Less than a fortnight until Christmas. What a terrifying and wonderful thought. Two weeks from now, you will be half a stone heavier, reluctantly wearing your new presents like that glittery pompom hat and probably foggy-headed with hangover, but at least you will be away from nagging client emails. So to ease yourself into the binging season, let’s look at ways to make your life in PR easier for the rest of the month, so you can concentrate on fighting over discounted prosecco and hissing at your nephew to pipe down during the Downton Abbey special.
Pre-schedule tweets for Christmas bliss
Schedule your social media activity well in advance so you can leave the office on time on Christmas Eve. It’s even worth creating a rota based on when your colleagues are taking holiday, because while it’s definitely fine for a company Twitter page to go quiet over Christmas, there may still be reactive tweets required, for example as a result of breaking news. The same colleagues could be on standby for taking calls or other inbound enquiries so opportunities don’t slip through the net. Besides, being on standby is usually just code for eating mince pies and not having to do any work.
Set the elves to work
Among those responsible for pitching to journalists, have a coverage competition. Whoever garners the most press coverage from their campaign is the winner and gets a prize like an extra day’s holiday added next year, and the loser is awarded a stalk of brussel sprouts. If you’re an employer, you’ll find there’s nothing like the threat of embarrassment or the possibility of more holiday to motivate staff at Christmas. Or at least, it might stop them resting on their laurels and trying to slope off down the pub at 3pm every weekday in December.
Send out your thinkpieces
Newspapers and digital publications are crying out for more content around Christmas. Journalists are actually humans rather than cyborgs or customer relationship management (CRM) systems, so they also require recuperation time over the festive season, so if you or your client can provide ready-made articles you’ll both win. If it’s evergreen content which won’t become dated quickly, it could work for any time over the holidays.
Christmas spirit
We work in one of the few industries that still puts aside quite a lot of money pretty much exclusively for booze, and we should certainly get into the Christmas spirit. Don’t invite journalists to your Christmas party, or if you do, don’t have eggnog-downing competitions with them and end up crying, vomiting and admitting you hate your clients. Avoid live-tweeting the Christmas party at any cost and make sure you’re fully prepared for the unrelenting PR party season.
Trend predictions
As part of bedding down for the winter hibernation period, wild journalists build a nest of corporate trend predictions, store up their energy and avoid having to go and dig for juicy stories every day in December. This is great for PR people. We can pitch plenty of comments on what to expect in the coming year. Note that bolder predictions stand more chance of being included in trend prediction roundups, though a rather dry ‘2015 will be the same old shite as this year’ could work well depending where you’re pitching.
Christmas-themed stories
Even in the final run up to the 25th, there are opportunities to jump on the festive bandwagon and shoehorn your client into a story. There will inevitably still be journalists sending out urgent requests for gift guide suggestions, so make sure you have an email draft ready to copy, paste and send in the first two minutes after receiving the email.
Charity at Christmas
Is your company involved in any charitable events or donations around Christmas? Festive cheer puts people in the right mood for acts of kindness, both internally and as part of wider PR efforts. Helping children’s wishes come true tends to generate good PR. However, only go down this route if it’s really something that’s representative of your brand and its values; if it looks like you’re just trying to curry favour it undermines the good karma you spread.
Blitz the admin
If you’re not taking off the days around Christmas – and we’re lucky this year to have a long Christmas weekend – it’s the perfect time for playing catch up. Whether it’s coverage presentations for future use, updating notes about your media contacts, basically all the things you’d been avoiding, now is the time to get them out of the way. Then you can return in January with a much healthier inbox and hopefully a brief to-do list. The office is gloriously quiet if you go in during the holidays, which is great for just working in a relaxed environment. Or you could just faff around on Elf Yourself and get paid for being in the office.
Look at customer habits
If you have any data as to when your product or client’s product sells the most, consider scheduling social media activity to target people accordingly. Equally, for a news story suitable for online publications, you could set an embargo to lift at a peak online shopping time so that customers can act on the news. There are no guarantees, but you need to give people every opportunity to buy your product (or client’s product), so don’t forget to include the URL when pitching to journalists.
Celebrate the year’s achievements
Whether you’re the employee or employer, the end of the year is a good time for reflecting on new client wins, biggest pieces of coverage and more. Hold a meeting to share the good news, or incorporate it into a speech at the Christmas lunch. Write a version of it that’s suitable for public consumption and share it as a blogpost – if you’re all good at what you do, tell people, it could lead to new business leads. Best of all, it validates what we do and why we work so hard – it makes us feel good.
More like this:
How PRs can survive the Christmas party season: dos and don’ts
PR jargon: the 10 most overused terms
Not every PR plan needs social media
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