March 2015 #NPPRSA Twitter Chat Highlights: Preparing for a Crisis

March 23, 2015Ashleigh Mavros 1 Comment

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the March #NPPRSA Twitter chat as we discussed crisis communications–how to prepare and how to react. We would especially like to thank Jonathan Bernstein, President of Bernstein Crisis Management.

Join us again on April 15 for our next #NPPRSA chat and stay up-to-date with PRSA New Professionals on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Review highlights of the chat below. What did you learn from the March chat? How can you prepare for your brand’s vulnerabilities before a crisis? What can you do to minimize damage once a crisis hits?

You can receive FREE New Professionals Section membership for PRSA throughout March!

Lauren Rosenbaum is the PRSA New Professionals Social Media Co-Chair and Co-Founder of Soversity, a public relations and digital marketing company. You can connect with her on Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Meet Your 2015 New Pros Executive Committee

March 12, 2015March 17, 2015Ashleigh Mavros Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe we’re already a couple months into the year, but the Executive Committee has already been brainstorming and implementing ways to serve PRSA New Pros members throughout the year.

With a mix of returning and new chairs, we’re excited for what 2015 has in store. Read on to learn more about each person on the committee and feel free to get in touch. While you’re at it, don’t forget to join in our monthly Twitter chats and register for PRSA ICON in November. Click here to contact the New Pros Executive Committee members directly.

Nick Lucido – Section Chair
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Work: Account Supervisor, Edelman Digital
Education: Michigan State University: B.A. in Advertising with specialization in Public Relations, B.A. in Public Administration
How PRSA benefits me: Now in my 5th year of membership, PRSA has helped me expand my network and meet incredible professionals from across the country and world. Working with my fellow New Professions Section committee members has been a really rewarding experience and helped me make the transition from student to professional.
Fun fact: I moved to Brazil 10 months ago and since I have arrived, I’ve experienced the World Cup hosted in this country, protests against the Cup, a water crisis, a presidential election and a scandal affecting Brazil’s largest company and political party. It’s been an interesting year!

Jessica Noonan – Section Liaison and 2016 Chair-elect
Location: New York, NY
Work: Associate, Burson-Marsteller
Education: American University: B.S. in Business Administration and B.A. in Public Communication
How PRSA benefits me: Since I was a student PRSA has been a go-to resource for the standards of the PR industry. By being an active member of the society I’ve had numerous opportunities to network with some of the stars of our industry.
Fun fact: PR runs in my family – my parents met working in PR nearly 30 years ago!

Amy Bishop – Programming Co-chair
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Work: Senior Digital PR Strategist, DigitalRelevance
Education: Indiana University: B.A. in Journalism
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA helps me take an active role in national industry discussions and also allows me to connect with my local PR community.
Fun fact: I love dubstep music, naps and strategy board games.

Brian Price – Programing Co-chair
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Work: Assistant Account Executive, Edelman
Education: Northern Michigan University: B.S. in Communication Studies, Graduate Certificate in Public Management
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA benefits me through providing a network of peers and seasoned professionals to work with and guide me as I begin my career. It’s also given me opportunities to grow through leadership opportunities at my Chapter and insight into the profession.
Fun fact: I’ve never been one for caffeinated drinks in the morning or for energy.

Stephanie Vermillion – Blog Co-chair
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Work: Senior Account Executive, Wordsworth Communications
Education: Boston University: M.S. in Public Relations; University of Dayton: B.A. in Journalism
How PRSA benefits me: I love having the chance to meet so many like-minded people both locally and nationally. I’m also a big fan of the ongoing education resources, because that’s critical to ensure we’re all staying at the top of our game.
Fun fact: Outside of work, running is one of my favorite hobbies. I just completed my fifth marathon, the Disney World Marathon, in January 2015.

Ashleigh Mavros – Blog co-chair
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Work: Account Associate, Fahlgren Mortine
Education: Ohio University: B.S. in Journalism
How PRSA benefits me: I couldn’t imagine making the transition from student to professional without PRSA. The organization creates a web of guidance, support and continuous learning to help you discover your aspirations and abilities.
Fun fact: I grew up in a small farm town where I was fair queen and showed heifers for 4H; I definitely enjoy the change to the city life in Columbus!

Erica Brown – Social Media Co-chair
Location: Sacramento, California
Work: Account Associate, AugustineIdeas
Education: Sacramento State: B.A. in Communications/Public Relations
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA benefits me by continuing to learn more about the field of communications as well as networking with professionals not only in Sacramento but across the nation and the world.
Fun fact: I don’t drink coffee, my favorite drink to get is an iced soy chai tea latte!

Lauren Loxterman – Social Media Co-chair
Location: Houston, Texas
Work: Founder, Soversity
Education: University of Houston: B.A. in Communications, Public Relations
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA has given me a place to grow. I can learn from industry vets and not be afraid to fail because of the support I receive from the society.
Fun fact: I’ve recently been getting back into film acting.

Simon Oh – Newsletter Co-chair
Location: Campbell, California (San Francisco Bay Area)
Education: San Jose State University: M.S. in Transportation Management (in progress); Cal State Fullerton: B.A. in Communications, Public Relations
How PRSA benefits me: Connecting with and learning from fellow PR professionals about how I can succeed as an emerging professional myself.
Fun fact: Fan of tacos, light rail and Simpsons references (“I was saying Boo-urns”)

Hanna Porterfield – Newsletter Co-chair
Location: New York, New York
Work: Assistant Account Executive, Development Counsellors International (DCI)
Education: Michigan State University: B.A. Advertising, Specialization in Public Relations
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA has allowed me to connect and relate with public relations professionals working in a variety of industries. Not only that, but I continually gain leadership experience, stay up on industry news and am making friends around the country.
Fun fact: I ran my first sprint-distance triathlon in 2014 and am obsessed with spin class.

JR Rochester – Membership Co-chair
Location: Charlotte, North Carolina
Work: Digital Media Strategist, AAA Carolinas
Education: East Carolina University: B.S. in Public Relations & Interpersonal/Organizational Communications
PRSA Benefits: PRSA has been instrumental in my success as a new professional in and out of the office. It has given me leadership development, professional development and personal life long friends.
Interesting Fact: I was in the United States Army for 11 years and I attended Saddam Hussein’s trial.

Hilary Jurinak – Membership Co-chair
Location: Arlington Heights, Illinois
Work: Communications Coordinator, Binny’s Beverage Depot
Education: Columbia College Chicago: B.A. in Marketing Communications
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA provides countless education and networking opportunities.
Fun fact: Midwestern girl addicted to exploring Chicago, networking and enjoying craft beer.

Mike DeFilippis – Mentorship Chair
Location: Washington, D.C.
Work: Assistant Project Manager, Direct Impact (subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller)
Education: Boston University: B.S. in Mass Communication with a concentration in Public Relations
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA is a group where I can learn more about the profession from seasoned executives, as well as develop my career alongside like-minded new professionals;
Fun fact: I’m an Eagle Scout.

Lauren Gray – PRSSA Liaison
Location: Stamford, Connecticut
Company: Project Manager,The Visual Brand
Education: Western Carolina University: B.A. in Communications with a concentration in Public Relations
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA benefits me with networking opportunities that have brought me great friends and connections and by allowing me to continue to learn and grow in various leadership opportunities and from various conferences.
Fun fact: I’ve been to 29 states and 8 countries and plan to add more this year!

Henry Cervera – PRSSA Liaison
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Work: Independent Practitioner for small business owners
Education: Utah Valley University: Communication with an emphasis in Public Relations, currently finishing a degree in Business Management
How PRSA benefits me: PRSA has given me access to an abundant amount of learning channels (on-demand webinars, case studies, the Edge and the PRSay blogs, that help me stay up to date with the latest trends and news of our industry. As a PRSSA member, I started building my professional network. Now as part of PRSA, I can continue to connect with more professionals nationwide through the New Professionals Section.
Fun fact: Committed to run a race each month of the year and is currently training to run his first marathon in April, the Salt Lake City marathon.

Five Tips to Help Simplify Your Social Life

March 2, 2015Ashleigh Mavros Leave a comment

As young PR pros, social media has grown into our everyday routines, used as a tool for both personal and professional use. With social media growing ever so rapidly, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the constant changes and advancements.

Producing engaging content and adhering to guidelines to make sure your post gets as much traction as possible can be overwhelming. Thankfully, there are ways you can simplify your social life on both a personal and professional level.

1. Maintain your online presence. Follow people on Twitter, clean up your Facebook, update your LinkedIn, and keep your profiles public – these are the easiest ways to be found via social media.

2. Schedule, schedule, schedule. In maintaining your online presence, you need to make sure you have time to keep the profiles listed above up-to-date. Pre-scheduling posts has made every community manager’s life easier, but it can also help your personal profiles so you don’t have to worry about losing your online impressions. There are numerous free online tools you can use for this including TweetDeck and Hootsuite!

3. There’s an app for that! If This Then That, LastPass, Evernote, Hootlet, etc. are only a few of the apps that can help simplify your social life. Useful for business and personal profiles, there is the right app for you depending on what you’re looking to post. My favorite is the “recipes” created on IFTTT which automatically posts your Instagram photos to your Twitter using the proper links so you can see the image.

4. Share, share, share. Sharing content! There’s nothing like creating traffic and sharing what people are saying online to get your message across. Always give credit where credit is due by tagging authors or publications in which will also help create more engagement for your profile.

5. Always measure up. Those of us who don’t work in social media don’t think to measure how our online presence is doing. Being able to measure your content helps you to see what posts are working and how to improve your content for the future. This can been seen through many online tools such as Klout, Twitter and Facebook Analytics, Hootsuite, Sysomos, and Sprout Social just to name a few.

What have you done to simplify your social media presence?

Marcy McMillan is the Marketing Communications & Events Coordinator for York University’s Campus Services and Business Operations department. When she’s not working, you can find Marcy discovering new restaurants in downtown Toronto, attending and writing about events or spending some time at the public library. Find her on Twitter @marcy113 or visit her site.

Why Facebook and Twitter are Reviving PR

February 5, 2015February 6, 2015Ashleigh Mavros Leave a comment

When I landed my first public relations job in 2012, I sensed the field—and those within it—were experiencing a paradigm shift. Working next to seasoned professionals, I watched as savvy practitioners stumbled over using one of the most important public relations tools of our time: social media.

In my opinion, practitioners often lose sight of the purpose of public relations, focusing on output-oriented measures like the number of press releases sent out or the amount of media coverage received. Over the last three years, though, I’ve seen social media bring an exciting transformation to the field.

Thanks to sites like Facebook and Twitter, publics expect honesty, quick responses, interaction and engagement more so than ever before. Gone are the days of hiding behind press releases and media outlets. Social media makes public relations operate on real time. More importantly, social media has helped PR rediscover its relational roots.

This public-focused approach has transformed the way my company operates and executes its public relations strategy. If you’re interested in harnessing the power of social media for PR, here’s four ways to step up your strategy:

1. Use social media to refocus on relationships. I firmly believe that relationships are the glue that hold public relations and social media together. As practitioners, it’s our job to know, understand and advocate for our company’s or client’s publics. Social media offers us the opportunity to do all three on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.

2. Use social media to empower your position. Social media makes the need for a public relations practitioner mandatory. In addition, in order for the company’s social media pages to align with the business’ goals and values, the public relations practitioner in charge of social media must have support and approval from the dominant coalition, making way for opportunists to discuss and make the presence of public relations known.

3. Use social media to facilitate two-way and symmetrical communication. Social media enables businesses to practice two-way and symmetrical communication with their publics like never before. In other words, answer questions, create opportunities for dialogue and get personal! Social media efforts flop without a human touch.

4. Use social media for environmental scanning. Used as a tool for analysis, social media allows for practitioners to listen to the concerns of consumers and other risk bearers. In fact, I’ve started to track every single complaint we get on social media. It’s a great way for me to detect trends and a useful resource when asked for customer feedback.

What other ways do you feel social media has impacted public relations?

Audrey Roeder works as a public relations coordinator for two of the nation’s top-selling master-planned communities. She’s an alumna of Texas A&M University and the University of Houston, where she received a Master of Arts in Public Relations. In her free time, Audrey enjoys exploring her city’s ever-growing restaurant scene, binge-watching Netflix with her fiancé and posting too many pictures of her Siamese cat, Sibel, to Instagram. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Three Ways to Let Analytics Guide Your Social Strategy

February 2, 2015Ashleigh Mavros 3 Comments

Every PR pro knows a good online strategy is nothing without great content to back it up. Social media should not be overlooked when it comes to strategic planning. As more and more organizations incorporate social media into their overall PR strategy, it becomes increasingly important to create content that sets them apart from competitors and builds trust with audiences. There are so many great tools available (for free!) that can help guide social content to maximize its benefit.

Here are a few ways to use them:

1. Find the Right Time to Post. Timing is everything. The great thing about social media is its instantaneous nature, so messages can get out to audiences in seconds. But is it really necessary and/or beneficial to deliver every message in real-time? Social media users can be connected to hundreds of other users or organizations, and every post is competing for attention. Most PR pros work typical 9-5 hours, so it might seem like it makes sense to post a link to a new blog on Facebook during your work day. But if those who follow a brand on Facebook aren’t online during that time, the post becomes buried among a hundred others.

Tools like Facebook Insights allow organizations to see the demographics of their Facebook followers. One of the most valuable pieces of information is a daily timeline that shows follower activity peaks. Insights is completely free to business/organization pages on Facebook, and it can help pinpoint the best time to schedule posts. It may turn out that time is at 7:00 p.m. on a Friday evening. There are plenty of tools available to schedule posts automatically so the prime posting window isn’t missed because it is outside of traditional work hours.

2. Figure Out What Content Works. It can be easy for a social media strategy to place too much focus on building an audience. Social media is a tool to engage in conversations with an audience. If the audience isn’t responding, something isn’t working. A large fan base does not equal a successful social media strategy.

“While the number of page likes or Twitter followers seems like an obvious metric to track, it is important to measure reach and engagement as well,” said Katie Hinerman, Freelance Digital Marketing Specialist.

Twitter Analytics is a new tool available for organizations to measure the engagement of their Twitter content. The dashboard shows overall impressions (how many times a tweet was viewed), engagement (how many users interacted with a tweet) and engagement rate (ratio of tweets to interactions). A good social media strategy should include a plan for increasing engagement rate across all social platforms.

“Social media marketing as we know it is changing,” added Hinerman. “In 2015, brands are going to have a harder time reaching users organically. This is why it will be especially important to track reach and engagement metrics when measuring your efforts.”

3. Measure Your Success. A strategy can’t be created without goals, and goals can’t be deemed successful unless they’re measurable (Click to tweet!). A social media strategy is no different than any other part of an organizations’ overall communications plan. Once SMART goals are set, they should be measured and tracked for progress. Lack of progress toward a goal could mean efforts need adjusted.

Google Analytics includes statistics on web traffic referrals from social media accounts. If increased web traffic is part of a social media goal, this tool is the best way to measure progress. The results are offered in real-time, and a variety of time frames can be analyzed and compared. Google Analytics is free to use and offers several tutorial videos to coach beginners through the analytics process.

In a world where PR pros are already stretched thin and wearing many hats, strategizing and measuring social media efforts can keep everyone on the right track. Using analytics to guide social media strategy is a great way to make sure that too much or too little work isn’t being done. Knowing what content is most engaging and when audiences are looking for it maximizes the impact with audiences and minimizes the drain on staff. And that keeps everyone happy.

Jennifer Materkoski is a graduate of Kent State University with a Master of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communications with a specialization in Public Relations. She has worked as a writer and editor for both newspaper and television and as a member of a non-profit marketing and development team. Materkoski is the owner and principal consultant of a boutique public relations firm, Songbird Public Relations. She is an avid sports fan and a yogi. Materkoski resides in Wheeling, West Virginia with her husband and son. Find her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter @MrsMaterkoski. She can be reached via email at jen@songbirdpublicrelations.com.

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Meet Your 2015 New Pros Executive Committee