Advice from the PR Pros: Kelly McGinnis

The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication has conducted oral history interviews with dozens of the nation’s most influential public relations practitioners. The Page Center website features a vast collection of transcripts and videos of these interviews. On this blog, we will highlight some of the advice given by professionals on attaining positions in the field of public relations.

Kelly McGinnis is vice president of global communications at Dell, Inc. She is responsible for managing Dell’s reputation and specializes in employee communications/internal relations, integrated marketing communications, and media relations. Before Dell, she served as general manager of Fleishman-Hilliard’s San Francisco office and led corporate communications for drugstore.com.

With countless options, PR pros must determine the best methods of communication

“There are so many opportunities, so many possibilities and so many threats on a daily basis, that really figuring out where we can have the biggest impact on the business and channel our resources against those activities—that’s the biggest challenge for us.”

“I think that what we’ve seen is just the proliferation of opportunities. There’s traditional media, there’s online media, there’s going directly to your customers, or being able to create your own media channels… “

“One of the things that’s really clear, is our leaders have seen the power of communications with their employees. Figuring out how you do that in an organization of the size and scale of Dell, and to do it in a way that’s still efficient and focused and can be driven against very specific results, because we’re a data driven organization.“

“First and foremost, all comes back to focus. And you have to keep enough room to experiment and learn along the way, but to make sure that we’re focused on the right things, that’s the hardest thing that we focus on.”