{In this month’s guest post, Joe Flood seeks your opinion on non-profit, street solicited “guilt-payments.” Through a PR lens, I see street solicitation as a sure way to decrease the validity of your brand and strength of your reputation. What’s your take? Read Joe’s post and share your thoughts below!}

One of the annoyances of urban life is the proliferation of people asking for money. We’ve all seen them– homeless men parked outside of stores, cup of change jingling in one hand.

However, the streets of DC feature another group angling for cash. They’re well-scrubbed young folks and they cry, “Do you have a minute for the environment?” Or poverty. Or AIDS.

They position themselves on opposite ends of the block, so they can harangue pedestrians going by in both directions. Clipboards in hand, canned spiels at the ready, they’re from organizations like Greenpeace and the Save the Children.

But is this really a good way to market your organization? Greenpeace and Save the Children are large international organizations, with thousands of employees and budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Read More…

Let’s talk about what distinguishes an unstoppable PR “professional” from a PR “shockingly average-al.” Not be confused with the Three Signs of an Effective Flack, this is a conversation about work approach. I’ll start:

To a great flack, the state of your reputation is an intensely personal responsibility.

Be it day-to-day grunt work, shielding you from unimportant drama, proactive strategy or reactive crisis response–the minds of these folks are anchored to an unshakable urge to enhance your reputation AND keep you from damaging it. Read More…

I blog because it’s important to me that I share my passion for/expertise in reputation management in a public way. On the record. Out there for the world to critique and hold me accountable to.

Readers of this blog are chiefly nagged about four things:

1. You must take every opportunity to build and maintain your personal brand;
2. You are smart and talented.  You must be able to communicate that and advocate on your own behalf with gusto and confidence (a skill that Clay Shirky believes is more often utilized by men than women); Read More…

Image by World of Oddy via Flickr

So I got this thing from this professional person a few weeks back. This is going to be a vague story but I swear it has a point. It was a document I needed to be able to do my assigned task and several weeks went by before I received it.

When the glorious  .doc finally graced my inbox I immediately pounced — just sure it would be exactly what I needed.

And then WTF? happened.

Surely this is a draft. Surely I was sent an unfinished version. But no. This is the complete Margie-send-this-along-to-an-important-person final. I was stunned. Did the sender actually read this before he sent it out?

Here’s the deal. Everyone likes to say “the Devil is in the details” but, honey, that ain’t no Devil. That’s your reputation.

Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying you must be perfect.  Lord knows I misspell my own name from time to time or write something that just reads the wrong way. Mistakes happen, but mediocrity shouldn’t be par for your professional course.

Thankfully I had a fabulous (and very intense) boss early in my career. Her mantra was basically, “If they ask for summary, make it a memo. If they ask for a memo, make it a plan. If they ask for a PowerPoint, blow that presentation out of the water.”

Some folks call that a knowing how to “under promise and over deliver.” I call it creating for yourself a reputation for quality, meaningful and relevant work.

A half-hearted work approach produces half-hearted work product, which produces your reputation for shoddy half-ass work.  Better to blow a deadline and take your time crafting a thoughtful piece than cram some words on a page to check it off your list. Honestly, I’m such a list-checker-offer that I often struggle with that temptation. But I know and was taught better (thanks, SH!).

DEFY MEDIOCRITY.

Even if you don’t know what you are doing – figure it out. You are smart. You do good work. Don’t give folks a reason to believe otherwise because it’s really hard for them to forget.