Building S.M.A.R.T.E.R. Career Buzz

One of my favorite sayings is: Work Smarter, Not Harder.

Of course, this is not always so easy to follow when it comes to building your career buzz. That’s why one of the first questions I ask every client when we start working together is: What are your PR goals?

 

Over the years, I’ve discovered that for many of you, this is not an easy question to answer. And, it’s not your fault…because many of you simply don’t know what you don’t know.

 

To help, I want to introduce you to the S.M.A.R.T. way for setting your PR objectives. The acronym was introduced back in the 80’s as a way to set objectives and was used primarily in project management. Since then, a few different versions emerged and the acronym was even expanded to S.M.A.R.T.E.R.

Today, I think it’s completely relevant and applicable to help you create and implement a buzzworthy strategy to showcase your career successes.

Here’s the S.M.A.R.T.E.R. approach:

 

Specific

Get as specific as you can with what you want from your PR outreach. Whether you’re doing your own PR or working with a publicist, it’s important that everyone involved knows exactly what you’re trying to achieve. For example, if your goal is to gain more fans for your web series, determining exactly who these new potential fans are will help you figure out how to reach them. Try answering the questions: what do these fans read, where do they go for their news, do they hangout on social media sites, what radio stations do they listen to, etc. The answers to all of these questions can help you tailor your media list to reach the precise fans you hope to gain.

 

Measurable

It’s essential to define how you’re going to measure your progress in order to determine if your efforts are working. So, if your overall goal is to grow your fan base by 50%, what would it take to accomplish this? How would that look in terms of PR outreach and coverage? Does that mean you would need 2 articles written by a blogger + 1 article in a printed newspaper to reach enough potential fans? Or maybe 1 radio interview + 1 entertainment Trade article? Keep in mind the size and scope of each outlet’s audience in determining your expectations.

 

Actionable

Create a series of action steps that are achievable within a reasonable amount of time. If you’re trying to get 2 articles written by a blogger, you have to start by figuring out what the first few steps are and how long it should take you to finish them. For example, your first step might be to create a press release for distribution within the next 3 days. Then, do some research and determine exactly who you’re going to send your release to by the end of that same week; followed by creating a timeline plan for when to send out the release based on the launch date of your new series; and so on.

 

Realistic

It’s important to set realistic goals from the beginning based on the resources that are available to you. While you should stretch yourself to reach new heights, be careful not to set the bar so high that you become destined to fail. For our web series example, if a blogger covers your new web series the first week you launch it…keep in mind that they might not express any additional interest until season two is ready to kick-off. This is because a media outlet isn’t going to cover the same story twice. So, realizing that you can’t rely on the same outlets to cover your show each week means you’ll need to constantly be looking for new reporters to cover your project. This would also be an important factor in evaluating whether your overall goal is one you can achieve yourself or if you need to bring in additional help to assist you.

 

Time-Bound

Crafting a timeline and declaring a deadline is beneficial for achieving a goal. It good to determine several time-based goals, including what your objective is for tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. If you want to overall goal to be increase your web series fan base by 50%, you need to establish by when this is to be achieved. Also, try deciding what percentage of fans you expect to gain in the first week, second week, after one month and throughout the launch of the first season of episodes.

 

Evaluate and Reevaluate

At every step of the way, it is imperative to evaluate your intermediate goals in order to reevaluate your overall goal. Sometimes it’s not until we’re in the middle of a project that we realize if our objectives are realistic, obtainable, set to low or too high, unclear, etc. For this reason, it is important to constantly check in and gauge our efforts, understanding that objectives can be revised at any time.

 

Overall, if you take the time to create a S.M.A.R.T.E.R strategy for sharing your career successes, I bet you’ll see a noteworthy difference in the amount of buzz you build.

 

THANKS!