Work Life

With several months left before the chill lifts for much of the country, it can be easy to slip into the winter blues during the work week (that is, unless you’re joining us in sunny SoCal next week at PR News’ Digital Summit & Crisis Management Boot Camp, Feb. 23-24 in Huntington Beach, CA). To ease your winter blues, we asked PR News’ Twitter followers to share the mantras and inspirational quotes that help them stay motivated.

“Almost all firms are over-servicing,” Gould says, though small ones, with yearly revenue of $3 million or less, are the major culprits. This largest group of firms often lacks sophisticated time-management systems (one he recommends is ClickTime) and a chief financial officer (CFO) to oversee, interpret and analyze the data such a system produces.

“When people are under so much pressure to process information, the result is an unstoppable flow of data, an overloaded mind and consequently an analytical mindset,” LEWIS founder and CEO Chris Lewis writes in his just-published book, “Too Fast to Think: How to reclaim your creativity in a hyper-connected work culture.”

The diversity of knowledge needed in our profession continues to expand. We’re strategic advisors as well as communicators. As such, I’m seeing a greater need for continued learning. When I was in journalism school, I was required to take one marketing class. That’s right, one. Not that regression analysis is part of my day-to-day, but that class gives me more insight now than it did then. Communications is a business. A strong business education is critical to success.

What are your toughest challenges? What would help you do your job better? The Conference Board asked those questions of CMOs and CCOs who said analytics and silo busting two important topics.

More than likely the young hire is arriving at your company with a basic knowledge of communications and much curiosity. I’m generalizing, but I feel new college graduates are adaptable, careful listeners and hungry to learn everything they can about your company.

We conclude our 2-part series about how PR and communications are taught in colleges and universities.
There was plenty of agreement between what our PR and communications pros told us and what the quartet of academics we interviewed said. Writing—specifically, writing for PR vehicles that is clear, concise, creative and persuasive—was among the skills both the pros and academics emphasized. Several of the academics said students lack familiarity with PR writing, which, they said, is different from writing term papers. Our academics said this is an area they stress extensively with students.

PR professionals are tasked with a lot these days. From writing traditional press releases and website copy, to crisis management and social media, the list of responsibilities seems to grow almost daily. It’s hard to know which skills communicators should be prioritizing to stay at the top of their field. For insight on this career-making question, we turned to the PR News community.

A PR professional’s work is never done—especially considering the breakneck speed of digital communications. And on top of press and media relations duties, communicators are now also expected to stay on top of a growing list of social media accounts and metrics. With those hefty expectations in mind, we asked the PR News community for tips on effectively juggling a communicator’s responsibilities.

To get readers in the right frame of mind for the start of the school term this two-part series begins by asking a bevy of veteran in-house and agency communicators to discuss the latest trends in the field and how they are being taught (or not) at colleges and graduate schools. Their responses are included in this week’s edition. In our next edition, we’ll present the academics’ responses to similar questions.