pr career

PRSA New Professionals Brown Bag: Get Your Dream Career

Heather Sliwinski Leave a comment

In our November New Professionals Section tweetchat, we discovered that many of our new professionals are eagerly searching for up-to-date relevant information on getting a job. Should you include social networks and a QR code on your resume? How can you bump up your interview strategy? We’re fortunate to have our very own part of PRSA dedicated to answering all of our questions – the PRSA Jobcenter.

In our upcoming Brown Bag, Richard Spector of PRSA Jobcenter, will share with us all of the basics, but also all of the new and creative ways to enhance your resume with QR codes and social media. Then, once you catch an employer’s attention with your resume, he’ll discuss how to “wow” them with your interview skills. In addition to interviews and resumes, he will review the job seeking tools PRSA has to offer.

Regardless of what stage of your career you’re in, this is always valuable information to have!

This New Pros Brown Bag will be held on Thursday, Jan. 17 from 12 to 1 p.m. EST. Remember, it’s free for New Pros members! Register here.

Richard Spector, manager of client services and sales support at PRSA, has been working with PRSA Jobcenter for five years. Spector guides public relations professionals of all levels in their job search, resume writing, networking and interview follow-up skills.

Intro to Crisis Communications

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Almost 17 years ago, I started my career in public relations after a five-year stint as a trade journalist.  Since I have a social butterfly/people-person personality, I thought PR was all about mingling with the celebrities, traveling and promoting great news journalists were sure to write about.  After I took off my rose-colored glasses, I realized PR wasn’t always peaches and cream and often involved using skill sets like crisis communications to protect my company’s image and brand.

I started my career in technology PR and quickly discovered strategic crisis communications were must-have skills to survive in one of the most stressful jobs in the professional landscape. Why do you ask?  At most of the companies I worked for in the telecommunications segment in the 1990s, acquisitions, restructurings, layoffs and management upheavals were commonplace. Therefore, it was essential for me to develop crisis communications skills early on in my career to prepare my company for the worst.  Thinking on my feet, developing strategic counseling and planning skills were drilled into my DNA as a PR professional early on.

Fast forward to the last few years. What’s been the big trend in PR?  Whether you are a new PR or veteran PR professional, no one can forget the crises that have affected big companies like Chick-fil-A, BP, News Corp., Penn State, Netflix and HP. The common theme in many of these crises is that the PR and marketing teams didn’t develop solid communications plans to react to the media quickly enough and preserve their brand’s image.  Whether your company is in the technology, healthcare or travel and tourism field, you always need to be prepared for potential situations involving lawsuits, accusations of impropriety, sudden changes in management and other volatile situations on which your stakeholders — and the media that serves them — often focus.

Crisis communications is at the heart of my current job today.  My company provides essential information that helps customers across all industries and government predict, assess and manage risk. We provide products and services that address evolving client needs in the risk sector, while upholding the highest standards of security and privacy.  To that end, upholding my company’s standards of compliance in a highly-regulated industry is a natural extension of why crisis communications is so important.

For me, every day is different.  I have to stay on top of what’s happening with my company in the media landscape by reading and studying trends, including privacy and security changes, regulatory and compliance issues, to name a few.  In addition, I avidly monitor the news and potential crises through social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  In a highly-regulated business like mine, it’s essential to respond appropriately to media inquiries as well.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of my job is helping our spokespeople and marketing teams develop strategic messages that help protect, preserve and raise our brand in key markets like financial services, government and insurance – ultimately so we can influence the key influencers – the media and analyst community.

Therefore, developing an issues or crisis communications playbook is the way our small communications team prepares for a potential crisis that could involve a technology issue, an executive appointment, a natural disaster or on-site employee issue.  This is our guide or instruction book for communicating quickly and decisivively to our key publics, including the media, the industry analysts, partners and customers, charities and investors.

Change continues to be the only constant in my job.  However, here are five for new professionals looking to add crisis communications skills into their careers:

  1. Take courses on crisis communications through PRSA and other outlets like PR News.  The only way to effectively learn how to become an effect crisis communications pro is by learning from the experts who have years of experience managing them the right way.
  2. Ask your key spokespeople what the five biggest risks would be to your organization’s business.  Asking the hard questions and preparing the answers to potential risks your organization faces, will help you prepare your talking points, Q&As and issues management playbook in the event a crisis happens.
  3. Study what has happened with some of the biggest PR crises over the last few years and learn from their mistakes.  Mistakes are bound to happen in the PR profession because communications aren’t always effectively managed or rolled out. But you can magnify those mistakes by a magnitude of 10 when a crisis is mishandled. So you can learn from what other companies or organizations have done to repair or resurrect their images and brands in the wake of disasters that will help you in the long run.
  4. Put your crisis communications skills into practice.  Start small by simulating a crisis communications drill.  Once your crisis playbook is developed, set up a war room and temporary phone lines and prepare your spokespeople to be trained to take questions from the media.  Practice makes perfect and drills help to make sure you are properly prepared if a true disaster happens.

Crisis communications is far and away one of the most difficult PR skill sets to master, but you need to learn to be prepared in case your company has to deal with a crisis.

 

Stephen LoudermilkStephen Loudermilk is global media and analyst relations director at LexisNexis, where he heads communications for the company’s Business Services and Screening practices.  In his spare time, he is actively involved in PRSA, where he serves as chairman of the Technology Section and treasurer of the PRSA Southeast District.

PRSA New Professionals Week: New Pros Tweetchat Recap via Storify

Heather Sliwinski Leave a comment

Today, the New Professionals Section hosted a tweetchat to celebrate the second annual New Professionals Week. We discussed resumes, portfolios, LinkedIn and more. In case you missed it, see below for a recap via Storify! Thanks to our programming chairs, Elizabeth Rhoads Greenaway and Brendan Hughes, for hosting.

Back to PR School: Experts to Follow for Continuing Your Education

Heather Sliwinski Leave a comment

Career expert Peter Weddle advises job seekers to always work on their career fitness. We expect it of ourselves and so do our employers. Just because new professionals are no longer in school, doesn’t mean you can’t take some time this fall to go back to PR school and learn more about the burgeoning industry to which we belong.  

To be a successful public relations practitioner you need to know everything from social media, search engine optimization, reputation management, marketing and more. But how can you be all things to all people?

The Internet is a never-ending resource for newsletters and blogs to help you (and to help build Klout scores!). Many industry experts will place their presentations on Slideshare. The following are my favorite newsletters and experts to follow: 

  • Lee Odden (TopRank Online Marketing) – SEO is not just about finding the keywords that yield the most traffic. SEO is about using relevant content to attract your specific audience. Temper this in with social media and its rapidly changing venue and you need expert advice to stay ahead of the curve and to keep impressing the boss. TopRank Online Marketing produces an e-newsletter chock full of guidance and success stories written by Odden. When your employer asks you to write web content or an SEO-optimized press release, Odden is the man you want to follow on Twitter. Subscribe to TopRank’s e-newsletter, and your knowledge will soar.
  • Deirdre Breakenridge – If you haven’t been asked already, it’s only a matter of time before your employer expects you to write a social media plan. You will need to know how to set goals and use the best tactics (measurable ones) to best help you meet those goals. Following Breakenridge on Twitter and seeing what she’s pinning on Pinterest is a great start. When you are on a job interview, you want to show your potential boss you can hit the ground running. You may even consider doing a mini social media plan for the interview. You will stand above the crowd.
  • Peter Weddle and Weddle’s E-newsletter – To survive in the workforce today, being qualified is not enough. You need to be what Weddle calls a “career activist”. A recruiter, HR consultant and business CEO turned author and commentator, weddle knows what it takes to keep growing in the field. His favorite term is “work strong”. Subscribe to his e-newsletter and you’ll not only learn as a job seeker, you’ll gain knowledge from an employer perspective as well. One of his many books, Recognizing Richard Rabbit will change how you think about your current and future career.
  • Recruiting Trends – My dear friend and expert recruiter Sandy Charet of Charet & Associates always mentions the very difficult job recruiters have. They not only have to review resumes sent their way, but also need to constantly comb through LinkedIn to find the best “passive job seekers”. They are completely overworked and need to process a voluminous number of job orders within superhuman deadlines. A recent study showed that recruiters decide within six seconds whether a resume winds up in the “yes” or “no” pile. Therefore, it’s key to understand where recruiters are coming from. If you understand the pressure they are under, it will change how you approach them when following up after they have sent you on a job interview.
  • FINS Newsletter – While the advice may not be tailored directly to public relations, there’s a multitude of career and resume advice on this Dow Jones career and employment website. Their topics have universal appeal regardless of your career specialty. It is one of the best places to read about writing your career story, the 25 toughest companies for interviews and facing feedback from your employer.
  • Mashable – If you are just beginning in your career, you want to know who the heavy hitters are in making news and headlines. Mashable not only covers major technology trendsetters, it will help you show potential employers that you’re fully up-to-date understanding the challenges in the business world.

While the list of resources is always growing, consider following these experts:

  • Eric Schwartzman – With Schwartzman, you learn about social media from A to Z. His knowledge will take you from the beginning of setting up your Twitter account to blogging and expertly tagging your digital content.
  • Dawn Edmiston – Recruiters not only want to know about your resume – they will research your professional online presence. Dawn is an expert resource. The most critical resource you have is your own branding. Dawn will help you take ownership of this.
  • Sandy Charet – We all know how important LinkedIn is to recruiters. You want to present the most professional and complete profile possible. Charet knows all the ins and outs of working with LinkedIn. 
  • Brian Solis – His conversation prism will graphically show you all the facets to social media. When setting up a social media plan, you need to know which tactics will work the best. However, how many of us really know all the forms of social media out there? Solis gives the best starting point by displaying all or at least most of the available forms.
  • Andrea Nierenberg –Networking is key to your career survival, but how do you approach someone? What do you do if you’re an introvert? How do I really use the “give to get” principle? Nierenberg’s thoughts and insights will help you network with results.

We also hope that you will read the 70+ articles on PRSA Jobcenter. Having a full range of job advice and resources will ensure a very long and very happy career.

 

Richard Spector is the manager of client services at PRSA.

Intro to Employee Communications PR

Heather Sliwinski Leave a comment

A growing specialty in the world of public relations is employee communication. Positions with this area as the primary focus are found most often in large organizations, where the employee base is large and diverse. More importantly, these positions exist when leadership fully understands how employee engagement correlates with an organization’s success or failure. In a sense, employees are the organization, so it is hard to imagine a more critical stakeholder group.

Describing a day in the life of an employee communications specialist doesn’t sound difficult until you sit down and start to write. Why? Because every day is so different from the next. Let me begin by telling you, briefly, about our organization.

DuPont Pioneer is in the production agriculture industry—specifically, crop seed genetics. Headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, where the business began in 1926, Pioneer now has more than 12,500 full-time employees working in more than 90 countries around the world. Acquired by DuPont in 1999, Pioneer is part of a science company that is more than 200 years old and focused on using science to help solve global challenges related to food, energy and protection.

Since joining Pioneer five years ago, I have enjoyed being part of a very exciting and rapidly growing business. One of the biggest “plusses” had been the value placed on employee communication by our president.

I lead a terrific team of four professionals, each of whom has a full plate of specific responsibilities related to our global employee audience.

So what is my typical day like?

Because each day is so different, I am going to take some liberty with my assignment and tell you instead what a typical week includes. And since it is Friday morning, I am simply going to look back at the week that is now coming to a close. Keep in mind that my role involves more managerial duties than others on the team. (Read: Lots of meetings!)

Monday: 

  • Global teleconference to review the Pioneer Communications planning calendar
  • Met with Pioneer intranet manager to review process to secure outsourced help with online publishing
  • Consulting appointment with Web Services staff to set up Team Site for Global DuPont Public Affairs task team that I am leading
  • Attended Lunch-and-Learn meeting to hear two renowned journalists/authors discuss looming global crisis: hunger
  • Attended final presentation by our summer intern
  • Met with two staff members to develop draft presentation for meeting next week with executive sponsors of the next-generation intranet steering team
  • Attended evening event related to work

Tuesday:

  • Met with Communications Leadership Team to discuss planning process and budgets for 2013
  • Web meeting with DuPont colleagues about intranet platform capabilities
  • Slogged through overflowing email inbox
  • Proofed documents as requested
  • Followed up on PRSA Employee Communications Section responsibilities; also on local PRSA Chapter responsibilities.

Wednesday:

  • Participated in web conference with DuPont colleagues to view demo of intranet site set up on SharePoint 2010 platform by another DuPont businesses
  • Summarized highlights of web conference and sent follow-up memo to appropriate Information Management staff at Pioneer
  • Met with new manager for employee online communities about metrics and dashboard options
  • Met with staff members to refine draft presentation for meeting next week with sponsors of the next-generation intranet steering team

Thursday:

  • Early meeting with next-generation intranet steering team
  • Left that meeting early to get to the first of two half-day training sessions with senior leaders, led by David Grossman of The Grossman Group (focus was internal communication of Pioneer strategy)
  • Talked with David over lunch about other work he is doing with Pioneer
  • Second training session with senior leaders

Friday:

  • Three goals today: write this blog post, follow up with members of task team I am leading for DuPont, and get out of the office in time to go to the Iowa State Fair. One down, two to go.

Young professionals who want to work in employee communications should:

  1. Polish their writing and presentation skills. You must be strong in both of these core skills.
  2. Get very familiar with intranet best practices, which are evolving even as I write this post.
  3. Take some business classes, and develop a basic understanding of today’s global economy. This knowledge will help you understand and converse more intelligently with your senior leaders, whose support is critical to your success.

 

Chris JensenChristine Jensen, APR, MBA, is the employee communications manager of DuPont Pioneer. Prior experience includes a position as an adjunct lecturer in public relations at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and public relations/marketing management positions for a private college and several healthcare organizations, including Mayo Clinic, where she managed internal communication. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College in Iowa and her Master of Business Administration from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. Jensen served for three years as a board member of the PRSA Charlotte Chapter and currently serves as accreditation chair for the PRSA Central Iowa Chapter and the chair of the PRSA Employee Communications Section. She was a charter member of the executive committee of the Section and chaired its first national conference in Chicago in 1996. The thoughts expressed in this blog post are entirely her own and do not reflect those of her employer.