On to more questions.

Q. What is the PR industry’s reputation today? How do other industries view Public Relations as a practice? Is PR being taken seriously everywhere? How has this changed in the past few years (if at all)?

A. I’ll answer this two ways. First, and this is just my personal approach to life – not just public relations – I don’t spend any time contemplating or thinking too much about how people view public relations. I’m usually too busy working to think about what someone may or may not think of the public relations industry. And the reality is that there will always be negative people, and I long ago realized that life’s just too short to spend much time trying to change people’s opinions about public relations – or politics.

Second, you can point to a wide number of public “scandals” that people blame on public relations. BP’s numerous communication mistakes after the Gulf oil spill. The current Penn State crisis (I’d be willing to be there was a PR person involved at some point – giving horrible advice on preserving Penn State’s “image.”) There are PR mistakes made every single day, just as there are business mistakes made every day, journalism/reporting mistakes made every day, etc.

Those mistakes should not – and frankly – don’t define the industry as a whole. Do they give PR a black eye? Absolutely. Do they invalidate all the honest, hard PR work going on every day, nope.

For me, it all boils down to what I bring to the table for the companies I work with. Companies, especially, startups live inside a bubble. That bubble is necessary to design software, sling code, and ship product. However, that bubble leads companies to believe that they’re doing life-changing, totally revolutionary work. While that might be the case, reporters need and thrive on context. Where does company X fit into the overall industry landscape, what about their product is truly unique, and what is similar to competitors?

It’s my job to work with companies to tell a compelling story about their product or service within the context of the overall industry and the overall news conversation of the week or month. To me, that’s honest, fun work, and I sleep soundly every night regardless of what some person or persons may be ranting about the ills of the PR industry.

Q. What is the most valuable skill for recent PR grads looking for a job today?

A. I touched on this in my earlier post answering these questions. My biggest piece of advice, and I can’t stress it enough is DON’T WAIT.

If you’ve investigated PR, and you think you’d like to work in the industry, DON’T WAIT.

DON’T WAIT – for professors to insist that you be well read and well-informed on daily news. Even if you plan to go into celebrity or entertainment PR, every PR professional should be reading every single day – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today (at a minimum). Those newspapers, along with the Washington Post and LA Times drive the news conversations of the day and the week.

If you’re reading newspapers and blogs every single day, you can start to make connections and see how the companies and organizations you’re working for can fit into the ongoing news conversation.

DON’T WAIT – to learn digital content creation. Build a blog. If you don’t consider yourself technical, there are literally tons of online tutorials for people who are “non-technical”. Figure out what you’re interested in, and start writing about, recording video commentaries, start an audio podcast. Begin building your audience today. Those skills will be invaluable and required for PR professionals.

DON’T WAIT – to get PR experience. Sure, pursue internships and participate fully in any classroom assignments, but you can start gaining PR experience today. In every town, in every city, there are tons of worthwhile organizations – charities, non-profits – desperate for PR help. Help them build or revamp their website. Volunteer to help them with their Twitter, Facebook, Google+ strategies. Help introduce them to local media and local news reporters. Write press releases for them.

Classroom experience is valuable, but in-the-trenches PR experience and learning how to build an audience online and interact with that audience are invaluable talents and skills that will help you gain your first job in PR – and succeed and thrive over the long haul.

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In late 2009, Wertz created a H.J. Heinz, yes the ketchup company, twitter account and proceeded to twitter on behalf of Heinz – links to recipes, bits of history about the company. He followed people in Pittsburgh, Heinz’s hometown, and people who included the word “Heinz” in their tweets, and he started to build a following.

And, oh yeah, he was never authorized by Heinz to create a Twitter account or to tweet on their behalf. After two weeks, Wertz logged into Twitter and found his account changed from @HJ_Heinz to @notHJ_Heinz. Today, if you’re curious and try to find the @HJ_Heinz account, they’ve protected their tweets. What?

Some might read my headline above and think it’s misleading. They were listening and they responded. “They contacted Twitter and had this yahoo booted after two weeks.” Two weeks? Time in social media is measured in dog years. Two weeks is the equivalent of about 6 months.

I’m curious. If Wertz had been tweeting links to unsanitary uses of ketchup, would Heinz have responded faster?

Yes, someone at Heinz was listening, despite their slow response. But, what if you’re working at a company that can’t afford a social media monitoring dashboard? What if you’re a small, locally-owned business that wants to make sure you know what people are saying about your business online, yet you don’t want to spend hours each day manually doing searches on Twitter to monitor the conversation.

Learning how to set up a real-time Twitter monitoring system isn’t new. Chris Brogan wrote about in January 2009, and you should definitely check out his article. But, technology changes, and I have some updates to Brogan’s great suggestions.

How to set up a real-time Twitter monitoring system:

1. Go to Twitter Search.

2. Search on your business name.

3. On the results page of your Twitter search, notice the orange RSS button in the upper right hand corner of the page with the text, “Feed for this query.” Click on that button.

4. Copy and paste the RSS feed URL, and then go to Feed My Inbox, and subscribe to that feed. For $5 per month, you can subscribe to 25 feeds and get real-time feed updates. If you choose that option, you will get an email, in real-time, each time your business name shows up in Twitter. If real-time updates overwhelm you, you can easily change them to once-a-day updates.

5. Go back to step 1, and create a new feed with the name of your town, the type of business you’re in, (Mexican restaurant, plumber) combined with another word, “hates, crap, love, wonderful, question, recommend” and you can create multiple feeds, each one of them subscribed to via Feed My Inbox.

6. As Chris Brogan pointed out, you can use this type of system in a variety of online monitoring tools, including Google Alerts, Icerocket (for monitoring blog conversations), etc.

Are you monitoring the Twitter conversation about your company and your local industry? Can you afford not to?

Photo credit – Nick Fraser

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