Add some humor to your PR efforts

Put a smile on people’s faces with public relations content.

Tell me if you haven’t heard this one before: Public relations is a humorless industry that always must have 100% serious content.

Okay, you gotta admit that’s a pretty lame joke. Public relations has changed; it’s no longer the world of very serious content. Jokes and humor in your public relations content are becoming more and more common. If you’re not adding some humor to your public relations, then you’re missing out.

Why add humor to your PR content? Having humor can be very effective. A good pun, a joke, or a clever or contrarian headline at the right time can draw a lot more views and interactions on content than if you were completely serious. A joke or funny headline can help you connect with your audience in a way that generic and serious content cannot. Humor can also make your content spread more than serious content would.

But, perhaps there is a way to skip the process. Can you have guaranteed earned media coverage?

Putting humor in your content can also be fun for your team as well. Having some fun with your team can help your overall productivity and team coordination.

Adding humor depends on the type of company you are.

Good idea: business to consumer

Could work depending on who you work with: business to business

A “maybe”: business to government

However, there’s always a time and place for humor. Humor is a bad idea in public relations for these situations:

• Crisis communications: Nobody’s going to take your crisis communications seriously if it’s tinged with humor.

• Major company announcements

Also, make sure your humor is not offensive or can be taken out of context as offensive. It’s a great idea to run humor you might be doing through people outside of your agency or department in case there could be something offensive you didn’t realize but others did. The fallout from a bad joke can seriously hurt your PR efforts, so it’s important to stay on top of making sure your humor won’t harm your company.

PR is a serious and stressful career, but that doesn’t mean your content always has to be serious. With humor, you can connect with audiences in a way that serious content cannot. However, humor isn’t the best for certain types of businesses. You also need to be careful about the humor you have and avoid creating content that could be seen as offensive or bad in or out of context.

Clients love Jacob’s speed. Jacob is an inbound marketing-certified webmaster. He earned an integrated communications degree from Florida State College at Jacksonville. Jacob joined Axia PR as an intern in August 2015 and earned his way into a critical role at our PR agency.