Category: Public Relations

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My Journey to Public Relations

Picture of a teal typewriter on a wooden table with a cup of coffee, pens and stationary by it.

It was late June of 2003 when my life changed. I remember the day well. It was warm. The sun has just ascended to its zenith and my family was saying their goodbyes to old friends. Aside from the teary farewells, it felt like any other day. I certainly did not expect to part from the familiar vendors at local markets, the chaotic streets shared by motorcyclists and rickshaw drivers, the Mekong Delta that cuts through my little town, or my loved ones in Vietnam to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to an unknown world called America.

The first year in the states was rough. I didn’t know a single word, not even hello. I wanted to learn the foreign tongue to be able to tell the lunch lady I didn’t want the thawing peaches or gray grapes. I wanted to get a perfect score on spelling quizzes and reading assignments. I wanted to make good friends. I wanted to become a part of the new culture that I felt estranged to.

I remember spending every day forcing myself to read. I started with easy books like the “Junie B. Jones” series and Dr. Seuss. Eventually, I worked my way up to more difficult texts like “The Magic Treehouse” and “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” The drive that I developed from familiarizing myself with English led to my love of literature and rhetoric. I learned the value of language. It paved my way to majoring in journalism with an interest in public relations and minoring in creative writing.

I chose public relations because I loved to tell stories. An admiration for storytelling is crucial in the public relations and journalism field. Public relations practitioners must translate a client’s core message to a public, in other words, telling the client’s narrative. My background in learning a new language and the skill set I gathered from creative writing help me succeed in public relations and being an editor for Tehama Group Communications.

If you share this appreciation and deep-rooted interest for language and capturing a narrative, then give the field of public relations a consideration. Ever since I’ve been a part of the Tehama Group Communications team, my writing skills has improved and my love for language has grown to new heights.

By: Kim Nguyen

Image provided by Pexles

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How Being a Student Athlete Makes Me a Quick Hitter in the PR World

Anna Baytosh hitting a volleyball over the net

The ball drops.

 

In a single moment, the curtain falls on my career as a collegiate athlete. As my teammates saunter onto the court to wish the opposing team a good game, a feeling of accomplishment and pride overwhelms me, despite my team’s loss in the conference championship.

 

In this moment, I suddenly realize that I have spent the last nine years of my life playing a sport that is essentially a glorified version of “don’t let the balloon touch the floor.”

 

Fear not!

 

I have avoided dwelling over this life-changing event by focusing my efforts on the exciting path ahead.

 

I proudly accepted a job as an account executive and editor for Tehama Group Communications. At first, I’m sure the staff was hesitant to let a Wildcat loose in the office, but I’m pretty confident that I’ve gained everyone’s trust by now.

 

So, in the burgeoning days of this new life direction, I have consolidated my learned experiences as a collegiate athlete into four main skills that have guided me as a public relations professional:

 

 

  • Time management

 

I invite anyone who claims it is impossible to balance a social life, sleep schedule and heavy course load to consider the extra stress of an athletic commitment. Picture juggling these essentials while also enduring a weekly 12 hours of practice, three hours of weightlifting, two hours of analyzing game film and extensive travel on the weekends. Knowing how to manage your time and prioritize your tasks is vital when tackling the fast-paced world of PR.

 

 

  • Communication

 

Whether it is telling a teammate to focus on the game or asking a writer to reword a sentence, effective communication is key. In order to communicate clearly and effectively, you must keep in mind the current situation, everyone involved and all potential outcomes. Understanding how patience, tone and empathy are required to be a good communicator helps me collaborate with clients and team members of various personality types and backgrounds.

 

 

  • Leadership

 

Take this gaggle of girls and help them transition into a dependable, organized and motivated team. Molding the future faces of any program is an unspoken task bestowed upon every senior in his or her final season. In order to be a good leader, you must vocalize group strengths and weaknesses in a direct and respectful way while simultaneously leading by example. This is crucial now that I lead my own team of writers and creatives toward multiple project goals.

 

 

  • Adaptability

 

It’s no secret that coaches appreciate adaptable players who are comfortable performing within a constantly changing landscape. If they tell you to run the darn play again, you do it with no hesitation. Quickly analyze the last play, figure out how to fix it, then execute immediately because another ball is coming your way now. Being adaptable in the world of PR is absolutely essential in an environment that moves furiously fast, where new problems arise by the minute. A happy client is synonymous to a happy coach, and both are integral to a successful and gratifying outcome.

By: Anna Baytosh

Photo provided by Chico State Sports Information Department

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How Public Relations Contributes to my Side Business

Nick DJaying in at a nightclub in Chico

When I am not speaking in front of the agency, writing press releases or taking trips to the coffee machine, I can be found with two turntables and a microphone making crowds of anywhere from 100 to over 1000 people put their hands in the air.

 

I am incredibly lucky to make a profit on the weekends doing what I love. My range of clientele as a disc jockey ranges from weddings, nightclubs and private events. I am able to do this every weekend due to my knowledge in public relations. When the lights turn off, the crowd is silent and the record stops spinning, I am locked away creating media lists, pitching to local venues and strategizing my next big night. Promotion is a huge part of the DJ business and knowing social media strategy is vital if you want to have any chance at succeeding.

 

Branding yourself is also just as important. Your voice on your social media must appeal to the right demographic in order to get a response. Also, you must keep your clients happy because they are the ones that pay you. In PR the same concept applies when working for a company. You can only hit the right demographic with the right voice, branding and social media. Only then will your client’s profits begin to advance.

 

Signing contracts with a client for a wedding or an event is very similar to working with clients in Tehama Group Communications. The first meeting consists of getting to know the client and learning about their vision for their event. Just like being an account executive, as a DJ it is my job to make that vision become a reality.

 

This hobby is an opportunity that not many people have and has taught me how to read and respond to an audience.

Nick Djaying at The Beach Nightclub in Chico

By: Nick Rizzo

Both photos provided by: Emily Hilbers

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The Difference Between B2B vs. B2C Public Relations

Two people shaking hands over brown table, there is a woman taking notes and there are several other documents on the table. It seems like they are closing a deal and there is also a laptop on the table.

A public relations specialist is often referred to as a jack- of- all- trades because when it comes to PR there are a wide variety of skills you master in order to be successful. Just like there are many different skills you must have as a PR specialist, you must also be well versed in the different areas of the industry.

When you think of public relations, the first thing that comes to mind is B2C PR whether you realize it or not. Although B2C is more commonly thought of, B2B PR is just as important. There are many differences between the two ranging from their goals to their influencers, but these differences can be boiled down to who the audience is and how they are targeted.

Essentially all sectors in PR benefit from B2B and B2C PR whether its lifestyle, health, food or tech. So, what’s the difference?

Business to Business

  • Targets specific business audience
  • Emphasizes building trust & credibility within a brand
  • Focuses on selling products between two businesses
  • Sells the business

Business to Consumer

  • Targets general public
  • Promotes a product or service
  • Creates strong brand awareness
  • Sells a product

So why is B2B PR just as important as B2C, if not more? B2B is extremely relationship driven. It focuses on building your brand’s credibility and enhancing your company’s reputation with potential business partners and investors. B2B also aims to position your company uniquely and add value to your brand. Without it, it’s easy for your company to get lost in a sea of competitors.

B2C PR uses emotion to convince consumers they need a product. Consumers are driven by trends, price and desire. On the other hand, businesses are driven by profitability and decreasing costs. B2B PR focuses on providing substantial content and educating their audience to help them make an informed purchasing decision.

Regardless of their differences, their underlying need for PR is the same.

By Salma Hegab

Image provided by Pixabay.com

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Study Abroad and Public Relations

A picture of a beautiful European building with words edited onto the picture that reads "Study Abroad and Public Relations"

The passport to public relations and communications is global. In a career that involves understanding everyone’s point of view and background, it is crucial to immerse ourselves well outside of our comfort zones.

Growing up with a Latin heritage in California gave me a general idea of a few cultural differences between two neighboring countries. However, it wasn’t until I visited Europe for the first time in the summer of 2017 that I received some of the biggest culture shock of my life. I found that the things that helped me most on my first solo journey were my willingness to adapt and ability to understand the environment.

Whether I was sitting on the sidewalk with my favorite tapas in Barcelona or watching well-dressed people bustle up and down the Underground in London, I couldn’t help but appreciate the different ways of life I would see in each city. Their unique lifestyles taught me the importance of understanding your audience in public relations. This reflects on how to choose your social media content, and understand your target audience, but most importantly, in my discovery for a passion in learning all about how the citizens of the world function, I found my calling. Travel public relations. I want to help people break down their own borders and come away with a life changing experience that is all their own.

My father got me a passport when I was five years old, and made the effort to take us somewhere new every year. I was lucky enough to travel across Mexico and Canada, but now I’m ready to be global citizen and public relations professional.

By:Roxanna Necoechea

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Ad Campaigns Promote Body Positivity

A woman with tattoos and her hair in a pony tail kissing her boxing gloves

Companies are launching dynamic PR campaigns designed to motivate women to achieve greatness, whether it is being comfortable with their bodies or challenging gender stereotypes. Here are four ad campaigns that have positively impacted women of all ages:

 

  • Aerie launched Real in spring 2014, an ad campaign that refrained from retouching photographs of their models. Studies show that unrealistic, airbrushed representations of women’s bodies are negatively impacting women’s body image. This campaign was designed to show that diverse types of bodies are beautiful and change the perception that beautiful bodies are thin bodies. In addition to building young women’s self-esteem, it also boosted their sales 20 percent the first year alone.

 

  • The 2014 #LikeAGirl campaign by Always worked to challenge gender stereotypes placed upon young girls. Research shows that as young girls reach puberty, their self-esteem plummets. The campaign battled this issue by highlighting photos of strong, confident girls, in an effort to reframe girls unrealistic ideas about the “ideal body.”  This campaign is generating long-term brand loyalty by focusing on young girls who can identify with the campaigns messages and will need Always products for years to come.  

  • Barbie launched a campaign called Imagine the Possibilities, intended to show young girls that they can achieve anything. This video showed five girls playing with Barbies that represented what careers they wanted to pursue when they got older. As the video goes on, you see these girls become a veterinarian, professor, paleontologist and CEO.

 

  • Under Armour launched a global campaign called I Will What I Want that depicted photographs of ambitious women achieving their goals. This campaign celebrated bold women who persevered through  adversity and followed their dreams, regardless of backlash from others. With this global ad campaign, Under Armour gained a 42 percent increase of traffic onto their website.

 

Ad campaigns like these are improving women’s perceptions about their bodies. By showing diverse types of bodies, with stretch marks and freckles, girls are realizing that it is okay not to fit into the mold that society has plastered across the media.

 

With widening how they represent women in the media, these companies have gained more traffic and sales from the “normal” type of woman.

By Elizabeth Ernster

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5 Ways My Blended Family Helped Prepare Me for the PR World

Taylor Pickle's family photo outside by a pool

PR agencies can easily become the people you spend the most time with and, in many ways, become your pseudo family. For me coming from an unconventional family background, I have been able to take those experiences and use them in a PR setting. PR life can be fast paced, hectic and unpredictable and so can families. I didn’t realize how well my family prepared me for the ups and downs of being a part of an agency until midway through the semester when there were deadlines looming and various projects needing to be completed.

  1.              Always expect the unexpected

Just when you think you have a plan you can always count on, the truth is that someone or something will come in and change everything. Being prepared for the unpredictable can save you from many late nights and your bank account from suffering those caffeine cravings.

  1.              Adaptability is your best friend

There comes a time when you have everything completed and put all your time and effort into completing a task. And, at a moment’s notice, things change. Being able to adapt to last minute or major changes will have a huge impact on how successful and smooth your life in PR will go.

  1.              Communication is key

We spend a majority of the day communicating with all different kinds of people and in order to get quality work done efficiently, having a solid foundation of communication will change your life.

  1.              There’s always a positive

In many cases taking away a positive can be hard to do, especially knee deep in edits and last minute client changes. But taking away at least one positive thing from the situation you find yourself in will help alleviate negative attitudes and unwanted stress.

  1.              Keep calm in a crisis

There are times when you can’t avoid a crisis. But, how you handle the crisis initially can set the tone for how you and your team will overcome it. Having the ability to stay calm when faced with a dilemma will help you in producing the best content possible for your client.

By Taylor Pickle

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Four Necessary Elements of a Great Website

Someone's hands typing on a silver laptop with a black keyboard on a wooden table with a cell phone, camera and wallet surrounding the laptop

With technology growing increasingly important in our society, websites have become a big part of marketing. This causes many businesses to just slap something up on the web and hope it works, but there are some techniques to helping your website be more effective. Here are four necessary elements to any great website:

  1.     Aesthetically appealing

Websites need to have a tone that matches the feel of the website. The look of a website is very important; it tells your audience what you are about. For example, at Tender Loving Coffee, a client I have worked with, we spent a lot of time understanding what their company is about before developing their website. They are an inclusive, positive, fresh environment and we wanted their website to reflect those feelings.

  1.     User friendly

A website should be easy to navigate. If your audience cannot figure out how to find the information they need, then it is not a well-designed site. Websites need a simple design for anyone to know how it should work.

  1.     Call to action

If you do not have a purpose for your website, then what is the point? A call to action button or slogan is a vital element to any website. The audience should be directed to complete a task such as: donate to your cause, buy your product or learn information about you. There needs to be a reason for your website to exist or people will just look elsewhere for what they need.

  1.     Mobile-friendly

According to Smart Insights, 71 percent of Americans use the internet on a mobile phone. If your site is unable to be viewed on a phone or other mobile device, then you are missing out on a big demographic. It is very simple to add a media query into your coding when creating a website, and I suggest that you consider that when creating a website.

With so many websites popping up every day, you want your business to stand out. Try out these necessary elements when starting up a great website for you and your business.

 

By: Emily Rench

 

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Three Steps Employers Can Take to Shrink the Gender Wage Gap in PR

A zoomed in picture of hundreds of coins

Even though 70.9 percent of public relations professionals are women, women are still getting cheated in the workplace. On average, male PR executives earn $125,000 a year while women make $80,000. The average yearly salary for gender nonconforming individuals and minority women is even lower.
Why are women making less?

Some believe that women choose to work less hours, prefer working jobs that turn out to have lower pay or have docile personalities that make it tough to succeed in higher paying jobs. These beliefs imply that women could shrink the pay gap if they worked harder. While working harder might help some women, it’s unlikely to help others.  Not all women have the time and resources to work harder, longer hours.

What can employers do to shrink the gap?

  1. Offer both parents paid family leave

The US is the only industrialized country in the world that does not provide paid family leave to new parents. Currently, women who cannot afford to take unpaid time off, have to choose between their children and their careers. It’s no surprise that women’s wages decrease by about 4 percent with every child they have. Providing paid parental leave to both parents makes it possible for both parents to share caregiver responsibilities. Mothers who share parental responsibilities equally with their partners have a much easier time balancing their careers with their home life.

  1. Flexible work schedules

Another workplace policy that holds women back is inflexible work schedules. Studies show that fields that offer the most flexibility with work schedules have the smallest gender wage gaps. This is likely because women typically take on more parental responsibilities. Mothers who struggle to balance their caregiver roles with their work schedules typically need more flexible hours. Unfortunately, those flexible positions tend to pay less.

 

For example, a mother might not be able to stay late at the office in attempts to balance her full-time job with her parenting responsibilities. This could require her to take a job that allows her to work from home, even if it pays less. A father with less parental responsibilities might have more time to spare, giving him the freedom to work overtime to make more money and possibly get promoted. Both partners work in PR, but the man has more opportunities to make a higher salary and gain a higher position.

 

PR firms have the opportunity to allow for greater job flexibility by giving employees the opportunity to work from home. This could prevent working mothers from having to quit higher paying jobs to take lower paying positions for more flexible hours. If companies want to help close the gender wage gap, allowing more flexible schedules to accommodate employees with busy home lives could be a solution.

  1. Hold diversity trainings

Employers can organize agency-wide, mandatory diversity trainings to show employees that the organization is committed to an inclusive work atmosphere. Studies show that organizational climates for diversity and sexual harassment are linked to whether or not organizations hold diversity trainings.

 

Diversity trainings can help by increasing individual’s awareness of their biases. This ultimately creates a more inclusive work environment by helping employees be more understanding and supportive of each other’s different backgrounds and home lives.

 

How long will this take?

These three steps won’t solve the problem of unequal pay overnight, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Written By: Hannah Stevens

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The Art of Self-Editing

An open notebook with an empty page with a pencil and glasses on it, there is also a magnifying glass, camera and pottos all laid on a map

If you want your editor to love you, turn in clean copy. It is as simple as that. Not only will you win over your editor and they will possibly buy you lunch, but it makes both you and your editor’s lives easier.

Think about it.

The cleaner the copy you turn in as a writer, the less changes you have to make later on. It also allows your editor to turn your copy around quicker. This means you avoid a grumpy, sleep deprived editor at your Monday morning meetings. And everyone wins when the case of the “Mon-daze” is avoided.

So, here are my five tips on how to write clean copy and earn a free lunch from your beloved editor:

  1. Take a Step Back
    After you have finished a new piece of writing, leave it for a few hours before making your first round of edits. This allows you to become unfamiliar with your piece allowing you to read it objectively.
  2. Read Your Writing Forward, Backward and Sideways
    Read your writing over and over again. You obviously can’t read your work sideways but reading it backward disrupts the narrative flow, which helps you catch mistakes you’d normally skim over. Read your writing starting with the last paragraph, working back up to the beginning.
  3. Read it Out LoudScream it if you want but just make sure to not get a noise complaint. Reading your work out loud allows you to keep your brain from automatically correcting mistakes.
  4. Have a Colleague Look it OverThe more eyes on a piece before it reaches your editor, the better. If you have people willing to read your work, take them up on it. There is a good chance that they will catch mistakes that you have been subconsciously skimming over.
  5. PENCIL TAP
    Take the tip of that writing utensil that is going out of style and tap on every single word. This helps slow your brain down so you don’t fill in the blanks when you edit your work. It makes your brain focus on each individual word rather than your brain trying to predict the rest of the sentence. If you follow these five tips, you will be enjoying your favorite pizza place or preferred coffee joint in no time. And all of it will be at the expense of a happy editor.Written by: Dylan Wakefield