The One Client Most PR Pros Have Been Ignoring

PR professionals are among the most skilled communicators in the world. They know how to craft a message, find the right platform, target the right audience, and turn a subject-matter expert into a recognized authority. They do it for CEOs, founders, and executives every day.

Then they go home, close their laptops, and leave their own LinkedIn profiles untouched for four months.

That contradiction was at the center of a recent episode of Cracking the Comms Code, where Proven Media Solutions founder Dustin Siggins sat down with Brendan Watts, Director of PR and Communications at Storyblok; Jacqueline Martinez, President and Chief Communications Officer at Digital HQ; and Noah Greenberg, CEO of Stacker. 

The topic was how PR professionals can build their personal brands and the uncomfortable finding was that most aren’t doing it.

The skills transfer perfectly

Jacqueline said it directly: “You already know what to do. You’ve just always done it for everybody else.”

Think about what a strong LinkedIn presence actually requires. A clear point of view. Consistent messaging. An understanding of your audience and what they want to hear. The ability to turn an insight or an experience into something worth reading. The discipline to show up regularly. PR professionals develop all of these skills on behalf of clients. Why not apply the same skills to their own career?

Dustin made a similar point from his own experience. When he transitioned from political journalism to running his own company, he had no idea what to post about. His father’s advice was simple: write things down throughout the day as they come to you, then once a week, sit down and pull out the best ones. That’s a content strategy. It’s also exactly what communicators do when they’re building a messaging calendar for a client.

What “building your brand” actually means

One point the panel was quick to correct: personal branding on LinkedIn is not self-promotion. 

Brendan’s most-engaged posts have nothing to do with his employer. They’re about how he thinks about his work – the process behind a campaign, an observation about the industry, a lesson from something that went sideways. “People sense they don’t want you to sell them,” he said. “But if I talk about how we planned a campaign rather than promoting it, it pops off.” Noah’s top-performing post of all time was a breakdown of how he’d approach getting a product’s first hundred customers – actionable, generous, no pitch attached.

PR professionals constantly write thought leadership for clients. They ghostwrite op-eds, develop executive voices, and shape how a CEO comes across in an interview. The same instincts apply on LinkedIn – the only difference is whose name goes on it.

Jacqueline’s framing was useful here. A client of hers in the public sector had built a consistent LinkedIn presence around his work and his thinking. When he walked into the governor’s office to meet the chief of staff for the first time, that chief of staff pulled out a book the client had recommended on LinkedIn weeks earlier. The client came back to Jacqueline, saying he was walking into rooms where his reputation preceded him. “We are warming these rooms for our clients,” she said. “Why wouldn’t we be warming these rooms for ourselves?”

The mechanics are the same, too

The tactical elements of LinkedIn success map almost exactly onto what communications professionals already practice.

The hook – the first two or three lines before someone hits “read more” – is a lede. Noah said it deserves as much attention as the rest of the post combined, because it determines whether 100 people see the content or 1,000. Any PR professional who has written a pitch email or a press release knows how to write a lede.

Commenting on other people’s posts is relationship-building and source cultivation. Jacqueline makes 10 to 15 substantive comments a day, not to drive traffic back to her own profile, but to stay connected, add value, and keep relationships warm. That’s account management. Noah noted that a thoughtful comment shows up in connections’ feeds – it’s essentially a post with lower stakes, and it’s a natural starting point for anyone not yet comfortable publishing original content.

Content planning is already in the toolkit. Brendan keeps a running text document – currently over 560 items – of observations, one-liners, and passing thoughts that he draws from when it’s time to post. It’s a source list. PR professionals maintain those for clients all the time.

Even the question of what to post answers itself through a PR lens. Dustin described a lobbyist whose organization had just secured a White House meeting on a low-profile bill. The instinct was to announce it. The better post, as Dustin reframed it, was: “Here are five things we did to get a White House meeting that had nothing to do with Venezuela, immigration, or government shutdowns.” Don’t just report the win. Explain the strategy behind it. That’s the difference between a press release and a story – and PR professionals know how to tell stories.

Why it matters now

The stakes are real and getting higher. Brendan is about to hire two PR professionals. Before he opens a job description, he’s already on LinkedIn. What he’s finding is that 95% of candidates have profiles that are effectively empty – recycled company posts, a CV-style about section, nothing that shows how they think. He said: “You’re being hired to do this for your execs and your company and immediately I have a bad taste in my mouth.”

Noah told us that for every hiring manager doing this consciously, there are probably a hundred doing it without realizing it. People posting regularly have built familiarity and credibility before the first conversation happens. The people who aren’t posting start at a disadvantage that they may not even know exists.

PR professionals have spent careers making other people visible, credible, and worth listening to. The tools are the same. The platform is the same. The only thing that needs to change is realizing who the client is: themselves. 

Catch the full conversation in the video below.