The most important PR skill you’ll ever learn… or seem to learn?

At drinks with my old boss from a past agency, we got round to a particularly riveting topic – the most important skill in tech PR. While it might sound incredibly dull and in no way a normal conversation to have after a long week, it actually proved to be a huge source of debate.

Some more intelligent people in the room suggested ‘ability to understand IT’, ‘ability to manage a load of demanding clients and ‘ability to not sound like a robot on the phone’ as three core skills. I’d agree with all of those – all equally important and I’d put all of them on the PR curriculum… if there was one. Wouldn’t that be awesome!

But my old boss shook his head, and said ‘No – it’s the ability to PR yourself. You don’t need any of those skills if you can convince everyone else you have them.’ We all laughed but he persisted that the ability to make yourself sound like you’re in control and know your stuff is more important than actually being able to do any of that.

B2B tech PR is known as an area of PR where you genuinely need to know your stuff. If you don’t then certain tech journos will find you, and they will kill you. No, they won’t do that – but there will be some damn awkward phone pitches no matter who you’re talking to. But the ‘PRing yourself’ comment made me wonder – do we need to know, or do we just need to appear as if we know?

For my own sanity, I feel that I do need to know. This is largely driven by paranoia that a client will find me out if I don’t have degree-level knowledge of cloud computing, etc. But, thinking back to before I joined Spark (I hastily add), I worked with many PRs who I saw get fantastic coverage and make clients love them. But they genuinely didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I remember watching someone sell-in a story about augmented reality and the guy had to Google it whilst on the phone to the FT in order to find out what he was selling in.

He secured that opportunity – and drinks with the journalist who ran a great piece 2 weeks later. Whilst I wouldn’t recommend it and it’s not an approach I’d go for, it does make me wonder what is more important - knowledge or the ability to appear knowledgeable?