Careers in PR

This week our class had the oppourtunity to listen to two great speakers that both have very different jobs in the field of Public Relations. Melissa Bohl, a UW-Whitewater alumni spoke about her job with GE Healthcare. In this position, Melissa works heavily with internal and customer communications. She uses her PR knowledge to create tools that help sales representatives better communicate with clients. Melissa's job in healthcare PR is much different than an agency job, which I found very interesting. Due to the confidential information that healthcare employees encounter on daily basis, different precautions and tactics have to be used. For example, rather than using conventional forms of social media, GE healthcare created different internal social media vehicles for their employees to use. GE Connect is an online forum that is similar to a blog. This tool allows GE employees to share information about new studies and happenings going on within each dept. of GE. Another social media tool used and created by GE is Yammer which is similar to Facebook. Overall Melissas job at GE was in a very corporate setting and relies heavily on communication skills.

A change of pace came later in the week when our class heard Cory Zimmermann speak about his job at Z2 Marketing, of which Cory is the co-founder. Cory began by explaining his journey to success. Afte high school, Cory got accepted to MIAD and went to school to persue his passion for photography. After graduating, he landed a job with Hanson Dodge design firm. After some success and failure with other agenciesw Cory finally got to where he is today. Overall Cory had some great tips for student. First he said that the first client every student will have is themselves. Your first job, is to find yourself a job! Another thing that Cory opened my eyes up to was that with a job in PR you will eventually accomplish two things; the unknown celebrity, and how to stop second guessing yourself and succeed without thinking. Overall I found Cory to be very insprirational. To find your own inspiration follow Cory and Z2 Marketing on Twitter.
@z2marketing
@coryzimmermann

BMA-MKE

Have you ever wanted some advice on how to propel yourself into the business world? That is exactly what the members of BMA Milwaukee provided to area college students at their Lightening Round Interview and Resume Review event. At the event, students visited three different stations. The first station was a presentation on social media given by three professionals from the Fullhouse Marketing agency. During the presentation, the professionals disscussed how to appropriately utilize and present yourself on popular social media sites often used in job searches. The sites that were focused on included Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter. Stutdent were even encouraged to tweet during the presentation using the hashtag #bmamke. The next section gave students the opportunity to have their resumes reviewed by different Milwaukee professionals. and the third section was a lightening round interview session in which students had six minuets to sell themselves in a mock interview.

Overall, I thought that all of the sections of this event were highly beneficial. However, my favorite section was the speed interviewing. In this section I was able to not only interview with four different professionals, but it was also a great networking oppourtunity. I believe that the feedback that I get during these interviews will really benefit me in the future.

Year in Review

Over the past semester, I have found this class to be very beneficial. Having public relations major I expect to use many of the skills that I have learned in this class. Many of the assignments in this class will help me in my future line of work. Learning to use publisher to complete the newsletter will be a good skill to have in the business world. I also really enjoyed making the Facebook fan page. As prevalent as social media is becoming in our society and the business world, knowing your way around the social media site is another great skill to have. My Facebook fan page is for the Kettle Moraine Figure Skating Club and has so far been a great success among its members. The prevalence of social media was also apparent through the social media case studies. I looked over the success of the Harry Potter Tweets campaign. I also had a great time at the BMA event. It was really refreshing to do some learning outside of the classroom, meet new people, and get some good feedback on my resume and interviewing skills. Blogging was also an interesting experience. I had never blogged before, but I surprisingly found it to be a lot of fun. I don’t think that I had a favorite blog over the semester. I just enjoyed reading other classmates points of view on topics that were being discussed in class. Overall I really enjoyed this class.

Comet Branding

When listening to Sarah Meaney’s presentation, I found out that she had a lot of great public relations information to offer. She spoke a lot about how get your company out there and how to properly use social media to do that. The main focus of her presentation was how to format your online writing to effectively reach your audience.

One of the points that she stressed was to be concise in your writing, and to get to the point FAST. It amazed me to see how what areas people look at on a website, and how much time they actually spent looking at it. This time is very minimal so some tips she gave us were:

• Write in inverted pyramid style, in which the main idea and most important information come first, and the details follow.
• Highlight the keywords
• Use digits rather than spelling out the numbers
• And, Use bulleted lists :)

Another important thing to think about, not only when writing online, but for all writing in general, is to clearly define your audience. With a specific audience in mind, it is easier to keep them interested because you can use specific language to target them. When writing for your audience, keep in mind tone, format, voice, flow, content, and length.

Finally, looking over Sarah’s website for Comet Branding, I really enjoyed it. It has a fun layout, and has many tabs relative to the objective. However I think working links to all of their clients sites would be a great addition!

When Environmentalists attack!

The Nestle candy company has recently been receiving some heat from a global environmentalist group known as Greenpeace. While it is the organizations directive to stand up for environmental issues around the world, Greenpeace is taking their objective to the next level staging a full out attack on Nestle. The organization has created several parody videos criticizing Nestle for its use of palm oil in their Kit Kat candy bar product. They have also taken over the wall of Nestle’s Facebook fanpage, posting this outrageous statements concerning Nestle’s use of the palm oil and how this act is leading not only to the destruction of Indonesian rainforest, but to the endangerment of the orangutans. However, it’s not the use of the oil that is enraging Greenpeace, it’s the source of its purchase. It seems no matter where else Nestle goes to purchase this product; they can’t hide from the heat of Greenpeace.


While enduring Greenpeace’s attacks, Nestle has made an attempt to recover. However, the attempts have so far been unsuccessful and only further provoke Greenpeace to produce more video parodies and attacks. Any recovery has also been prohibited by some of Nestle’s responses to unwanted comments that come off in a tone that is, “at times sarcastic or antagonistic,” as quoted in an article on the BNET website.

Personally I don’t think that this is a proper use of the Facebook fanpage application. The objective of Facebook fanpages is to support the pages namesake. Therefore, I believe that the Nestle Company has every right to be upset about the negative comments that are littering their wall. If Greenpeace wanted to properly voice their outrage on Nestle’s actions they should create their own properly titled page where all people with similar views could come together. However, with the lightening speed of social media and the internet, good and BAD PR spreads like wildfire.

"What happens in Vegas, stays on Facebook"

I was very excited to attend the event, “What happens in Vegas, stays on Facebook.” Being an avid Facebook user myself I was interested to learn what people in the professional world had to say about Facebook, and how my Facebook decisions will affect me in the future. The first presentation, by Emily Lenard of WiredWI, was basically a tutorial on how to manage the privacy settings on Facebook. Learning about the option of creating lists that can control what specific people on your face book see was the most helpful part for me in the first section. Now knowing this, I know I still have the option to put up whatever materials I want, and customize what each of my friends is able to see. This will definitely help protect my future reputation with perspective employers who often base character judgments on materials posted on online social media profiles.

The second part of the presentation was even more beneficial for myself. This section of the presentation focused mainly on the networking, social media website Linkedin. Linkedin is just recently coming into popularity among many people in the business world. Presenter Katie Felten of MKElive gave us a very informative tour of the site, showing everything from how to present yourself professionally on your profile to how to make connections with other users and use that to your benefit. Overall this was the most helpful for me because I am not particularly familiar with Linkedin and it will be a great business networking tool to have in my belt in the future.

Overall this was THE most interesting presentation I have attended yet at this university, and better yet, I actually learned some things!

Opions taken with a grain of salt...

As a business owner, your main objective is to earn a profit. Hopefully, most customers taking advantage of your business or service will be pleased with the outcome. However, you will have the occasional customer who is displeased. Thus being so, it is your job, as a business owner to make sure that customer’s displeasure goes away and they continue to return to, and leave your business a satisfied, happy customer. I can guarantee you, Sarah, a customer at a Minnesota movie theater will not soon be returning after receiving a vulgar email in response to her complaint of a poor experience. Granted, Sarah’s email wasn’t the most polite, however it is not her job to keep the business owner happy, it’s the other way around. To read the full email exchange, visit the website for the local Twin Cities newspaper.

In response to this, two Facebook fan pages have come about; one, with over 5,000 fans, supporting Sarah and her movement to boycott the theater, and another supporting theater president Steve Payne, with only 200 fans. I do think this is an appropriate use of the Facebook fan page application, especially for Sarah and her cause. She is able to inform people on a large scale what had happened to her and allows her to get support from them very quickly. Although this is not the intended use of the Facebook fan page it is very fast and effective.

Recently, I have come across a similar fan page on Facebook in which disgruntled customers can ban together and make their point heard. This is the fan page titled “I HATE Bronze Body & Brew and I Want My Money Back!” This fan page is in response to the local Whitewater tanning salon going out of business without informing any of their customers and leaving them with numerous tans lost. In such a small town, the page has reached almost 1,000 members and still continues to grow. Many fans, of which I am one have used this page to vent and talk about plans of action to get our money back.