5 Ways to Survive Your First Year as a PR Pro

By Alyssa Bedrosian

Graduating from college and diving headfirst into the world of public relations can be scary. No matter how many internships you had or how great your professors were, you will never be fully prepared for your first full-time position at an agency or an in-house communications department. Managing client relationships, mastering the pitch, and working effectively in a team are skills that you learn on the job – not in a classroom.
However, there are some concrete ways you can prepare for your first year in PR. As a young professional myself, I’ve learned how to navigate the industry and come out successful, even when that meant getting a few bumps and bruises along the way. Here are some of my tips for those entering the field:
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Don’t Get Your Torch Snuffed: Communications Lessons from Survivor

By Adam Bowers

For the past 14 years, there have been two days each year that I look forward to more than Christmas: the fall and spring premiers of Survivor. The season 29 premier was one of those nights. While most seasons include some kind of twist (this season’s twist has the castaways playing with and against family members), every season essentially begins the same way: the castaways land on the island, exchange awkward “hellos,” attempt to build a shelter and make fire, compete in a challenge, and then decide who will receive the humiliating distinction of being the first person voted out.
After watching 28 seasons of the show, it’s easy to guess who that first person voted out is going to be. The most likely contenders are always contestants who are either obnoxious or threatening in some way. SPOILER ALERT: The person voted off in the episode two nights ago, Nadiya, was a little of both.
The truth is, most of the castaways who get voted out early could greatly benefit from some simple communications counsel. Here are 3 communications lessons from Survivor that could help you not get “voted out” of a job, team or business deal:

The Loudest Voice Doesn’t Always Win

On Survivor, the loudest person nearly always assumes an initial “leadership” role because he or she steam-rolls other competing voices by sheer virtue of volume. He or she assumes this role for about three days, but then is quickly voted out because the tribe mates are tired of hearing him or her talk.
In the real world, this happens too. How often does the loudest person in a meeting dictate the conversation, only to annoy every other person who has something to say, but can’t? How often do companies think they can sell a product or service by sheer volume of ads? The most effective communicators know that the message itself is far more important than the volume at which it is said.

Sometimes, Your Audience Doesn’t Care

The domineering loudmouths who get voted off the island first never see it coming. They can’t believe their fellow castaways didn’t want their advice on how the shelter should be built or where the fire pit should be established. They assume that everyone was sitting on the edges of their seats, just waiting to hear their next piece of sage-like wisdom. They don’t realize that their audience was never interested in their thoughts in the first place.
When crafting a message in the corporate world, it is imperative to know how receptive or primed your audience is for the message. If they aren’t receptive at all, your strategy shouldn’t be to beat them over the head with the message until they happily receive it. Seeing two back-to-back GEICO ads in a commercial break doesn’t make me more likely to make that 15-minute call and switch to GEICO; it just annoys me. In cases where your audience isn’t ready to hear what you’ve got to say, it may be better to start with a conversation that gauges what they are interested in hearing. For example, you might do this by interacting with your followers on social media, listening to their opinions and then adapting your message based on what you hear.

Positioning is Crucial

For Survivor contestants like Nadiya, who get voted out largely because they are considered a threat, their demise is largely due to an inability to position themselves well to their fellow players. In this case, Nadiya might not have been voted out if she had positioned herself as a reality show expert, with the know-how to get her alliance far into the game. Instead, she seemed unconcerned about her tribe’s perceptions and failed to play up her strengths. Obviously, this mistake cost her.
In marketing, positioning is crucial. The foundation of any campaign should involve research to understand where you fit within your market, what your audiences’ needs are, and what messages will be well-received by key stakeholders. Only with the right strategic positioning will you truly thrive in your sector.
Ultimately, Survivor is a show about communication. The players that win understand their audiences, know which messages their fellow contestants want to hear and recognize how to best deliver them. One of the most enjoyable parts about watching the show is witnessing the truly great communicators at work (and also seeing the terrible ones crash, burn and get their torches snuffed).
Photo courtesy of Kristin Dos Santos’ Flickr photostream.

The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier: A Guide on Personal Branding for Recent Graduates

By Alexandra Obradovich

Over the past four years of college I have read plenty of assigned books. Yet, with graduation right around the corner, I can only recall one text that I expect to have a constant impact on my future career. The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier was initially written to help businesses bridge the distance between strategy and design, although the disciplines outlined in this book directly relate to personal branding and my immediate job search.
“A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is,” is one of the first concepts introduced in the book. A brand is defined as a gut feeling about a product, service, person, or company and although people have power over their messaging they do not have control over how others will perceive their brand.
The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier can help recent graduates determine how to leverage their skills and education by exercising five key disciplines required to form an influential brand.

Discipline 1: Differentiate

Before a recent graduate can build a successful brand he or she needs to be able to answer three questions:

Who are you?
What do you do?
Why does it matter?

Professionals with established brands already have (hopefully) compelling answers for all three questions. Answering these questions can help to uncover flaws in focus, self-image, and outsider perception. By effectively communicating strengths and skills, young professionals can develop a strong argument for why they should be hired. Important competitive advantages lie in understanding who you are, what you do, and why it matters.

Discipline 2: Collaborate

Brands don’t develop in isolation. Instead they are a direct result of interactions between people over a long period of time. Building a brand is a collaborative effort that requires contributions from an entire community. For recent graduates, that branding community is a direct result of their networking efforts, like utilizing university career services or reaching out to industry professionals. As Neumeier says: “It takes a village to build a brand.”

Discipline 3: Innovate

In The Brand Gap, Neumeier introduces an idea called the innovator’s mantra: When everyone zigs, zag. Young professionals need to “abandon the comforts of habit, reason, and the approval of peers, and strike out in new directions.” In order to stand out from a sea of applicants recent graduates must attract employers through innovative approaches. “And how do you know when an idea is innovative? When it scares the hell out of you.”

Discipline 4: Validate

Neumeier describes the old model of communication as a monologue. This model fails to recognize that real world communication is instead a dialogue. Neumeier stresses that to transform a brand, feedback is necessary. As a young professional it is important to request feedback about your performance from your boss at work, internship supervisor, or university professor. Feedback can be immediate and unambiguous, which lets your personal brands adapt and make necessary changes.

Discipline 5: Cultivate

Within this disciple, Neumeier introduces the concept of a living brand. He states that a living brand is a dynamic experience. The most successful professionals are the ones that are continually adapting to changes in their industry, economy, and culture. Same goes for brands.

March Madness: 3 Lessons for PR and Marketing Professionals Straight from the Court

By Victoria Dolan

Most basketball fans can sum up this year’s NCAA basketball tournament in one word: surprising. Losses by Duke University and Ohio State University in the first round resulted in real “March Madness” and broken brackets for many avid basketball fans. Whether you researched team histories, banked on expert opinions or viewed every game personally, there were not many advantages to be had building your brackets this season.
Depending on current standings, predictions and status quos can hurt PR and marketing strategies too. Here are some lessons that translate from the basketball court to the communications world:

Leverage your victories.

Relish in the glory but don’t let your winner’s high distract from building relationships or converting customers. Awards, media mentions and successful rankings are the perfect time to reach out to nonbelievers and show them why your product or service beats the competition. After UCONN’s victory over Michigan State, the team President Obama had picked to win the national title, @UCONNHuskies tweeted: “Sorry about busting your bracket @BarackObama… We have room on our bandwagon if you’re interested.” A little humor never hurt anyone, right? Engaging with them then might not convert them right away, but it can help build a better relationship in the long run.

Just because you are seeded #1 does not guarantee winning the title.

Michigan State was seeded #4 and was defeated by UCONN who was seeded #7. Kentucky was seeded #8 in the Midwest Region and has made it to the Final Four. Your product or service may be accredited “the best” in the industry today, but tomorrow is another day and there’s a good chance that the competition is trying to show that they are just as good, if not better, than you. Continuously innovate and challenge yourself to exceed your customers’ expectations because being too comfortable with your current bragging rights can lead to failure in the end.

Be aware of ALL your competition.

Know, observe and track all of the teams you’re playing against. Today’s underdog could be tomorrow’s fiercest rival. Follow their marketing campaigns, new product releases and developments, news coverage and social media interactions. Keeping tabs on their strategies will not only show you what works and doesn’t work, but will also keep you a step ahead of the game.

Photo courtesy of Luis Blanco’s Flickr photostream.

The Psychology of Marketing and Branding

By David French
My latest read, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, has spurred considerable thought about the branding and marketing work we do for clients. What are “good” design, appropriate colors and the right copy messages? Do subconscious forces influence our work?
The book by Adam Alter, assistant professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, delves into the subtle, unnoticed cues that influence our decisions, behaviors and even our success in life. If you’re unfamiliar with the shade of pink referenced in the title, it’s a vivid, bubblegum shade. Researchers in the 1970s and 1980s found that it significantly calmed children in Canadian schools. They wondered whether the same effect might occur when aggressive people were exposed to the color, so the walls of drunk tanks and jail cells were painted pink. You can guess the result.
I’m pleased to say that RLF has done quite a lot of excellent, award-winning branding and marketing work, directed by our stalwart and experienced creative director, Ron Irons. I sat with him for a few minutes to talk about how we use color, design and copy to support and build brands. I learned that creative direction is less about unseen forces and more about strategy and creativity with a dash of intuition.
“We’re not using colors, shapes and copy concepts to manipulate. At the most basic level we’re trying to help audiences understand a brand, its personality and what it promises to deliver,” he said. “But a fair amount of intuition—you could say the subconscious—does influence design and creative execution for a brand. Plus, I’ve been at it for many years, so experience counts, too.”
Take color, for example. For a client whose business is to educate and enlighten, we recommended the dominant color be shades of yellow—the color of sunlight and illumination. For another who’s in financial services, we used grays, blacks and muted colors to communicate solid, secure, and stable.
Shapes and spacial arrangement of design elements are important, too, to emphasize and clearly communicate what’s important—and to get noticed. As a brand is marketed and promoted, very often those shapes alone carry the entire brand message. Logos and symbols, for example, if property executed can become memorable. Think the Nike “swoosh”—in executions where it’s the only element, it’s immediately recognizable to millions around the world.
Elements like headlines and tags, and copy are the third consideration. Under Ron’s direction, we strive for high creativity, yet keeping it simple and pragmatic. “If the message isn’t easily grasped and understood by the intended audience, then it becomes noise,” he said. “You can be creative without being complex. And that holds true for all elements of design. They are the tools that provide a visual and verbal context, working together to communicate the core brand message.”
As a “non-creative,” I expected to draw more parallels between the thoughts presented in Drunk Tank Pink and marketing/branding creative. I have to say after talking to Ron, I’m not disappointed that there are few, if any. I’m gratified—and clients can be, as well—that building effective brands is based on strategy, creativity…and a lot of experience.

The Power of Pinterest

By Kara Frasca
The power of Pinterest for companies is in its ability to connect with current and potential customers, and ultimately drive those customers to make purchases. Not only is the site the third-largest source of referral traffic online, but Pinterest traffic converted into a sale 22 percent more times than Facebook traffic. To top it off, a whopping 70 percent of Pinterest users utilize the social media site for inspiration on what to buy. That’s 17.5 million of its 25 million members.

So Pinterest is an extremely powerful marketing tool, but is it right for your brand? Unless you’re targeting women between the ages of 25 and 54, the answer is “no.” Eighty percent of Pinterest users are women, and 50 percent of all users have children. Lifestyle brands typically have the best luck on Pinterest, but that doesn’t mean that a company selling dental insurance has no chance at Pinterest success. It’s all about creating good content and appealing to your target audience.
In order for companies to reap the benefits of Pinterest, it is vital that they follow these steps:

Pin often to win

By remaining fresh in a user’s newsfeed, a company has a better chance of capturing attention, and ideally, connecting users to its website. To save time and improve results, use a scheduling tool. Pingraphy and Curalate are two scheduling tools that also offer analytics. Saturday morning is the best time to reach pinners, so schedule more pins on that day to reach more people.

Crop your images

Because a user sees many different images from different sources in her feed, your pins will be competing with many others’ for attention. Statistics show that pins with taller images get pinned more, so it is vital to crop your images vertically. This cropped format matches Pinterest’s vertical scroll layout and your images will be more likely to catch the attention of users.

Optimize, welcome and convert

Fifty percent of users access Pinterest through a mobile app. In order to reach this demographic, companies must optimize their pin-linked websites for mobile devices. The website must load fast, be easy to read and navigate, and require minimal scrolling.
Since its inception in 2008, Pinterest has grown to become a leading social media platform for both businesses and consumers. That popularity is only increasing. By harnessing its attributes and incorporating these tips into your Pinterest strategy, you can further brand awareness in an effective way.
Have you achieved Pinterest success with your brand? What tips can you share?