Guest article: Matt Baldwin, Coast Communications
Professional services firms are built around deadlines.
A pitch for a new piece of work will have a hard stop. Court proceedings are governed by strict timetables. Year-end tax deadlines are set in stone with penalties for late filing. And a client deal will take priority over pretty much everything.
Nobody would dream of missing those deadlines – that would likely be career limiting (or ending).
But lawyers and accountants are not the only ones governed by deadlines. Journalist deadlines are just as rigid.
And missing those deadlines has consequences – the worst being an unexpected blank page in a magazine or newspaper and a firm overlooked for future opportunities.
Bluntly, press deadlines deserve the same respect as those for clients.
But there are deadlines and deadlines.
We are approached almost daily by journalists looking for brief comment, typically at short notice with a deadline of just a couple of hours.
Here, journalists hedge their bets, approaching several firms or PRs for comment. The first to respond or the punchiest comment wins. One or two missed deadlines doesn’t really matter, although repeat offenders will find invites to contribute quickly drying up.
But when an article is commissioned, especially for a print magazine, the deadline is sacrosanct. Miss it, and it creates a whole world of pain.
Many of you will know that I edit the PM Forum’s magazine, PM. It has some 6,000 readers around the world all working in professional services marketing. It constantly surprises me just how many marketers agree to contribute a piece and a day or two before the deadline pull out (‘I’m just too busy’ is always to blame).
Now we know how busy firms and their marketing and BD teams are, and we also appreciate that sometimes the unexpected lands meaning everything else is dropped.
But it is the silence that is the most frustrating. Advance notification gives journalists (and PRs) the opportunity to make alternative arrangements, to perhaps extend the deadline.
And journalists can be surprising accommodating. With PM, I tend to over-commission and give marketers the opportunity to contribute to a later edition. Outside of the perhaps more sympathetic professional services marketing bubble, good PRs can often save the opportunity and renegotiate a deadline. We have managed to extend one deadline three times over six months.
Savvy PRs will always build some leeway with deadlines – the false deadline that is two or three days in advance of the final cut-off is well-worn. They will do everything in their power to make sure deadlines are not missed.
But every now and then, there is (with apologies to Douglas Adams) the ‘wooshing sound deadlines make as they go by’.
What matters is how those missed deadlines are managed. And that is about good communication – something PRs should be good at.
Matt Baldwin is the joint managing director of Coast, a media relations agency.