I’m happy to say, I have definitely found value on many social networking sites. I look around campus and I think I’m one of the few. Like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, finding value online takes perseverance. (It’s March, after all. So I needed an Irish/Leprechaun reference.)

After tweeting back and forth a bit with @Jason_J_Davis, he asked me to guest blog on his HR Think Tank. I was thrilled. What a great way to extend my personal brand! I’m definitely looking to do more guest blogging. I’ll just keep plugging away at the social media world and see what happens next.

Here’s a brief snipet from my article “Harnessing the Gen-Y Beast”:

Like it or not, my generation is charging into the workforce. Yep, all 70 million of us. We’re a talented herd, too. HR directors will play Ringling Brothers trying to tame us, hire us, and retain us. Most will fail.

The Gen-Y stampede of talent cannot be stopped and refined. It must be harnessed.

As you can see, we were very excited last week in the days leading up to what some called “the best regional activity ever:”

My favorite part of the conference was the HR panel. Our president Rachel Sprung monitored the panel and taking question from the audience via Tweetdeck. Talk about new media enhancing in-person experiences!

My phone died this week. May it rest in peace. I seriously think all of the tweeting via text finally did it in.  But there were some great conversations happening on the hashtag. I couldn’t just sit and watch.

I’ve noticed a lot of blog posts recapping the event were thrown up this week. Here are some of the ones I found:

• “PR Advanced: Brand Yourself” by Rachel Sprung – She does a nice job of summing up the event and some of the highlights.
• Laura Flanagan took the plunge into personal branding with her first blog post “Step 1: Attend BU PRSSA Brand Yourself PR Advanced Regional Conference.”
• Ginny Soskey is ready to binge on personal branding too with her post “Branding Yourself: PR Advanced Conference Wrap-Up.”
• “Branding Yourself – PRAdvanced Conference” by Emily Forrest – Emilie focuses on lessons from a breakout session by Karen Raskopf of Dunkin’ Brands.
• Emilie O’Toole gives a few major lessons for personal branding. “Branded: Takeaways from PR Advanced 2010″
• I really like the skills assessment in Ellie Botelho’s post “Branding Myself.” I’ve got to get working on a skill assessment of my own.

Thanks to all who attended. The responses have been overwhelmingly positive, and our hashtag #PRAdvanced was a trending topic in Boston!

For the last three-four months, I have been working hard behind the scenes at my internship consulting on our blog design and creating some of our web pages. Meghan M. Biro and Lisa Simons were the other brains behind the operation.

We’ve assembled a talented community of contributors from all over the country. We’ve got start-up experts, hiring pros, resume writers, HR marketers, college students, fresh graduates and everyone in between. We’ll be blogging, podcasting, posting videos and making multimedia content centered around a variety of topics: Careers, Culture, Digital Media, Green and Sustainability, Innovation.

Now, all of our hard work is public. Check us out. Subscribe to our RSS feed. Read my first post “Treat Your Job Search like a PR Campaign.” I’m so excited for this opportunity to contribute to the community and enhance my personal brand!

Secondly, I realized that I had some branding issues. I classified myself as a “Future PR Star” on my old blog. I went to a PRSSA National Conference in San Diego in November and realized that the reputation that comes with “PR” isn’t something with which I want to brand myself. Too often people think “media relations” when they think “PR.” That’s not me. Yes, I want to establish and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics. That’s “PR” by textbook definition. But times have changed for those two letters, and the reputation hasn’t kept up. Now we call what I want to do terms like “marketing,” “social media marketing,” “corporate communication,” and dozens more.

“PR” has expanded, so my personal brand needed a face-lift. One of my favorite PR professors asked on the first day of class, “Why are you here? You want to be hacks? Flacks? Spindoctors? Liars? That’s what people say when you tell them you’re in PR.”

No; I don’t want to be any of those things.

My goal with this newly redone blog and e-portfolio: Establish myself as a credible and experienced communicator with a passion for content creation and new media marketing. So check in on me every now and then. I just might accomplish that goal.

]]> http://ericleist.com/2010/02/01/my-blog-its-alive/feed/ 2 Eric It's Alive http://ericleist.com/2009/04/06/91/ http://ericleist.com/2009/04/06/91/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:16:21 +0000 Eric Leist http://ericleist.com/?p=91 ]]> I’ve mentioned before that I intern for a PR firm on the days I’m not in class. I can’t help but notice how this fairly traditional firm treats bloggers. Or rather, doesn’t treat them.
Often I’ll be ready to send out a press release to a media list containing only contacts in the mainstream outlets, or small local newspapers. I can understand the challenge of trying to keep blogger-exposure local. It’s easy to pitch the opening of a small amusement park in Carver, Massachusetts to The Carver Reporter. But it’s difficult to find a blog covering that niche market.
Yes, asking for blogger attention and “link love” can be difficult. But what about unsolicited mentions?
One of my tasks as an intern is to monitor media coverage for theMassachusetts Bay Commuter Rail. So every day I get Google Alerts highlighting anything new that mentions the phrase “MBCR.” The first day my boss was giving me instructions on how to compile the coverage, he told me to “just ignore anything that says ‘blog’.”
I’m just a student, but from what I can see, ignoring the blogging community is wrong.
This growing community of people publishing their own content on the web is growing, and it’s growing quickly.

Their influence is expanding closer and closer to that of mainstream media outlets. They can’t be ignored forever.
David Meerman Scott, who wrote the industry bible “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” stresses the potential of the blogosphere. He says bloggers are usually excited to receive a piece of news being pitched to them, and that he has been successful in his blogger relations efforts.
He says bloggers should be treated as if they were journalists, and journalists should be treated as individuals. So that’s the PR perspective, old and new.
What do the bloggers think?
Chris Pirillo, a long-time well known blogger in the tech community discusses the issue:

The video is 19 minutes long. Here is a summary of the guidelines he gives to PR folks interested in pitching to bloggers:

1) Be transparent
2) Don’t ask for links
3) Be proactive for reviews
4) Know who you’re pitching to are and why they matter
5) Keep it short and sweet
6) Treat everybody as if they were someone important

Pirillo mentions that bloggers are different from journalists because they aren’t paid. They are passionate writers covering what matters to them.
“Press releases are not aimed at people who are passionate,” Pirillo says. “They are aimed at people who are used to reprinting.”
Bottom line: Bloggers need to be approached differently and independently from journalists.