A recent surveyfrom CareerCast.com has gotten our industry in quite a tizzy. The survey looked at over 200 different professions and came up with a list of the Ten Most Stressful Jobs. Public Relations Officer came in at #8. It’s also worth noting that PR pros, advertising execs and CEOs were the only three office jobs in the top ten, alongside firefighters and police officers, and pilots!

Being on this list reminds me of a directory my alma mater, Williams College, was on for the 100 Colleges with the most unattractive women. Although we were excited to be listed toward the bottom, it wasn’t that sweet to be included to begin with. I have a similar feeling here, but unlike during my college days, this situation encourages some critical thinking as to why we in the PR field are on this list, and what could be changed to get us off it.

Here is what CareerCast has to say as to why PR is stressful:

Stress Rank: 193
Stress Score: 78.523
Unemployment: Low*
Hours Per Day: 9
Time Pressure: High
Competition: Very High

Public relations specialists make speeches and give presentations, often in front of large crowds. Because it is a highly competitive field, specialists must work quickly and creatively to meet deadlines. In addition, some PR officers are required to interact with potentially hostile members of the media.

I’ve written about the latter part of this statement beforehand; the threat of public mockery and humiliation at the hands of a spiteful journalist if you make an honest, if not careless, mistake, can keep a PR pro up at night. The other criteria, however, seem fairly applicable to almost any client service position. Here are a few of my thoughts on the challenges we face in PR, and some ways to address them.

Measurement
Measurement can be challenging. As with many marketing communications practices, it is a crucial element to any program.  Budgets are tight and companies need to understand where their PR dollar is going. Measuring PR success is not always a simple equation, however; many of our clients want to be able to track sales leads and market impact. For some clients, success is more easily tracked- take the example of a consumer-downloaded product. A recent product launch that the Panda Security team of Bill Bourdon, Shannon Walsh, Jeana Tahnk and Amy Ziari managed resulted in 213 feature articles, 7,803 blog posts, 28,000 YouTube video views and 930 Tweets. This generated 200,000 visits to the product micro-site, all in a 24-hour period (go team!). The numbers were impressive, but they also drove some pretty significant business impact.

For other clients, measurement is more nuanced. An enterprise software sales cycle is very long, and leads are not always easily tracked, so direct sales impact from PR is not always a realistic benchmark. Sentiment and market position are also challenging, as they are subjective. Last year we were tasked with helping one of our clients transition their focus from one market to another. We created and executed our plan and generated some pretty impressive results in six months (100% increase in feature articles; 556 Blog posts; 721 Tweets), but these numbers alone don’t really address our larger objective- did we successfully transition the company’s perception?

How did we address it?
One of the things I am most proud of at the Bateman Group is how we gear every program toward having an impact on our clients’ businesses. Although big numbers are impressive, we really try to work with our clients to align our efforts with their business objectives and make sure that our writing, editorial and speaking campaigns target and resonate with their audience, whether it is a consumer or an enterprise architect. We collaborate on metrics will move the needle, and hold ourselves accountable to them. Sometimes this is sheer article volume or coverage in certain publications, other times it is increasing association with a given competitor or industry term.

We’ve developed a measurement system called Bateman Benchmarks. We feel our system does a pretty great job at objectively tracking our successes and generating un-biased, automated analysis to see how the media and industry’s perception changes due to our efforts. It is not perfect, but it has been incredibly useful in evaluating our practices to make sure we are approaching client work in the right way, and for our clients to demonstrate the impact of PR to the rest of the company. For the market transition example cited above, Bateman Benchmarks gave us a way to compare our client’s share of voice versus its competitors. We were able to evaluate how their association with their “new” industry changed during the six month timeframe, and measure the sentiment of the coverage. Coupled with the quantitative metrics, this gave us a really strong understanding of how we moved the needle on overall perception.

There are no guarantees.
I can’t tell you how many times I have patiently and persistently worked on securing a high-profile interview or panel only to have something happen at the last minute, dashing my hopes and dreams. I remember a recent situation where we created a beautiful pitch tied to a news event, identified the perfect target, secured interest and had an engaging briefing…and then the customer reference pulled out. On the one hand, it was a huge success for scoring the high profile interview; however since the reporter did not end up publishing a story, that success didn’t really translate to our end goal. Another example–for one of my consumer clients, I secured a spot in a major consumer magazine’s holiday gift guide, a huge sales  driver. Days before the issue was going to print, the editor let me know that they had to cut a few pages from the magazine due to a decline in ad sales, and my client’s product was on one of those pages. Bummer.

How do we address this?
This one isn’t as simple. The mercurial nature of the media (and, on occasion, the ad dollars that drive their publications) means that things happen that are beyond our control but that can affect our end result. To avoid similiar situations, we try to make sure that all of the moving parts are as foolproof and prepared as possible. References are confirmed, embargo dates are agreed upon, products are working, and spokespeople are prepped. The behind-the-scenes work that goes into pitching and coordinating an interview is extensive, but it’s not done in vain. And we also try to anticipate every potential problem and pre-emptively address them. For example, with my gift guide scenario, because that wasn’t my first rodeo, I knew I couldn’t put all of my eggs in that one basket. I had also focused on a few other higher-tier outlets and managed to secure placements in several other gift guides as well to soften the blow in case one fell through.

At the end of the day, some outcomes are simply impossible to avoid, even if you enter in with all of your Is dotted and your Ts crossed. The best that you can do is be as prepared as possible going into them, and be nimble enough to change course if obstacles arise. Despite the stress that these things can cause us, we try to minimize those stresses by being prepared—something most of us in this industry learn early on after a couple of painful mistakes.

These are just the realities of our industry (isn’t that a nicer way of saying stresses? I think so). Does PR belong on the most stressful careers list? Perhaps. But I would venture to guess that any profession involved in client (or public) service could lobby for a spot on this not-so-coveted list. Lastly, in terms of my college list, you know, I just did a quick Google search to find it and was unable to get past the “most attractive student body” listings. Maybe it was an urban legend created by some disgruntled alums? Sigh. One will never know.