Why Startup PR Is Great for Recent Grads

The answer is simply – that they’re so much alike. Startups (the term chiefly pertains to the technology industry) and new companies, like recent PR grads and even nearly-finished students, are bright-eyed and optimistic – no matter the economic climate. Here are a few reasons why those of you who are looking for jobs, may want to rethink the big names (ie: Edleman, Hill & Knowlton, Fleishman Hillard) and put your name and interest out to the small or, er – no names.

• Agility: Like you, small companies don’t have a ton to lose. They don’t have families (long-standing business partners) yet, they’re not bound to a location or direction. They can bob and weave through sticky situations and can focus more on innovation than stabilizing a large company. While large companies tend to drag their feet with announcements, small companies have the advantage of churning out huge updates to their products and services on a regular basis.

• Experience over Security: This is my promise: The experience and knowledge you’ll garner in one month will be equal to that of 6 months at one of the big firms. While with big firms, you’re pretty sure of your job ( bonuses, raises), you will likely be doing grunt work for a while, no one-on-one work with clients and no significant media outreach for months. With a startup, you’ll likely be pitching the Washington Post right off the bat.

• Fresh meat: For one, it gives you the chance to take “no-name” companies and build their awareness from scratch, no bad blood, no skeletons. Just your strategy, guts and fresh approach. Same idea with the next…

• Story: Like your resume, they’re still developing their story – very much your job to help with that. But because they’re small, they’re able to adapt and mold their story – or even completely switch gears, without killing it. They don’t have a ton of history to hold them down or to overcome.

• Startup community: One of the coolest things about the startup culture is how tight-knit it is. Take events like Ignite, Startup Weekend, and SF Beta. They bring together and showcase some of the newest and breaking technologies as well as the companies that are about to explode (in a good way) within their veins of technology. Cool stuff, and while they don’t always center around technology, they provide a wonderful support system and network for new companies. Some cool emerging startup communities are:

1. New York City – Yes, kind of surprising since it’s the center of all industry, but their startup community is very tight-knit and supportive. Companies don’t drown in NYC, they thrive – Take Etsy, Foursquare, Meetup, and Boxee
2. Boulder, CO – They say it themselves: “Boulder is for startups.” They are famous for a wealth of beer-charged meetups and a ‘cool kids club’ type of environment where technology thrives. Some of the coolest companies come out of boulder.
3. Portland, OR – Wedged between Seattle (Microsoft fortress) and Silicon Valley, Portland seems to be a catch-all, a stewpan for new companies. Cool stuff happens there.
4. Atlanta, GA – There are some sweet things happening in the south – meetups, conferences, web development and design, social web innovation. ‘Next-gen’ (which is, by the way, a buzz word) stuff.
5. Austin, TX – Home to the insanely popular annual film/music/interactive festival, SXSW, this community is huge for technology innovation: Check out Austin Startup for upcoming events and companies to watch.

• Do or die: Either execute or be executed – startups are ALL IN from day one, because if they don’t strategize, execute and deliver, they’re down for the count. No pressure.

• Innovation/Creativity: When working with startups you see the coolest and newest technology in its earliest stages. But whether companies are unfunded or are there is an element of desperation (see “do or die”) and it’s this desperation that triggers innovation and thinking outside the box with their technology – just like you will need to think outside of the box to give your company a voice and make some noise in very noisy industries – tech or not.

• Triumphs are longstanding/failures short-lived: [for the most part] The nicest thing is that with such a high metabolism, a startup can quickly recover from a flawed beta test or an awful review in Macworld. What’s more, when you land a great story in the New York Times, the interest in new technology is so great, that the story has potential for massive syndication, follow-up/response stories and tons of tiny blog posts. You, too, are young enough that you can recover from mistakes and make improvements.

• Opportunities for disruption: Startups have the unique opportunity – responsibility, really – of disrupting their channels of technology, taking done ideas and reworking and revamping them to turn the industry on its head and take it in new directions. You, too, have the chance to take a very done practice, like PR, and create new ideas for awareness and storytelling.

I’m just sayin’ – lots of opportunity here to give yourself a leg up without depending on larger companies who are already drowning in resumes. For starters, search and GO TO  your local tech events: Ignite shows – see who’s sponsoring them, find out who’s presenting. Eventbrite, while focusing on all types of events, is a startup itself and thus is used by lots of startups – look at different events in your area to find out who is participating. Easy enough, right?

The point is that it’s a tough market for a new job-hunter. And here’s one place where your communication training and skills are so needed. And if you think you can’t get into tech, believe me, it’s more relevant to you than you might think – and pretty addicting stuff.

Details, details… Why You (as a young PRo) Need To Be Nit-Picky NOW.

I am not the most detail-oriented person. Not by a long shot. I am more what you’d call a “Big Picture,” conceptual person. Which is why, in the first months of my job, I struggled a lot with not seeing the value in details and not grasping for a while just HOW MUCH I needed to harness those details on all of my teams.

If your work environment is anything like mine, you’re on multiple teams and it’s very collaborative. Everyone does everything until the job gets done. It’s nice to see the managers of accounts chiming in and even sometimes drafting pitches and releases.

These are wonderful things to be able to expect from your teams and and managers. However, bear in mind what is expected of you at the bottom of the totem pole:

1. You are the gate-keeper of information. Your account managers will often be overseeing all of the high-level activity in several accounts, not just yours. It’s up to you to be on top of every single detail and moving part within your account so that if they need to know if a client has sent their feedback on a release, you can update them right away.

2. You are the task master. If someone’s been assigned a new Washington Post target, you need to check and make sure they’ve been pitched. You need to be sure of everyone’s pitching progress at any time. You need to know everyone’s progress on everything at all times. Don’t be afraid to manage up on this one.

3. Your clients probably care. Client-facing emails, especially with small companies aren’t uncommon for the young AA or AAE. Typos (and believe me, I am THE WORST with typos, just read some of my past blogs) look so bad to clients. Doesn’t matter if it’s a short, logistical (“Please use the usual dial-in”) message or a large, content-heavy correspondence. Same for client deliverables – PR reports, tracking sheets, whether hard copies, PDFs or Google docs, these need to be flawless.

4. Your teams DO care. They definitely care if they can’t trust you to send simple messages that are error-free to clients. Especially avoidable errors. Spell-check and have them proofed (it’s a killer to your writer/communicator’s ego, but worth it when you start to pick up the nuances of client communications). Never send a client email without letting your team know, or CC-ing them (once again, please learn from MY mistakes here).

5. It kind of becomes second nature. At some point you just learn how to do it without thinking about it. And you’ll find that as your organization increases so does your productivity. So it’s definitely worth the extra care and time that you put into it now.

6. Important: If you let them, disorganization and small mistakes WILL run the way you do things and define you as a professional. Small mistakes that go unchecked can quickly brand you as sloppy and unprofessional and will even faster become habits and harder to manage and rid yourself of.

This has been one of the most aggravating things to learn as I’ve gone out into the “real world.” Do whatever it takes to incorporate this into your work habits even if you’re cursing those detail oriented, anal-retentives who sit next to you. Eat some humble pie and learn from them.

*Organization tips to follow. Photo courtesy of Details magazine.

Fresh Meat Advice: Contribute what you know – in my case, Twitter.

On a tip from Kelli Matthew’s PRos in Training blog, to which I still subscribe, I read the post by Julia Roy called “Getting More Twitter Followers and Twittering for Business.” In the post she talks about gaining more Twitter traction – a whopping 4,000 followers – and how she decides to follow people back.

STUDENT TWEETS: Everyone has to start somewhere.

I started Twittering in February with no idea what I was doing. How did I become acclimated? I was online three or four times a day looking up tech news, reading Mashable and TechCrunch, NYT Tech columns, PRWeek, Business Week, poring over Google Trends, getting GMail alerts for news and blog posts on PR and Social Media, virtually all of the blogs in my Google Reader were tech and PR blogs. I needed to be able to engage with the people who were on Twitter about things that were important to them.

When LaunchSquad, found me on Twitter, though, it was because I’d “tweeted” about one of their clients – Vivaty.

TWITTER ON THE JOB?

JetBlue was one of the first business Twitter feeds that I followed and actually tweeted back at. They are one of the best Twitter business models I’ve seen.

When I started here, one of the first things I was asked to do on each of my accounts was either establish or revamp their Twitter activity. I wrote a Twitter strategy based on a case-study on JetBlue’s Twitter activity.

WHY I PAY ATTENTION: Their 4,800 followers are resulting from updates about their flight schedules, flying/travel tips and steady responses to customers and other Twitterers.

WHAT I TAKE AWAY: To be savvy with customers and Twitter, you need to pay attention to what they’re saying. People often express frustrations with software and companies on Twitter.

Another great example is Mighty Leaf Tea. They’re hardly tech, but they’re in the East Bay and so here in San Francisco – and silicon valley, we’re big fans. They’ve got great, unique flavors which makes for great “Tweets”. 

WHY I PAY ATTENTION: They’re not tech. At all. They sell tea, for god’s sake. But they come up with useful ways to discuss their products over Twitter and currently have 500+ followers in their pocket.

WHAT I TAKE AWAY: They post “relevant” issues and articles and are engaged in their industry beyond just their product – like the above post: List an interesting article and bring it back to the product. Very nice.

THE SKINNY

I suggest before taking on a client’s Twitter campaign, work on beefing up your own feed in addition to the rest of your online presence. Social media savvy applied to personal uses can only help when you’re asked to do it for a client.

A friend of mine and former intern here at LaunchSquad, Ben Kessler, has a great blog as well as a juggernaut Twitter following (currently at 579) and has managed 6,200+ updates so far – In September he averaged 24 updates a day. Makes me tired just thinking about it.

In my own case, I eventually found an even balance for my Twitter feed: my initial rabid tech/PR discourse combined with a cultural commentary (articles, music, film, events) and have – to reinforce Julia Roy’s point – seen a steady increase of 5-10 new follower’s a week.

Once you’ve honed this aspect of social media – and not to imply, by any means, that I have – you’ve become a valuable asset to any company, client and agency as they all are trying to figure out what Twitter means and could do for their business.

Schizophrenic 2.0

Like The West Wing and Subway sandwich punch-cards (I recently learned they brought them back) the Bryant Park Project,  so many good things in life come to an end: In my case, college. In the midst of finishing final projects, studying for finals and saying goodbye to life as a student, I have been eagerly and frantically looking for housing as I relocate to the Bay Area. I’m already anticipating the repercussions of this huge change: distance from friends and family, a busier, fast-paced lifestyle, a much more steady income, less sleep, more reading, less homework, more client work.

There is one aspect of this situation that I hadn’t considered prior to reading Todd Defren’s post entitled “The Secret Life of Runners.” In this post he brings up an important issue: talking about client work on company or personal blogs. As far as my blog goes, I’ve never held much back. It’s been a log of my PR experience and discoveries as well as a personal manifesto as to my intentions for PR (to treat it like a lady, of course).

This blog has been a very successful resource for finding ways to not only join the conversation, but also to ask questions and get them answered by PRos. To say that this blog has been merely instrumental in where I am headed as a recent graduate and practitioner-on-the-verge would be a gross understatement so – I hardly intend to abandon it and the further lessons that could be gleaned from continuing to maintain it.

My question is, where’s the line? Can I afford to discuss my work in an anonymous way in a Web 2.0 world where to join the conversation is to, essentially, have a strong web presence and thus have your job, your work, your personal profile easily accessible? Do I refrain from discussing whatever career/life lessons I learn on this blog? Do I sacrifice my transparency by being secretive about my work? Does it benefit my client at all from any discussion I might have on them?

Any insight would help here, I’m having trouble with this one.

Cinematic Savvy: Cool Hand Luke

Thought I’d get your attention with Mr. Paul Newman.

“What we got here is a failure to communicate.”

This observation from the road crew captain in the film brings to mind several instances where this very truth has caused havoc in my personal and professional (or pre-professional) life. Whether it’s laziness, disdain or sheer ignorance that’s ruptured the flow of healthy verbal relations, it always means another failure is in store.

Relationships – duh. Oprah and a host of highly-qualified psychological professionals say we need communication for our relationships and if it isn’t there, relationships sink.

But in the professional environment, maybe you don’t get emotionally wounded, but lack of communication means your team, and ultimately your client, takes it right in the gut.

I’ve experienced this on both sides. There was an instructor who failed to clearly communicate expectations, due dates and functions of each task assigned and remained unapproachable. This led to a lot of struggling and eventual dissent from the class members who left the class confused about what was assigned, much of it very important to our careers. The one lesson I’ve taken from this example is that you can’t always trust the people you work under to lay it all out for you. I guess.

On the other hand, in leaving town on a planned trip one week, I left my team high and dry without knowing it and accidentally skipped out on a huge deadline because we failed to properly communicate under the urgent circumstances. Luckily, the client was still provided with information they needed in a timely fashion and no bridges were burned.

Now, it would be easy for me to say: this is what happens when there is a failure to communicate. But it can get much worse. When communication is sacrificed, other things are tossed out too: trust of team members and clients, reputation among colleagues and networks and most importantly, the ability to hold yourself to a standard of having decent respect for those you work with and the things you work for. These are big losses.

I hope my examples illustrated that it isn’t always a lack of timely or dependable communication that’s the problem- when I’d gone out of town, my team had attempted to reach me by e-mail rather than phone – but sometimes it’s the quality of what’s communicated that causes a problem. Sincerity, consideration, and professionalism are always appreciated.

Honesty will also score high.

The Cinematic Savvy series is designed to explore themes and ideas from certain films. Inspiration can be drawn from characters, their quotes, their circumstances, historical approaches depicted – it’s my blog, I’ll take it where I get it. I love film and I love PR. Let’s see how they influence me.

*Image courtesy of /www.johnmariani.com

Is It A “She-Thang”?

In the spirit of International Women’s Day, er – yesterday, I am compelled to devote this post to my sex. To my delight, the New York Times article Boldface in Cyberspace: It’s a Woman’s Domain delved into a new site called “Wowowow: The Women on the Web” which features blogs and articles written by professional women. Most of them have backgrounds in media like Leslie Stahl, and others are groundbreaking entertainers like Candice Bergen and Whoopi Goldberg – all of them brilliant contributors to our intellectual culture. It isn’t enough to say that these women and many of their colleagues stimulated me and my rabid educational and vocational pursuits. They motivate me daily.

It is with this mindset that I explore a new question: Is PR a women’s industry?

Now, first, as a disclaimer, I’d like to point out that I’m a student blogger and my topics are mere questions that I face and answers that I find. These might be brazen claims, but they are prompted by the fact that my internship and PR classes are female-dominated and this leads me to question whether that is the nature of the industry.

Sorry, guys. It is not my intention to ostracize. I also don’t wish to ostracize my own sex with the assertions I’m about to make based on clichés. I, rather, wish to question why I feel so comfy in PR. If we consider the stereotypical female persona, the one so often caricatured in sitcoms and their accessory traits – a persona with which I often identify- and compare it to PR, are they are perfect fit?

1 . PR is about communcation: We handle situations by talking. Not only that but we learn methods of talking that help us shape our message so that people understand us. We even adopt cadences to our voices to give us credibility and authority as we make our arguments and appeals. We tailor our language to each audience. Oprah says this is healthy so we do it.

2. PR is about relationships: My life is relationships, family, friends, boyfriends, teachers, bosses. I think about relationships, I talk about relationships. I’m good at relationships. Not only that, I manage my relationships. What’s more, I look for new ways to be better at managing my relationships. And if you’ve ever watched Sex and the City, this is in every episode.

3. PR is sometimes about SPIN: There are times when some publicists are forced to talk out of their badonkadonk in order to manage a client’s reputation. Some might call it being manipulative. I call it good celebrity PR.

4. There’s a soothing nature to PR: In a time of crisis, our client’s causes become our own and we form a Florence Nightingale attachment. It’s a natural, and, dare I say, nurturing response.

5. PR is SEXY: Sometimes it’s about talking the talk and walking the walk. It’s about perception and attraction. It’s about flashy marketing stunts and reputation make-overs.

6. Lastly, PR plays games and likes gossip: PR people play word games and mind games. And now, more than ever, we play these games to create buzz or gossip about our clients and their work. We love it when things go viral. We go crazy when everyone’s talking about it. It makes us want to talk about it more so that we can generate more buzz and have a final authority on the situation: “Actually, I heard on TMZ that this is Lindsay’s fifth time in rehab, not fourth.”

Obviously, this list is not representative of every woman and these are very much some things in which both men and women participate. It does, however, bring some insight about why I, for one, enjoy PR. It speaks my language. It uses my tactics. It mimics my voice. It demands my kind of communication. It calls to me.

*Image courtesy of http://bothhands.files.wordpress.com 

Mischief Managed: Recovering From PR Blunders

In my spare time, I’ve been reading Jane Eyre and at one point in the lengthy conversations between Mr. Rochester and Jane, I felt very convicted by something he said to her in an argument: “You are afraid – Your self-love dreads blunder.”

Here is something to which I can relate. I don’t know if it’s self-love that drives me or makes me hesitate, but I do think it is, to some extent, a fear of mistakes or messing up. I’m a cautious and slow mover. I fear that my chance and risk-taking won’t pan out to success. My question is, when you mess up, how do you recover? This isn’t crisis management but, to reference to Harry Potter, “mischief management”.

In a recent article by Keith Ferrazzi, Founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a strategic consulting and professional development firm, he gives advice on how to deal with both personal and professional mistakes and blunders.

1. Get some perspective: This makes sense to me. In the grand scheme of things, assess how much does this really matter?

2. Assess and forgive yourself: In the grand scheme of YOU (and/or your company), how much does this mistake represent?

3. Come clean: Trust comes from full disclosure and free-flowing information. This goes for all relationships, personal and professional. At least in my experience.

4. Get back on the polo horse: I don’t really get why he stipulated that it was a polo horse, but I’ll take it. Move on by moving on. Prove to everyone that this mistake doesn’t define you or your work.

This is very good advice and coupled with what I’m learning in college, it should help in at least assessing and projecting recovery tactics for PR blunders and mistakes. In my PR classes, my instructors have presented the “wrong” ways to do things and even given us some examples of easily avoidable blunders and then how they were mishandled. The media is full of such situations. I’ve even blogged about them (See “Let’s Rethink This”).

For example, let’s look at former aide to Barack Obama, Samantha Power and how her off-hand and insulting remarks toward Hilary Clinton cost her a comfortable advising position in Obama’s campaign when Hilary didn’t accept her apology. What’s worse is that she’s a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a Pulitzer prize-winning author. Apprently, in an interview with The Scotsman, a Scottish newspaper, she called Senator Clinton “a monster” in an off-the-record comment which the paper ended up publishing.

How was this mischief managed? She quit. She also went to the press.

According to the Irish television network RTE, Power told a reporter, when asked if she regretted her comments, “Of course I regret them, I can’t even believe they came out of my mouth.” She went on, [Sentator Clinton] is also incredibly warm, funny. I’ve spent time with her. I think that I just had a very weak moment in seeing some of the tactics, it seems, that were getting employed.”

This is all well and good, but let’s see how this fares in Keith Ferrazzi’s 4-step formula.

Did she:

1. Get some perspective? Yes – and she decided that this blunder would cost the Obama campaign more than her pride was worth. In the grand scheme of things, it mattered.
2. Assess and forgive herself? Sure. Or at least she’s getting there. Her press follow-up showed her remorse and regret over the situation and that she was looking to move forward.

3. Come clean? Well yes, the initial incriminating interview actually did that for her, and her above-mentioned press follow-up allowed her to own up to her mistake and apologize for it.

4. Get back on the polo horse? Well I don’t know. In an interview with the Boston Globe, she said that she resigned from her aide position to remove all of the distractions that her comments had brought on the campaign. That probably includes staying out of the public eye now that she’s had a chance to put an apology out through the press. I can’t find anything other than her RTE interview. If you can, please let me know via comment.

All things considered, I think Samantha Power handled it as well as anyone could. And now that I have some idea of how to handle mistakes, I hope to be inspired to drive my decision-making with my aspirations and goals rather than let it be bridled by my fears of screwing up. It seems to me that mistakes and the managing of them are essential experiences and that they can only benefit my understanding of PR and add to my ease as a future practitioner.

I can only hope Samantha Power eventually sees it that way if she doesn’t already.

*Image courtesy of PrAsanGaM via Flickr.

Romancing The Industry

I’ve never been the type to cry when pulled over by a police officer to get out of a ticket. I’d rather argue my way out of it and make the officer see my side of the situation. But I generally tend to approach situations with an emotional mindset strictly as a personality trait. It’s the way I’m wired. This doesn’t mean that each school project or friendship problem becomes a soap opera, but rather that I evaluate coping methods and work strategies in terms of how I’ll feel about it during and afterwards. Will I be proud of my work, will it stress me out and how will it affect my behavior and relationships with those in my life?

After reading David Armano’s blog disecting “The Novelty Curve” – a chart showing the stages of reactions to novelty, I had to wonder if my sensative approaches could breed success or foster fickleness in my profession. Is it better to tackle the industry with logic and reason or can I get by with ambition and emotion driving my decisions and actions? Will each project and client become a melodrama starting with infatuation and ending in boredom and intrapersonal friction?

The more I learn about public relations the more I see that “feelers” like me aren’t only welcome in the industry but necessary for success within it. Public relations revolves around the human experience and communication and networking. With every relationship built and every client gained, I must approach each opportunity with a fervor for human connection and interaction.

The danger that comes with emotion is that the business side of the industry is threatened by approaches that don’t hail from logic and reason. Public relations has so much to do with business to business relationships and then there’s that pesky saying “it’s not personal, it’s business”. Is there room for “feelers” in business-to-business PR ? In one of my PR classes, we’ve been discussing investor relations, and I’ve got to wonder, could I thrive in that field? Do they need what I’ve got to offer?

In the end, I can only hope that the logical tactics and strategies I’ve been taught and have yet to learn will be enhanced by my naturally emotional approaches and ultimately be useful in my future field. I don’t want a love affair with the idustry, I want a lasting, healthy, mutually-beneficial relationship based around communication, creativity, innovation and fidelity. Is that too much to ask?

*Image courtesy of www.enidlawsongallery.co.uk