“I started blogging in 2007 during my final year at Leeds Met. However, in Oct 2009 I wanted to change tact and produce something more social media orientated, in order to try and land a social media agency role. I’m a firm believer that having a sound grasp and recorded opinion on industry issues is a great way to differentiate yourself when job hunting.”
“I also wanted a fresh start using WordPress and to get away from the student angst posts e.g. will I get a PR job and focus more on wider industry issues. It has proven to be a wonderful place to collect my thoughts as was initially hoped, however one of the unintended consequences is that it has been an absolutely brilliant networking and personal PR tool.”
Communication students leaving university have never had so much opportunity as the current workplace.
This is generation that has grown up with the technology and the tools that so many businesses have yet to embrace. They already have many of the skills that agencies and communication teams are striving to build.
But there is more that the current generation of PR graduates could do to kickstart their PR careers. Developing and demonstrating your digital communication skills will improve your employment prospects and may even enable you to demand a higher starting salary than your less digital savvy counterparts.
This was my message to students on the International PR MA at the University of Cardiff. I ended my session yesterday with a three ideas for ways in which students could kickstart their careers.
Build personal online networks
Create a profile on LinkedIn and include details of your course and any work placements. Start to build a network with people on your course and contacts you make through work placements. Likewise Twitter. Build connections with future employers.
Generate content and conversations
Sunderland journalist student Josh Halliday’s SR2 hyperlocal blog is an extreme example of this strategy but no future employer is going to be left in any doubt of his skills. Demonstrate your expertise by contributing comment and content to hyper local blogs, forums and blogs.
10. Lifestreaming is bollocks Few people are interesting enough to make lifestreaming interesting but lifestreams do provide a good anthropological or historical record
8. Social web analytics key to proving value of PR Web analytics provides the PR industry with the tools to prove that a given input led to an output connect with the language and metrics of the marketing department
In the last 10 days I have had three different conversations with businesses that are using the social networks to gather commercial intelligence.
A corporate finance team in the middle of due diligence efforts that is tracking conversations on Twitter amongst staff and customers of a target investment
A Westminster lobby journalist tracking blog posts and tweets from prospective MPs in a bid to spot stories and build up candidate profiles in the run up to the election
A tech company tracking the product development efforts of a competitor by monitoring tweets by members of the product development team
The very act of socialising an organisation means individuals share their motivations and information that can be tracked and used by third parties to competitive advantage. Be warned.
I caught up with Greenbang.com’s Dan Ilett this week for breakfast. He’s a journalist and entrepreneur that is building a great business.
But he’s pissed off with PR people asking for stuff for free. It seems that PRs are starting to confuse the line between blog and commercial media outlet.
“Burston Marseteller (Shell’s PR company of choice) [emailed] asking if we’d be interested in a) providing feedback on [its] videos) and b) posting the videos here on Greenbang.”
This was followed in short order by a request from Lexus PR, the communications firm for energy giant EDF for Greebang to host PDFs on carbon management and energy buying.
I suggested to Dan that he follows the lead set by publications such as Techcrunch and sets out his rules of engagement with PR people in clear terms.
He’s since published a manifesto: embargos, freebies and paradigm shifting bollocks are out and valuable business news is the order of the day.
It allows anyone with Google account to annotate web pages in a sidebar enabled via the Google Toolbar. It also appears to pull in content related to blog page from Google blogs.
Comments are ordered using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries.
Here’s the irony: Google launched this tool to take control away from brands in the same week that Squidoo launched Brands in Public in a bid to bring control back to brands.
I think I know which of the two products will fly.
[…] writing about my neighbourhood worries me deeply. Because the people and shops and cafes are going to notice that you’re writing about them, and if you’re in any way critical they’ll know and glare at you, and you’re going to feel really bad.[…] There’s a difference between slagging off a restaurant you don’t intend to go back to and walking past the same place every day.
I’ve tried it and its not comfortable. There is no doubt hyper local media is viable and that local bloggers are able to provide the content and reach of a regional newspaper but the issues of personal anonymity and legal protection need be tackled.
Russell again.
[…] if hyperlocalism is going to work in the UK maybe it needs to be aggregated rather than authored (somehow, I’m not really sure what I mean by that) or it needs some imprimatur of professionalism that says “I’m just doing my job”.
The twin issues of personal exposure and the backup of a publisher need to be resolved if hyperlocal media is going to work.
Tim pulls together several aspects of network and communication theory and demonstrates how it is possible to plan and deliver predictable outcomes. He cites the example of a Facebook fan site and retrospectively shows how sign-ups follow a mathematical model.
It’s an important shift for the PR industry. Finally thanks to digital techniques we are able to take our place alongside other marketing discipline in being able to deliver and cost predictable outcomes.
Anthropologists and historians in the future looking back on the 21st century will have an easy job. A cross section of life is laid out in blogs, Flickr Twitter, Facebook and forums.
We’re micro-blogging more than ever but are blogging less.Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel are among the A list bloggers that have switched from blogging to so-called lifestreaming.
Ged Carroll notes that Robert Scoble has seen a dramatic drop in readership since his move towards lifestreaming.
Little wonder. Lifestreaming is dull. Most people simply don’t have interesting enough lives. At best it’s a sequential record of random events recorded in a sentence or an image. To claim its anything else misses the point.
My use of Flickr is the closest I get to lifestreaming. To anyone outside my immediate network of family and friends my stream of images is boring as hell. But I make no apologies. It’s a personal record and it’s not intended to engage.
Ged reckons that blogging has passed through the hype cycle and is maturing. He’s spot on.
“Over the past ten years or so, we have seen blogging climb to what can be reasonably considered to be a peak of unrealistic expectations and it could be considered to heading towards a trough of disillusionment.”
Likewise Stuart Bruce says blogging – not lifestreaming – is the way forward if you want to develop thought leadership. He makes the point that blogs are far more Google friendly than micro-blogs.
Regular readers of my blog will know that I occasionally depart from my PR brief and blog about collocation in London and Northumberland, my family, chickens and rural issues. I am delighted to report that I now have a more sophisticated channel.
As a contributor I’ve been provided with a set of content guidelines and invited to post local news and information.
Northumberland editor Graeme Whitfield provides a light editorial touch and readers are encouraged to comment on posts and submit their own content.
Each micro-site each carries sponsored links, local ads and Google ads. It’s a smart model that returns regional media to its grassroots embedded within communities.
Could the Journal founded in 1852 be developing the new model for regional media?
The GoogleTalk widget on the right hand of my blog has become a useful feature of my blog. It provides a presence indicator whenever I am logged on to the Internet and allows people to make contact with me via an IM chat window. At least two or three people per week use it as a way of reach me and my daughters use it all the time to make contact whenever I’m away from home. Or they did.
But now it’s broken and either says that I’m offline when I’m not or spews out a 404 error. I’ve switched it off. Brendan Cooper who was good enough to show me how to add the widget to my blog has had experienced exactly the same problem. Neither of us has been able to figure out why the application isn’t working.
It’s another lesson in why you shouldn’t rely on free tools for business applications. Until it’s fixed you can reach me via IM, email or phone me on 020 7842 3200. And if you’ve any idea how to fix the widget please let me know.
Political upheaval in Fiji triggered by the repeal of the constitution has seen foreign journalists sent home and state censors placed in the editorial offices of all publishers.
The country’s media is not allowed to report news that is critical of the ruling regime. Publishers initially responded by publishing blank pages (image via Jachin Sheehy’s Flickr stream) until closure threats resulted in state reporting.
Journalists outside of Fiji are left unsure as to how to separate news from rumour and opinion and we’re back to debate about the role of bloggers versus journalists but in the absence of a news vacuum in Fijian bloggers are playing an important role.
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I caught up with Greenbang.com’s ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=47eaa48b-dc18-4f3d-bbe3-2ae0430263b9)
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Regular readers of my blog will know that I occasionally depart from my PR brief and blog about collocation in London and Northumberland, my family, ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a221747f-5f61-44f4-9fd6-a107eb45f494)
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