Everyone is circling back

Step 1 - Review your 2024 program and get feedback: Sit down with your team to review what worked and didn’t work from the past year’s program. Get feedback cross-functionally from your stakeholders on how well your PR / Comms team supported the business and where they’d like to see improvements or priorities shift in the future. These types of meetings are also super helpful for creating use cases for when stakeholders ask ‘why aren’t we doing XYZ’ in your 2025 plan. If it didn’t work, you have the proof-points to back your reasoning for leaving it out this year.

Step 2 - Set up cross-functional planning kickoffs: Have initial planning conversations with your Sales / Marketing / Events / Execs and EA stakeholders. Keep in mind that you may get pushback from teams on this one at first. Don’t let this step slip too late! In my experience, some teams can be a bit cagey with plans until they’ve been 100% baked / approved – which, if you ask me, makes no sense because you want to build WITH your cross-functional teams, and not pray that they all come together in the final stages. However, the trick for getting eyes on other teams’ plans early is by offering yours in early stages. By showcasing ideas, activities, storytelling themes, and campaigns in your plan’s draft / early stages, you’ll likely get a peak from your cross-functional counterparts' plans as well. Being a bit vulnerable and letting them in on the process invites them to do the same.

Step 3 - Create a strawman plan of ‘what you know to be true’: Here’s where you start to get everything down on paper on a timeline. This spans across activities that your company is owning (could be as high level as ‘company product launch in Q2 / May-ish’), in addition to other 3rd party events like CES and other events that take place around the same time every year. These activities – that can span across events (external and internal), product launches, company milestone targets, executive activities, etc. – will help you start to map out all the activities you have to amplify, in addition to identifying storytelling themes for each month / quarter and where you need to fill in moments where the company is too quiet.

Step 4 - Begin PR messaging & narrative development: This will likely be in progress long before step 4 comes into play, as it takes a village – marketing, execs, comms teams work together on this bad boy. However, now that you have your strawman, you can start to see how your messaging applies to your plans and start to plan accordingly around common themes & storylines you can highlight throughout the year.

Step 5 - Make some big bets: What creative or big comms ideas do you have for the company? Maybe it's a campaign or partnership with another big brand. It could also look like building / launching a research index that will fuel your narrative for the year. Maybe it’s a media roundtable. It’s up to you! But whatever it is, present it as early as you can so you can try to secure a budget from the money gods in your organization and / or secure the time on exec calendars.

Step 6 - Start story mapping: Identify the stories you want to tell this year and the components that are required to build them. Components can look like data, customer testimonials / use cases, exec / industry specialist, products, partnerships, etc. Identify what teams you need to support you to get these components. Map out when each story would be most relevant based on what you know to be true in your strawman.

Step 7 – Create a media map: Identify who you want to build relationships with and nurture existing relationships with across your media landscape. Research stories they’re currently telling. Connect with them to understand what their focus is for the future.

Step 8 – Do yourself a favor and do some Issues mapping: Plan for worse-case-scenarios by identifying where external hiccups could happen. How would you manage them? What stakeholders need to be informed and in what order? Is there any positioning you can build now and begin to work through as a team? What’s keeping your execs up at night? Write them all down and start thinking about them now.

Smart in Public ‘Episode 15: I ignored my brain’ – Katie Dufficy and I do a deep dive into these best practices listed above to help you build a communications plan with impact.

Cision’s 2025 PR and Comms Content Planning Calendar – Not something I’d leverage all the way through but can be a good place to start if you’re really in a bind for structural ideas

Your Toolkit for PR Success in 2025 - Some helpful tools / guidelines for building and measuring your PR programs

Sometimes you need other people to reflect for you, and this breakdown from Alex Daly and Ally Brushi does a great job at that. Read the lessons that 24 comms pros learned in 2024.

Hear me out… I realize this is probably the 98,786 prediction piece you’ve read, but this one just hits differently – particularly around the storyline around the shifting American dream and the narrative towards a chosen family (prediction #6).

The twists and turns of the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni dispute just keeps getting windier. At the end of the day, I think we can all agree that the PR industry is the greatest loser in this situation. I’m going to dive into this one a bit with Dufficy on the Smart in Public podcast later this month.

We all know that PR people are generally A LITTLE type A. If you’re a chronic multitasker 👋 or someone who tends to overcommit 👋 , you may find yourself reverting to those habits during the planning / holiday / New Year New Me season. This article was a good read for me, and hopefully will help bring you some mindful perspectives about burnout and how to manage all of your go-getter momentum in the New Year.

CES in Las Vegas from Tuesday, Jan 7-Friday Jan 10: Thoughts and prayers to everyone in the Comms and Journalism community headed to CES next week! Be sure to remember your AI drinking game BINGO card!

World Economic Forum in Davos from Jan 20 - 23: The World Economic Forum engages political, business, academic, civil society and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. If you’re in the comms world and attending this event I’m going to guess you’re likely in exec comms, partner programs, or events. In all seriousness though, I always find the news and thought leadership pieces interesting off the back of this event. I’d also challenge you to try to get your executive to travel to the event via commercial airline to avoid headlines like these.

Sundance Film Festival, Park City Utah, Jan 23 - Feb 2: The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It’s the largest independent film festival in the United States, and takes place every January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at Sundance Resort (a ski resort near Provo, Utah), and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers.

The Oscars, Los Angeles, March 2: I will be watching with one eye on the TV and one eye on TikTok to help funnier people form an opinion for me. Special mention to all the PR peeps who work this event each year – we see you in all black speedwalking in the background and we appreciate you.

MWC Barcelona / Mobile World Congress, Barcelona Spain, Monday, March 3 - Thursday March 6: MWC Barcelona (formerly but still commonly referred to as Mobile World Congress) is an annual trade show dedicated to the mobile communications industry. Don’t you dare come back from this trip saying ‘Ba-tha-leona’, because that’s my thing. 👼

SXSW, Austin, TX, March 7-16: SXSW is probably my favorite conference of the year. It pulls out all the stops: Celebs, Startups, founders, VCs, Music EVERYWHERE, Movies, chips and guac. It’s hard to get a speaking spot without a sponsorship or a celeb, but going for the connections you can make alone (in my opinion) is worth the ticket.

Game Developers Conference, San Francisco CA, March 17-2: The world’s premier event for developers who make games. It’s a surprisingly newsy event given the chipset angle that can come into play.