Public relations professionals are often asked to do more with less. This means more creativity and leveraging as many assets as we can. We should seek out and take advantage of every opportunity to immerse our clients into the public eye. Once we get our creative juices flowing, we realize there are a ton of opportunities out there—which sometimes can be a bit of a problem.
I often think back to my freshman year of college, when my PR professor was explaining to me what public relations is all about. “One day you will see everything, the whole world, from a PR perspective,” he said. I never really understood what he meant until my junior year when I started analyzing everything in the media from the standpoint of a public relations professional. And now, it’s hard to slow down my thinking.
Back to why this could be problematic: We need to remember to prioritize our thoughts and make connections between opportunities and strategies. Many of us have been there—after a brainstorming session, the whiteboard is cluttered with ideas and we might not know where to begin organizing those ideas.
Thanks to an article (http://brainzooming.com/strategic-connections-3-tips-for-identifying-more-opportunities/3289/) from Brainzooming, Mike Brown suggests three tips for identifying more opportunities by making strategic connections:
- When your strategic thinking is focused on multiple ideas, use techniques such as mind mapping, which help you to innovatively think through other possibilities the ideas suggest.
- As you consider multiple dimensions to your ideas, look for strategic relationships (i.e. things that matter) among them.
- The more relationships you can consider, the more options you have to find meaningful connections, which are compelling relative to your business objective.
So go ahead, let your thinking run wild, and use the three tips above to make sense of it all.
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