I love love.
According to the marketers of the world, Valentine’s Day makes February the month of love. I think that’s kind of silly… love is every month in my book. Now, it’s a great opportunity for spreading messages of love, so I’m all for it, but I think love should be part of every single thing we do. In fact, recently, one of my dearest friends pointed out that when you reverse the “I” and “o” in Olive, you get “I Love”. That made me pretty happy and slightly surprised almost 14 years into business, I was just seeing this amazing and very touching detail.
Love is something that runs through just about everything we do at Olive. Many people say there are only two forms of communication – love or fear. The easiest way to determine which one you are in is quite simple… anything based in love is positive and anything not is fear.
At Olive, when we are shining our brightest and doing what we do best, we are always communicating through love. Love is truly at the core of everything we do.
You might be thinking, how on earth is love part of everything we do. Here’s how:
Community and Clients:
Let’s start by talking about our love for our community and clients. We are so grateful we get to work with the clients we represent who are so committed to improving the lives of all those they serve. And, we are so lucky to be surrounded by and partnered up with people and businesses who share the same value. That’s love.
Mistakes Happen:
Another great example is what we do when mistakes happen. We always do our best to support one another both when we are winning and when mistakes happen too. We are human and things can’t always go right… we all need growth opportunities. When mistakes happen, it can be easy to slip into fear. Your mind might say things like: “Oh no! This is going to ruin everything.” So, it might take some training to remind yourself that everything always turned out okay before, it will probably be okay this time. Cancel culture has us on our tippy toes sometimes, but I really do believe that good will always prevail and if you are truly intending on good, it’s highly unlikely you will be cancelled over a mistake. Now, if that mistake illuminates something not so pretty that you have been hiding, then we are talking about a completely different subject.
Brainstorming
What other ways does love make its way into public relations? Well, every time we are brainstorming for our clients, the conversations often start with: “What would be the most joyful way for X to experience X?” That is completely loaded with love and joy. That’s why at Olive Public Relations, we love working with communities. Who wouldn’t love brainstorming how to make the holiday season the most magical experience ever and then make sure that everyone knows about it?
Love also makes its way into internal communications. When we set out to develop communication strategies, it’s almost always about identifying an organization’s values and then developing a strategy to ensure staff knows and understands those values through action. Very often, this has to do with ideas that make them feel individually special, acknowledged and supported, while also being part of a collective group doing good. Sometimes that comes in the form of corporate social responsibility campaigns, company picnics, team morale challenges, employee of the month campaigns, etc. There are so many ways to make people feel special within an organization.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility campaigns are another powerful way love runs through public relations. So often, our clients tell us what they are passionate about and our job is to create a partnership with a non-profit organization that helps them make a positive and direct impact on the topic for which they are passionate about. It’s truly one of our favorite parts of this work. We often survey organization employees to identify the causes most important to them, go out and research organizations that are on a mission to create solutions in those fields and then we develop a creative idea to make the biggest impact to support them. Once we present the ideas to the client, we get to see them through and magic happens! Because we are human, we can choose things that also inspire us and truly everyone wins, but especially the people or places served by the mission. Who doesn’t love to see important problems resolved? At Olive Public Relations, we are especially passionate about organizations that support children in need, animals and the environment, so you better believe our big hearts fill with love when our clients ask us to do this work!
Media Relations
This might come as a surprise to some people, but at Olive Public Relations, we do not “get” media coverage for our clients. We take a much more loving approach. We identify opportunities through our media contacts that will support them in achieving their goals and find creative ways for our clients to support those goals. It’s a little different. In fact, I was on an interview last week when the reporter said, please send me more news updates, I have to fill an interesting column every week and we would love to feature you more. In this case, he was talking about Olive Public Relations specifically, but that kind of conversation happens often with media. Above all, we see our role with media as a support to help illuminate all the good that is out there. They get great stories that impact their traffic numbers and delight their readers, our client gets an inspired placement and we are at our desk, sometimes teary-eyed, beaming with joy. Each time all of this comes together, we celebrate how this all worked out in favor of everyone involved… that’s love!
Celebrating
With campaigns that require high volume media coverage and big features in order to achieve great success and clients and stories worthy of big headlines, we celebrate a lot. We believe that celebrating is also a form of love! It holds a high vibration to invite opportunities in and to know you are worthy of receiving the opportunity that is elevating your brand. Celebration often includes champagne, but it might simply be acknowledgement and validation. I know I can speak for myself in saying that when things go as planned and everything lines up, I feel validated. Validation increases and amplifies my confidence and gives me the motivation to keep repeating that success.
So you see, love is a part of everything happening at Olive.