How can you repackage messaging you don’t like?
PR pros often have to broadcast a message they find unpalatable but inescapable. Here’s how to hold your nose and hit “send” —and still keep your pride intact.
You’ve read the headline, so let’s be clear: This is not about handling a major ethical dilemma.
It’s not about someone wanting you to lie or be unethical. It’s not about matters where it’s necessary to quit your job or take a career-limiting stand.
On the contrary, in this case it’s about those times when, as a communications representative, you are required to send out a communiqué you just don’t like.
It may be totally ethical and fair. It may be reasonable to others, perhaps even to your targeted audience. You just don’t like the way the messaging is crafted or the way it is to be delivered.
Yet here you are: You’re the one charged with serving as the organization’s spokesperson or its public relations representative, and you must deliver that message the way someone else wants it.
If you’re a publicist, maybe you’ve been given a specific story or story angle you don’t like. Sure, if it were just you, you’d say it differently. Maybe you would do things differently. Yet, you’re part of an organization, a team. There is a chain of command, a decision-making process, and it was decided by someone else that this is how you are to say it.
How does this happen?
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