Over the years, I’ve found that working in teams, brainstorming with colleagues and having the occasional bitch session with my peers makes this challenging profession a little more bearable.

Unfortunately for many of us, we don’t work in large enough teams to make such collaborative moments possible. PR is often one of the smaller functions in a business. It’s not uncommon for PR to be handled internally at a company by one or two people, and even in agencies, most client teams have only a handful of people.

As a result, our thinking can get stale, leading to more frustration and potentially less PR success. That’s why I’m very happy to let you know that I’m launching a new webinar series, PR Power Boost. The first one will take place Monday, June 22 at 1pm ET/10am PT.

PR Power Boost is a 60-minute webinar to recharge your batteries and send you off with a raft of new ideas to accomplish your PR goals.

Here’s how it will work:

• A small group will meet on a conference call to get the latest PR tips and share ideas. To make it as high-value as possible, there will be no more than 20 participants per call.
• Everyone’s line will be live, so you can ask questions, get answers and offer ideas all throughout the call.
• I’ll facilitate and make sure everyone gets the answers they need.

I’m really excited to offer this new service to the PR community and I think it’s going to be a great success. I’m pricing it at a very reasonable $75 per session, and offering at introductory price for this first webinar of $60 (use the discount code BOOST).

I hope you will join us, and feel free to pass this post and the discount code around to your colleagues!

Dan is speaking this morning at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit, so I’ve got some fresh insights into his “secret sauce.”

First off, his team: while Abrams says he has a database of 2,500 journalists willing to work on one of his projects, Abrams says that he has only used a tiny fraction of those, and they were people he and his colleague, Rachel Sklar, have recruited.

And they’re not full-time working journalists, naturally — they are freelancers and others on the margins and gray areas between PR and media. This is actually not terribly new — I’ve known people who straddle the line for years.

My other question was clients — who has actually stepped up to take his counsel? Abrams admits that so far, he has gotten litigation crisis work, which makes sense, since he is a trained lawyer. Abrams joked that as a lawyer, journalist and PR person, he may be a “walking, breathing axis of evil.”

Aside from these nuggets, I would say that Abrams came across as a newbie communications professional who has some basic insights into business communications (e.g., “you’ve got to a build a tunnel of trust before the water can flow through it.”). Clearly, with his name recognition, he is getting and is going to get clients, but time will tell if he’s really got anything novel to offer.

There’s been plenty of handwringing and pundit-izing about Abrams’ plan, since it seems to flaunt one of the fundamental ethical barriers of journalism. My question, posed some months ago when Abrams announced his plan, was whether Abrams could actually deliver anything corporate chieftains might actually pay for, since journalists are not exactly known for their business acumen and shrewd business insights.

Abrams announced his business plan last November. It’s now April. So Dan? Got any clients? Got any case studies you’d care to share with the rest of us to give us an idea of how it’s going? Any lessons learned so far?

If I don’t hear from Dan via the web, I’ll try to ask him when he keynotes the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit in May.

This is the gist of the podcast interview I gave to Eric Schwartzman of iPressroom and the amazing On The Record: Online podcast series. If you’re a client, or an agency person, I recommend you give a listen.

If you can’t, here are a few nuggets:

• The most important questions to ask an agency: do you know our industry (and can you prove it) and will the senior people pitching the business work on my account?
• Garbage in, garbage out: or vice versa. Agency relationships aren’t turnkey. If you throw your business over the transom and expect results, you will be disappointed. Aside from the two questions above, the most important determinant of a successful agency relationship is how much time and energy the client puts into it, in terms of providing access and resources for the agency to work with.
• The next most important component of the relationship is accountability. Put what you want in the contract, then have simple ways to measure or judge whether it is happening. And make sure to have weekly check-in calls to monitor progress and keep things moving.

Hiring an agency and want some help sorting out your options? I’d be glad to help.