Author: Heather Sliwinski

PRSA National Leadership Opportunities – 2012 New Professionals Executive Committee

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2011 is winding down, and it’s time to choose a new Executive Committee for the New Professionals Section. This is a National leadership opportunity and great for any new professional looking to get more exposure in the industry and showcase their talents. There are many ways to get involved from writing articles for the newsletter or blog to serving on the Executive Committee.

Please fill out our online volunteer interest form, select the New Professionals Section from the drop-down list and you’re on your way. There are a number of questions that will help staff and Section volunteer leaders match your interests and availability with our opportunities, and we will be in contact after the deadline of Monday, Nov. 14.

The following Chair positions are open for the 2012 New Professionals Executive Committee:

  • Programming Chair (1)
  • Blog Co-Chair (1)
  • Newsletter Co-Chair (1)
  • Membership Outreach Co-Chair (2)
  • Mentoring Program Co-Chair (2)
  • PRSSA Liaison (1)

Please note you must be an active member of PRSA and the New Professionals Section to volunteer. For questions regarding Chair positions, feel free to contact this year’s Chair Sarah Siewert at sarah.siewert@kemperlesnik.com or Chair-Elect Leah Moon at moon.leah@gmail.com.

New Professionals Section Tweetchat—Promoting YOU: PR Tips for Networking, Landing a Job and Moving Up

Heather Sliwinski 1 Comment

Working in the public relations field, promoting our clients or organizations is the root of what we do. We leverage Twitter, blogs, networking and traditional media to garner the highest praise for our client. When it comes to promoting ourselves for a better position, a higher salary or maybe even our first job, new PR professionals may come up short since we’re used to working behind the scenes.

The PRSA New Professionals Section wants to answer those burning questions you have about how to network effectively, how to stand out in a saturated job candidate pool and how to continue progressing in your PR career. This Tuesday, October 25, the New Professionals Section will be hosting its first Tweetchat with the authors of our July Summer Book Club book, “Be Your Own Best Publicist: How to Use PR Techniques to Get Noticed, Get Hired and Get Rewarded at Work”. Jessica Kleiman and Meryl Weinsaft Cooper will be live Tweeting at 7:15 p.m. EST with the PRSA New Professionals Section.

How to Join the Conversation

We will be posing questions from the PRSA New Professionals Section handle, with Kleiman and Weinsaft Cooper providing insight from their handle. You can follow both @PRSANewPros and @BestPublicist on Twitter, or simply monitor the #npchat hashtag to see what the whole Twitterverse is saying.

Didn’t get a chance to read the book? No worries. Read Blog Co-Chair Diahnn Henderson’s discussion of the book to get a preview of the advice you’ll gain during the chat.

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from two experts in PR, publicity and personal branding and make yourself indispensable to your current or future employer! Follow #npchat with the New Pros on Tuesday night!

Our featured participants:

Jessica Kleiman is currently VP-public relations for Hearst Magazines, one of the world’s largest publishers of monthly magazines. A graduate of University of Michigan with a BA in Communication, she started her career at a magazine publicity firm and then served as director of PR at The Knot, a wedding media company. In 2011, Kleiman was nominated as “Publicist of the Year” by PR News.  She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and daughter and enjoys posting words she finds funny on Twitter, Facebook and her blog, Funny Word of the Day.

Meryl Weinsaft Cooper is a co-founder and principal of Allen/Cooper Enterprises, a marketing, exhibitions and events company with a focus on art and lifestyle brands.  Previously, as managing director  of the DeVries Public Relations‘ Home & Lifestyle division and as SVP-Partner at LaForce+Stevens, she led programs for a variety of hospitality and consumer brands including Veuve Clicquot, Belvedere Vodka, Pepperidge Farm, Samuel Adams Beer, New Amsterdam Gin and Ecco Domani Wines.  A graduate of Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications, her PR experience includes stints in art, music and entertainment, including time at the Screen Actors Guild’s New York office.  She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and dog, and spends her spare time writing and producing films as well as seeking out the best culinary, travel and art experiences, which she documents in her blog, Searching for Jake Ryan.

Both authors are contributing bloggers on Forbes.com’s Work in Progress section.

Getting the Most Out of PRSA International Conference: 4 Tips for New Pros

Heather Sliwinski 1 Comment

So, you’ve registered for the PRSA 2011 International Conference. Now what? All you need to do is pack and relax, right? Well, maybe. This year’s conference is going to rock! Most likely, you’ll leave with a few business cards in hand and, most importantly, the tools and knowledge necessary to take your career to the next level. But, there is much work to be done.

Here are a few tips for new PR pros to help get the most out of conference:

  • Plan your schedule– the International Conference is jam packed with sessions, and it may be hard to choose which ones to attend. By planning ahead, you’ll be able to enjoy the conference more. Look for sessions that relate to your everyday job and ones that might challenge you. As a new PR pro, you may want to consider sessions like “How to Pitch to Overworked Journalists and Harried Bloggers and Come Out Unscathed” or “The Personal Branding Project – Crafting Your Identity.” Sessions like these will help hone your craft and position you to the right audiences, especially if you are looking for a job.
  • Network, network, network – so much of what we do is about creating and retaining relationships with key media and stakeholders. It’s only fitting that in order to excel in this field, we need to make connections with other professionals. You never know where your next job offer will come from, and you never know who might become your mentor. So, don’t be shy–introduce yourself to someone new at each session you attend! A must-attend networking event is the opening-night reception hosted by PRSA Orlando (shameless plug). The reception will be a great way to kick off the conference with other industry professionals from across the country. Other must-attend events include the PRSA Connections Networking Luncheon and the PRSA and Inside PR Tweetup by the lazy river. (Yes. You read that right. There is a lazy river at the hotel. Let’s do this!) 
  • Enjoy Orlando – conference isn’t all work and no play. There will be plenty of time to soak up some sun or venture off property to explore the other side to Orlando.
  • Follow up with your connections – be sure to send personal notes to all the connections you make at conference. You’ll want to keep in touch. In fact, when you get a business card from someone, write a note on the back of the card about what you talked about or where you met them to help jog your memory later.

So, pack your bags and trek on down to Orlando. The awesomeness that is the PRSA International Conference starts in a few short days. Who’s ready for some PR fun in the sun? 

Christina Morton is on the PRSA Orlando Regional Chapter Host Committee. She is an account executive specializing in social media for CBR Public Relations in Maitland, Fla.

Professional Development Brown Bag: Exploring Post-Graduate Options in PR

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Is graduate school something you’ve considered? If so, will you choose MBA or Masters? What about getting your APR? Where does it all fit in? Do you start right after you graduate from college or after you’ve been working a couple years? For some it’s obvious, if you’re more in line with a business field, you’ll go for the MBA, but what about the rest of us? Our next Brown Bag, “Exploring Post-Graduate Options in Public Relations”, should help answer some of your questions!

We have the opportunity to hear from a panel of three guests: Arthur Yann (APR), Meg Kane (Masters) and Heather Read (MBA). Each of them comes from a different industry and will shed some light on their career and education path.

The Brown Bag will be held on Friday, September 23 from 2-3 pm. Remember, it’s free for PRSSA and New Pros Section members! Register here.

Arthur Yann, APR is vice president, public relations, at PRSA. In his 20+ years of New York agency experience, Yann has launched and revitalized consumer and business products, developed national and local media relations strategies, managed corporate reputations and crises and built brands. Yann holds a journalism degree from Ohio University.

Meg Kane is currently an account supervisor for Brian Communications in Philadelphia, Penn. She holds a Masters degree in Strategic Public Relations and Political Rhetoric from the University of Maryland. Kane has worked on the agency side of public relations for more than five years, working with brands such as Tastykake and the Philadelphia Orchestra Association. Additionally, Kane served as the director of public relations for Mount Saint Joseph Academy as well an adjunct professor of communication at La Salle University.

Heather Read, MBA is an award-winning specialist in strategic communications and has 14 years of experience in business-to-business and technology PR and marketing. Read is currently public affairs program manager at DuPont, managing social media as it relates to issues and crisis communications. Previously, Read was the senior director of communications at Afilias. She holds a MBA from Temple University’s Fox School of Business and and is a certified Six Sigma Green Belt.

Intro to Healthcare PR Part Two by Debbie Harvey, APR

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Let me start by saying that growing up, I never considered myself to be a science nerd.  Science was never really something around which I foresaw my adult life revolving.  As a student, it stood for spilled chemicals in laboratories, confounding physics equations and the dissection of poor, defenseless organisms.  However, a turning point that perhaps, looking back nearly 20 years later, drove me toward the scientific side of public relations was the day my best friend and I had to make up a high school biology class after hours.

The assignment wound up being a horrendous but hilarious experience—we had to dissect a fetal pig, separating and marking each organ.  While we vacillated between bouts of laughing and gagging, the lab door opened and in walked our admissions director—and actor Martin Short!  He was filming in New York City and looking at our school for his daughter at the time.  He took one look at our messy “operating table,” our filthy lab coats and our horrified faces and said, smirking, “You two aren’t enjoying this too much, I see,” to which I responded, “Imagine how this pig feels!”  I was already lobbying for the rights of the patient at a young age.

But I digress. Suffice to say, the 15-year-old me did not prophecy that the 30-(ahem)-something-year-old version would spend her days researching countless medical conditions, reading scientific abstracts, meeting with advocacy organizations, developing social media programs and media training healthcare professionals and patients.  But that’s what I do nearly every day after catching up on the morning’s news about this ever-evolving industry. And, admittedly, I still love it.  So long as no one hands me a scalpel and a pig.

How Do You Define Healthcare PR?

I’ve come to find throughout my career that healthcare PR is somewhat undefinable, which is what makes it undeniably exciting.  Healthcare is a niche that is constantly changing, given legal and regulatory challenges in spaces like social media, coupled with the powerful changes that healthcare reform has – and will continue to have – for patients, healthcare professionals, advocacy and payors.  For me, PR wasn’t a hard career choice, as it’s the perfect confluence of strategizing, socializing, researching and writing. In fact, I’m pretty sure it found me.  The healthcare focus, though, was a happy accident, one that started as just a job but wound up becoming a fulfilling career. 

Like nothing else, healthcare PR provides the satisfaction of knowing you are helping people at the end of the day: helping patients better understand what a diagnosis may mean; helping patients and loved ones manage through life’s health challenges with tools and resources to be better informed and empowered; helping discover ways to jumpstart and facilitate meaningful conversations between patients and healthcare professionals that may not have been happening. Some of the most moving moments in my career have been when I’ve helped coordinate patient speaking opportunities at client headquarters, bringing together employees across multiple disciplines to hear first-hand how their work positively impacts people’s lives.  It’s a gratifying feeling to know that an idea you had, a meeting to which you contributed or a program you built went to helping people get better and feel better at the end of the day.

Your Career Roadmap

As a new professional, you may occasionally (or often) feel like a sponge, looking to soak up as much information as you can.  Healthcare PR offers an opportunity to never lose that feeling: continuous environmental, economic and societal changes make healthcare PR a rewarding challenge, and I would encourage you to learn more about it.  At GolinHarris, we often say healthcare PR is the art and science of blending clinical understanding and knowledge with best practices of consumer marketing.  But regardless of what area of PR you may choose to pursue, seek to be challenged every day.  Read industry publications.  Get more involved with PRSA and network.  Find a mentor.  Ask questions.  Don’t balk at “no.”  Learn and adjust.  And above all, have a good time doing your job. 

Debbie HarveyDebbie Harvey, MS, APR, is a senior vice president in healthcare at GolinHarris.  She holds a master’s degree from Northwestern University in integrated marketing communications and is president-elect of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Chicago Chapter.  A Big Apple native, she has learned to love the Windy City nearly as much. Follow her on Twitter, connect with her on Facebook, or email her at dharvey@golinharris.com.