By Paul Vetter, Vice President

While most of my 22-year career has been spent at PR firms, I recently returned to agency life after stints with a trade association and a major corporation.  It’s great to be back — from my perspective, working at a strong agency is the best way to stay at the forefront of our fast-changing industry, no matter what stage you’re at in your career. 

Aaron Brown’s recent posts about his visits with PRSSA chapters around the region got me thinking about what it takes to get a PR career started these days.  If you’re starting to think about that all-important first job, how do you evaluate which environment would be right for you — agency? corporate? nonprofit? For people early in their PR careers, I’m a strong advocate for getting into the agency game.  It comes down to variety — the opportunity to learn and keep learning. 

Variety of work. At the early stage of your career, you’re still finding out where you really excel. You want to make sure you get a mix of writing, media contact, brand strategy, event planning, social media, and more. In my experience, agency work draws upon a wider range of skills — it’s all about what the client needs, today (if not yesterday!). That breadth of experience can help you discover strengths to build upon — and weak areas to be developed.

Variety of companies and industries. Maybe it’s my background as a journalist, but I enjoy the opportunity to learn about — and master — new subjects by researching and writing about them. I’d encourage every aspiring PR pro to develop the wide-ranging curiosity of a good reporter. I’m interested in anything ‘green,’ and over the past few months I’ve had the opportunity to explore a wide range of issues, from the global e-waste crisis to energy efficiency of data centers (I’m kind of a B2B/tech geek — what can I say?)  Maybe it’s just adult-onset ADD, but I find it refreshing (and fun) to dig into new topics. And I think it gives me a broader perspective in addressing whatever challenge comes next.

Variety of colleagues. In my agency career, I’ve had the chance to work with dozens of top-notch professionals from a wide range of backgrounds. I’ve tried to learn at least a little bit from every one of them.  With the right attitude, every day is a graduate school seminar — except you get paid.

Ultimately, resolving the corporate vs. agency vs. nonprofit issue is a highly personal decision. The old joke is that it’s genetic; some people do seem to be naturally pre-disposed for one over the other.  I’m glad I had a chance to launch my career at an agency — and after several years away, I’m glad to be back.

By Aaron Brown, Associate Vice President

I always get excited when clients want their executives to go through a media relations course because it confirms the importance of this strategy in business management. I like that Steven Sonsino of Bloggeron.com notes that one of the top three reasons why CEOs fail is because they “forget the damage media pressure can cause.”

I recently put together a media relations course for a client and I decided that the most effective way to get my points across is to use insights straight from the horses’ mouths. Don’t worry, members of the media, you’re Triple Crown-winning horses.

I reached out to a small group of some of my favorite business-to-business trade magazine editors to obtain specific insights from them that would be beneficial to the course. It was a non-scientific survey through Zoomerang, and the questions could probably have been more specific; however, the results did confirm some really good tips, tactics and approaches for media relations. Here are tips and insights from the 10 editors/reporters who responded to the short questionnaire:

• Sixty-percent of the editors say their best executive resources always have an opinion worth sharing. While this shouldn’t come as a surprise, it is a reminder that if you want to see your name in print more than once, you’re going to have to be prepared with relevant insights that warrant intrigue from the editor and his or her readers.
• Seven of the 10 editors prefer executive resources who can connect them with additional relevant and informed sources. It’s always good to have a close group of allies who can reinforce or complement the points you’re making.
• If you want to share marketing-centric messages, buy an ad. This group’s biggest pet peeve about interviews? It’s when the so-called expert provides answers that seem as if they were right from a marketing brochure. Bring a unique perspective that is bigger than your product or service, or don’t bother.
• Get in their Rolodex, get noticed and stay relevant. When these B2B writers sit down to start figuring out how they’re going to fill three pages of content, they don’t look too far for resources - they look to their existing contacts first and then the people they see, meet and interact with at industry events. Only one of them starts with news releases when looking for stories. Blogger Glyn Yarnall goes into some more detail about how media relations is more than just a news release.

I’ll save the rest of the specific insights for the media relations course. If you want some more general tips, check out the Publicity Hound for some good perspectives. In the meantime, be sure to use these tips wisely. I’ve promised this group of respondents that the ROI on their time for the survey will be seen in better interviews!

By Neil Mortine, President, Fahlgren Mortine Public Relations

I was lying on the floor in the hallway near the restrooms last week, pretending to be dead and waiting for the first associate to find me. This is not the first time I’ve done this in the office. Over the years I’ve also lurked in dark basements to terrify staffers sent there on bogus errands, jumped out of closets, hidden under desks, fallen down staircases, worn an assortment of costumes, and generally made the month of October (or Shocktober as I like to call it) a frightening gauntlet for our associates to endure.

Why do I do these things? The convenient excuse of Halloween doesn’t really hold because such activity occurs throughout the year. And clearly there are psychological issues involved. I think the real reason for such shenanigans, however, is to let our people know that it is not only acceptable to have fun in the workplace but indeed it is critical to our success.

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By Jenny Fuerst, Director, Corporate Communications

Now that our creative group and interior designers have agreed on the color palette, furniture and accessories that best reflect the Fahlgren brand (nothing short of a miracle!), and now that most of us have figured out our new phone system and conference room technologies (another miracle), we thought it was time to officially break in the place with more than 500 of our closest friends. So, we did — in true Fahlgren style.

On October 1, we hosted our open house in our new headquarters at Easton Town Center. If you were able to join us, hopefully you enjoyed a tour of our new 30,000 square feet of space, learned about all of our environmentally friendly design initiatives and got your fill of appetizers and refreshments complete with sushi, a dessert bar and a full offering of beverages. And, if you weren’t able to attend, we hope you can come see us soon. Either way, take a peek at the pics from our special event.

We moved to our new office space at Easton this July, and we were able to combine our more than 120 employees who were in two Columbus offices (Fahlgren Mortine Public Relations and Fahlgren Advertising) under one roof in the heart of this retail Mecca. The location makes sense considering that much of our business is about engaging consumers and helping our clients sell goods and services.

You don’t have to take it from me what a great new space we have. Check out what Advergirl had to say about our new digs and our open house festivities, and feel free to let us know what you thought of the party and new HQs.

By Lara Kretler, Associate Vice President

Recently we teamed up with our friends at Webbed Marketing to present a free webinar about using Twitter for business. It was well attended and we got great feedback afterward, so we’re sure to partner on more webinars in the future.

In the meantime, you can view and download the Twitter presentation at SlideShare, where it is a featured presentation on the home page this week. If you haven’t visited SlideShare before, it’s a fantastic resource and truly allows you to access the “deep web” - information, statistics and entire presentations you would not be able to find using a search engine.

Is there a topic you’d like to see Webbed Marketing and Fahlgren Mortine tackle for our next webinar? Let us know. We’ll post all future webinar details here so you can sign up to attend.