17. What are the major challenges faced by Public Relations professionals?
The major challenges faced by Public Relations professionals are as follows:
i.) Focusing on multiple channels of communication to reach the right audience is difficult.
ii.) Also, it is difficult to measure the impact of social media.
iii.) With the use of Internet, anyone can get the message in seconds which results in a lot of exaggerated and untrue claims which hurt the creditability of promotions that utilize PR.
iv.) At times, it may get difficult to get hold of the editors.
v.) Undesired comments from internal staff or aggrieved stakeholders can get damaging and difficult to handle.
18. How will you handle negative publicity?
With this question, the interviewer is trying to understand how you will handle this type of situation and if you will be able to make up for the business at bad times.
If you think that a bad publicity will never happen to you, you may be wrong. By being prepared you can resolve the issues before it becomes a problem.
To answer this question you can say: "To handle a bad publicity, clear communication and honesty is the key. In such a situation it is important that no undesired comment goes out from you. This means that you need to keep the stakeholders informed and ask the colleagues and co-workers not to speak to the press or not to answer direct questions from the journalists or not make a comment on social media.
Plan and prepare what needs to be said & let it go out through the right channel.
A quick action, apology, making required changes and explaining how will y
you do the best in future and avoid this type of a situation can help tremendously.”
19. Tell us about the time when your PR communications were misunderstood? How did you handle that?
As a PR person, you will come across situations where the information you want to share may not be interpreted the same way you wanted it to be by your audience. The interviewer would like to know if you have come across this type of situation and how did you handle it.
To answer this question you can say something like "Once I was working on a twitter campaign which I noticed was going against me. After understanding, I tweeted my version of the story. I also contacted the editors and asked them if any wrong information has been published. I checked all the facts and politely asked for a public retraction. I also posted on my other social media channels my version of story to clear the confusion and misconceptions."
20. What are the skills required for Public Relations professionals?
A public relation professional needs to the following skills:
i.) Excellent oral and written communication skills.
ii.) Good interpersonal skills.
iii.) Presence of mind.
iv.) Presentation and IT skills.
v.) Effective relationship building skills.
vi.) Ability to plan and prioritize work.
vii.) Creativity.
viii.) Excellent research skills.
ix.) Confident personality.
21. Which social media optimization tools do you use?
With this question, the interviewer is trying to understand which platforms you are currently using. These tools make it easy to monitor and post on regular basis. Some of the tools are:
i.) Vitrue
ii.) Co-Tweet
iii.) Hootsuite
iv.) Postling
v.) Feedly
vi.) Sprout Social
22. When responding to media and public inquiries, what question do you find most difficult to answer?
As a PR person, you have to answer difficult media questions. You need to be well prepared to answer these questions without falling in any trouble. You need to spot strategies and prepare well in advance which will help you to identify the tricky questions, the reporters may ask you. It is also better to think like the reporter.
To answer this question you may say that: "There are no difficult questions as such but questions about competitor's flaws can be very tempting but I ensure that I have it in my mind that this is my interview and not competitors. I give importance to our company's strength rather than commenting on other companies. Also, the reporters have the habit of asking the same question in different ways which is annoying but I make sure I handle them politely.
If at all I am not able to answer the question I take a moment and let them know I will get back to them once I have all the relevant information."
