PR Manager’s Secret to Client and Team Success? Try RSOI!

Managing PR teams comes with its share of challenges.  You want your teams to have what they need to succeed – the information, resources and support of clients and management.  You want to make sure that they have the proper training and know-how, and are well steeped in PR best practices and the proscribed methods of the agency.

Above and beyond that, you want to get out of the way and let them do their jobs.  Nothing saps morality more quickly than constant status checks and endless reporting procedures.  The latter also adds a big time sink.

At the same time, as a manager you need to make sure that the teams are firing on all cylinders, and hitting the mark in terms of generating results.  You need information.

There is no better recipe for taking the temperature of clients than to connect with them live, in real time.  That means sitting in on the team calls, and often picking up the phone to speak with them in between.  This is not necessarily to check up on the PR team and foster some kind of nefarious back channel of communications.  It is to show that you are there, that you care and are adding value to the account.

Also, it is critical to have planning and review cycles, and work together with the team and client to develop a PR plan that lays out the anticipated program road map for the next 6 months, and sets measurable goals.

I have found that you can take the pulse of an account in just 3-5 minutes, by having the team deliver an oral RSOI report for each.  RSOI is an acronym (pr. "R-Soy") that stands for Results, Setbacks, Opportunities and Initiatives, as follows:

Results:  Is the team generating results that meet the client’s expectations?  What specific results have been delivered recently, and how do these mesh with goals defined in the PR plan?  This is arguably the most important part of the equation, because without results nothing else really matters.

Setbacks:  Any program sometimes suffers setbacks, and it is instructive to get the bad as well as the good on the table for discussion and planning.

Opportunities:  Looking ahead, what are the opportunities that the team can leverage to make some noise and advance the goals of the program?  This generally does not refer to one-off opportunities, but major trends or developments.  Is there big news from the client side on the horizon?  Has a top competitor gone belly up?  Did the Wall Street Journal or Gartner just identify a trend that indicates the need for your client’s solution?  It is important that your team be on the lookout for marketplace trends and related news developments that can be used to help move the ball forward.

Initiatives:  It is important to have a shared sense of mission with clients, and part of this means working together on initiatives towards goals.  In evaluating where the program has been and where it is going, it helps to understand what initiatives – e.g. projects, such as trade shows, tours, events  – are in the works, and what this means for how the team will be spending its time.

RSOI provides a window into the status and direction of accounts, and can be an indispensable tool for getting a good sense of what is happening across teams and clients.