t take long to find kindred spirits at inmedia, where there is a similar emphasis on how clients’ stories are told. In fact, it was a breath of fresh air after enduring reams of poorly researched and ill-prepared pitches while working as a journalist. Nothing burned my bacon more than junior PR flacks who tripped through their delivery as if they there reading a script that had just been handed to them, or more seasoned professionals who should have known the OBJ was the wrong kind of media outlet for what they were peddling. My thought was, if you haven’t taken the time to figure these things out, why should I take the time to listen?
But a PR pro who understands the importance of personal, hands-on service is only half of the equation. The other is the company executive holding the purse strings. Working as a business journalist gave me the opportunity to speak with scores of talent managers, headhunters, venture capitalists and sales and marketing gurus about what it takes to build a strong and successful company. A company that doesn’t rely on the “wow factor” of a product’s bells and whistles to drive sales and realizes that to settle for being “local” rather than global is to settle for mediocrity. Some executives get it, some don’t, and others never will.
In my new role with inmedia, I look forward to working with the ones that do and winning converts from among the rest.
