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A good first step is to define your professional objective and state the work functions you wish to perform in the job you acquire. You should match those work functions with your skills, abilities and interests. Then prepare a positioning statement that targets those work objectives. (See prior post “Do You Have Your Elevator Speech Ready?“)
Social Media is about more than just conversation. It’s about connecting, and these connections are driven by conversation.
This point has become clearer to me over the past six weeks as I’ve turned myself into a case study of the power of social media for building serious relationships.
It also provides fertile ground for comparison from experience, as happened last Thursday when I attended Coffee with crayon in the morning and the D.C. gathering of the Social Media Club in the evening (with lunch with fellow blogger Andrea Weckerle sandwiched between the two).
New marketing company crayon hosts a casual weekly gathering for new marketing types at their offices in Second Life. The meetu-p has been attracting good crowds and generated some interesting conversation in my first appearance this week.
The D.C. social media club is fairly new and this meeting was in the offices of Ogilvy Public Relations. About 20-30 people were present and the crowd of online geeks had a distinct slant towards PR/Marketing folk (an almost identical make up to crayon’s crowd).
For Forward Podcast 17 Terry Fallis, principal of Thornley-Fallis, discusses his agency’s increasing focus on social media and the new skills required in PR graduates.
Terry has had a distinguished career in Canadian politics and public relations and is one half of the fantastic Canadian podcast Inside PR. He has also just started podcasting his first novel ’The Best Laid Plans’.
This is a short 15 minute podcast but it serves as a good example of how PR firms are changing their business to include social media and what this new trend means for young PR’s.
Forward #17 - 'Focus on Social Media' with Terry Fallis [15:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2484)Don’t get me wrong, this is not going to be another jab at facebook. Personally I love it. I’m addicted to it for all of the silly reasons people use it: leaving fun messages for your friends, posting stupid pictures, starting and maintaining friendships, inside jokes, etc. And I can honestly also say that it has helped me keep in touch with people that I’m not sure I would have been able to as easily if it weren’t for this bit of social media.
But, facebook obviously has its downsides as we know, and Paull brought my attention to yet another. Groups on facebook are not helping pr’s cause for keeping its image clean.
When you search groups on facebook with the terms “public relations” you will find all kinds of stuff. There’s the always classy, “I make out In Public to Protest Other People Making Out in Public” group, or the sotally tober “Ain’t No Party Like a Duplex Party” group, and the, well just plain weird “Aaron Carter FREAKS me out!!!” group. Take your pick!
Todd And, a contributor to Forward Blog, has come up with an interesting list of the top 150 U.S. marketing blogs. It is Todd And’s Power 150.
The list comes about from a combination of objective and subjective methods that draw upon the following four factors: Google PageRank, Bloglines Subscribers, Technorati Ranking, and something called “Todd And Points”, which is essentially Todd’s personal opinion of the blog’s value.
According to Todd,
All four metrics were added to determine each blog’s total score. The total score carried the most weight in assigning the final Power 150 rank. If blogs shared the same final Power 150 rank, the suborder was determined by Todd And points. If Todd And points were the same, Technorati ranking points were compared – then Bloglines subscriber points and finally Google PageRank points.
Visit Todd’s blog for a more complete explanation. We’d like to note that Forward Blog is currently listed at #56 on the list. Thanks, Todd.
By the way, one of the reasons for this post is to test our new email notification system. Forward blog has about 150 email subscribers. However, the previous email notification plugin we were using for Forward was wrought with problems. So, we’ve changed to the Watershed Studio WordPress Email Notification Plugin.
Please do us a favor. If you received your notification of this post via email, please visit this post on the blog and comment. Actually, if you see this post and did not get a notification, please comment, too. We hope the problem is fixed. But, we won’t be sure until this post hits the blog. Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.
P.S. This isn’t Erin. I’m Robert. Don’t ask. I just needed to test the plugin. Erin was asleep. Shhhhh! She’ll likely not notice. 
Now, please say a prayer as I’m about to hit publish. Work plugin, work!
As a spin off to Leo Bottary’s great post about “Basic Assumptions and The News Media,” I’d like to pose the question “How do you avoid being misquoted?”
Like many PR folk, I’ve had clients who were afraid of media interviews - clients who absolutely despised the idea of talking “on record” with reporters. In my experience, it usually stemmed from a horrible misquote experience years back.
My solution was to revisit that exact bad experience with them, and explain how I would have managed the interview process differently - via key messages, talking slower when giving complex answers, reiterating numbers and messages s/he didn’t want misquoted, following up with clarification via email, etc.
Once the client realized just how much s/he (or their PR person) didn’t do to manage the interview the last time, s/he was willing to try it again with the added tactics for preventing misquotes.
So, what counsel do you give clients to prevent misquotes during the interview and, as the PR advisor, what steps can you take before and after the interview to assure the most accurate quote?
Technorati Tags: pr, public relations, media relations, media interviews
Warren Johnson of the Unsolicited Marketing Advice blog has written a great post that I wanted to pass along to our Forward readers. If you already graduated and could use some help settling into (or kicking off) your PR career, his tips are key. Even if you don’t graduate for another couple months (or years) — now is definitely the time to take the initiative to prepare yourself. I suggest using this as a checklist to help make sure you’re properly prepared.
Warren was gracious enough to allow me to include the post here in its entirety for your perusal. (The post can be found in its original location here.)
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Here are a few tips for finding your first job in public relations.
1. Know how to get your foot in the door
John January and Tug McTighe had a fairly long riff on job seeking tips for creative types (including copywriters, of course) in their August 7, 2006 edition of the American Copywriter podcast. Some key points:
Hello and happy New Year! At Forward, we’re kicking off the new year with some great news — we’re pleased to announce the addition of another member to our team. John Stauffer is coming on board as a principal contributor and will be publishing his first post to Forward soon. I’ve included his bio below.
John Stauffer graduated from the University of Maryland with a B.A. in Communications with a focus on Public Relations in 2005. As an undergrad, John worked for the school newspaper, The Diamondback, as an advertising representative and more recently as a media relations specialist for Berenson Communications.
He currently works for Stanton Communications, Inc , in Washington D.C., as an AAE with a focus on advertising and new social media as communications tool for a variety of clients.
John is a Web 2.0 enthusiast and is the author of the Young Washington D.C. PR Pros blog focusing on the intersection of new social media and Washington-based public relations. He also is a volunteer reporter for Street Sense, the Washington area non-profit bi-monthly newspaper.
Welcome, John! Looking forward to your contributions!
