Last year was an interesting, challenging and rewarding year for the AHA team. Our small PR agency worked on some incredibly challenging, rewarding and important projects. We discovered things about ourselves as professionals and as people that have changed how we engage with the world. We learned new things. We bonded as a crew. We improved and evolved as an agency, as communications professionals and as human beings. And that means that 2013 is going to be even better.
In 2012, AHA was a very active PR agency. We had several very large, high-profile projects that kept us busy working 18-hour days, seven days a week, for months on end. If we weren’t working, we were sleeping. It was that busy. We are a small agency on purpose – and that means that something had to give (besides social activities and sleep – we were already giving those up!). Our blog and Fast Take Friday videos became causalities of how busy we were as an agency and how busy I was, since I write most of the blog posts and am the “face” of the Fast Take Friday videos.
I have to say that while I do regret that there wasn’t time to write the blog posts and produce the Fast Take Friday videos, I did learn a valuable lesson. I give some of our clients grief about not keeping up with their blog posts and, in the past, I haven’t given enough respect to the fact that we live in a busy world and sometimes there really isn’t enough time to do it all. That doesn’t mean it’s right to put a hold on your external communication outreach. It isn’t. It does mean that you need to find more realistic approaches and ways of creating the content and making sure you are consistent in your communication outreach. Ways to do this include having more than one blogger on your team, developing some blog posts ahead of time that can be used when you are busy, and making sure you don’t just “go away” and not explain that you are busy and will be back shortly.
I am thrilled to be back blogging and am looking forward to producing our first Fast Take Friday of 2013 this week – check back Friday morning for that. And – for those of you who took the time to email and call asking when the blog posts and Fast Take Fridays would be back – thank you. It’s always nice to know that we have a core community who count on us to connect with you.
From the entire AHA crew, we wish you a very happy, challenging, inspirational and successful 2013.