Sarah Evans has an great post on the Top 4 skills all new PR professionals must have.  I really like the post - and every point rings true to me.  But I do want to add my 4 favorite skills to the list.  Yes - this is a far more snarky, sarcastic set of skills, but I think they have their validity.  Perhaps they are not really skills - but I think all of them can be learned, and therefore I see them as skills.  Here they are:

1. The ability to ignore everything you learned about PR or marketing in college. The tricky thing about this one is that you have to do it while at the same time beefing up your ability to embrace the most important thing that college taught you: that you should never stop learning, trying to learn, or questioning what you hear.  Two things happen when you get into PR: you realize that it is nothing like what you thought it would be, and that you’ve landed in the real classroom for your profession.  I’m not saying that your degree doesn’t matter, but you have to understand that the education you receive on the job is FAR more important than the basic foundation you received in college.
2. Killing your ego. The PR industry, for some reason, has and deals with a surprisingly large amount of egomaniacs.  The PR ones can generally find some level of success because other people find it easier to deal with them by giving them what they want.  But the egomaniacs, I imagine, will one day realize that they spent their lives in a career where they were given the opportunity to meet an enormous amount of really interesting, genuine, memorable people and they wasted all of it thinking about themselves.  More importantly, your going to run into a lot of situations where your ego is not as important as doing the job right.  You provide a service that is still hard to measure and easy to bash - so swallow your pride and choose your fights carefully.  Also - client service will always be an important part of the service you provide, no matter how great you think your results are.
3. Ditch digging. Seriously - if you haven’t done any manual labor, you will be hard-pressed to understand PR. It is a strange, strange profession.  Far more frequently than you would expect you will find yourself brainstorming some creative way to get a 300-pound buffet table from the car to your office lobby with minimal help, or building out a 300 page document at 2am with burning eyeballs and minimal help (because everyone else around you is doing the same exact thing).  If you have experience doing something that could, at times, be a bit repetitive or back-breaking in nature then you’ll understand why my buddy Josh Dilworth says that “PR Is a Blue-Collar Job”.  A lot of PR is about pure effort, and if you understand the jobs that require a strong back, then you will understand the unique way in which PR is “back-breaking.”
4. Honesty and Transparency. This is a big one and it’s not easy to discuss it briefly.  But here’s the short version:  Your client doesn’t want to be lied to, the media doesn’t want to be lied to and your colleagues don’t want to be lied to.  In fact, nobody wants to be lied to!  Yeah - this applies to every industry.  The difference in PR?  PR has a strange reputation - somewhat like lawyers - and people will, at first, assume you are a liar more often than they will assume that you will be truly honest.  The easiest way to be honest is to be yourself - and that is a notoriously hard skill to learn (or hold onto) for people who are under pressure and trying desperately to succeed in their careers.

So my suggested skills are nowhere near as technology or social media-centric as Sarah’s - and there’s a reason for that.  New PR, to me, is not only about the tools that are available to PR folks.  It’s primarily, I think, about the underlying cultural purpose and applications of those tools.  Maybe I’ll write a bit more on that for a post next week…