Soon, if not already, you’ll be reading about New Year’s resolutions and looking ahead to the coming year. Making resolutions and planning ahead for marketing and public relations professionals is a positive thing to do but only if you take the time to honestly review and critique the previous year.

Now is the perfect time to review your 2014 programs and projects and compare them to your plan at the outset (you had a plan, right? With measurable goals?) Don’t just list everything you did; instead, think back to what had an impact (or didn’t) and determine why.

Looking back should also go beyond just counting how many press releases you issued or Tweets made during the year. What impact did those initiatives really have? What were the outcomes? Did you affect sales? Increase the number of followers? Touch a new audience?

This is also a good time to take a look at your competition and how they performed during the year. Don’t fall into the trap that many do and downplay or be snarky about the competition. It doesn’t help and you can miss opportunities (or overlook something coming) if you don’t think the competition does as good, if not better, than your company.

Once you have this evaluation written down, it would be easy to craft a simple, one sentence branding message for your 2014. Keep it short, honest and commit it to memory. Then you will have a succulent, thoughtful answer to “how was your year?” rather than just saying “It was good!” This works well with the boss or at that New Years Eve event.

Take the time to review, be truthful and honest, dig deep into your results (and your competitors) and come up with a message to wrap up 2014!

RTC