Need a job…

Graduation Happiness (Photo credit: jameskm03)

What’s one of the biggest worries that a graduate student has after graduating from college? Well aside from having to pay your student loans out the wazoo, it’s trying to find a job. A job! In this economy it seems close to impossible. I know that when I think about having to graduate soon, I am having fears to do so. I don’t want to get out of college and have to worry of how to pay off my student loans because I can’t find a job.

1 in 2 new college graduates don’t have a job after graduating college. Does that scare anyone? It does me. If you have the same fear I would highly consider of going anywhere you can get a job after college. I found this article that I think will be helpful when you start searching for your job after graduation.

In this article it gives you 5 cities that would love to hire young people who just graduated college. Seattle, Houston, Minneapolis, Washington DC, and Boston are the 5 cities. In each city they give a little bit of a description of what they are looking for and how much annual wage growth each city has.

Ch 12 When the news isn’t good

Thumbs down red (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

This chapter had a lot of really interesting information on crisis. When a crisis happens there is nothing we can do but respond to it in an appropriate manner. Couple things to consider are the audience, timing and content. If and when a crisis happens we need to be on top of it. Not just public relations professionals but the entire company.

 

Since we never know when a crisis may happen, our books gives 5 really helpful stages. The first stage is detection, this is when you are always on the lookout, and you are the eyes and the ears of the company. Second stage is preparation, what will you do in a crisis situation, you prepare yourself. Third stage is containment if you get out there and tell about the crisis before anyone else you will be better in a long run. Another stage if recovery you’re turning back to the way things used to be. Last but not least is learning and evaluating, learn from your mistakes and do research it always come to good use.

 

The writing strategies are really important, especially when it comes to writing strategies for crisis communication. Establishing a clear position you are in the fore front but not telling all the information. Being honest, that’s a given. Be concise whoever is the face of the company needs to be trained to they will answer in a proper manner such as concise answers.  Look forward focus on the solution. Do not assign blame legal department will be a real good help. Take advantage of your employer’s good reputation. If you company has always done really well then it has a good chance that it will help them but the company still needs to respond to the crisis.

 

Sad face (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Instagram takes a Big jump

instagram logo (Photo credit: clasesdeperiodismo)

Recently Instagram released their app to Android phones. This was huge for Instagram. In this article “Instagram’s Exploding adds a Million Android User in 12 Hours and raising $50 million” that name says it all. Just in a matter of a half a day Instagram sky rocked. Not that this app wasn’t popular already but now it’s got even more users. Read the article it gives a little bit more information on Instagram and its pretty interesting.

Instagram has been out for about 2 years now. If you don’t have or heard of Instagram I would really encourage you to take a look especially if you are thinking about doing Public Relations. Unlike any other social network Instagram uses all pictures instead of text like Twitter. To me a public relations professionals or organizations should take full advantage of Instagram. It will be a great way to connect to your audience. We all know that people react emotionally to pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. This could be the new things for PR professionals. Pictures draw people in and get their attentions. That’s what part of PR is about; you want to grab your audience’s attention.

CAT ch 11 Let’s Hear It Writing for Broadcast, Script, and Speeches

Chapter 11 talked about broadcast, scriptwriting and speechrooms. Come to find out that broadcasting is a very small part of public relations responsibility. A great way to save time when you are required to write a broadcast is to not write one. Instead of writing a separate piece of work just uses the news release. This way you kill two birds with one stone. There are positives for having a message be boadcast. Lets say you need some action to make a point, it would be good choice to use broadcast.

 

Another thing that was talked about in the chapter was scriptwriting. Scriptwriting has changed a lot since moms and dads have been out of college. Now scriptwriting is works on flip charts, 35-mm slides, overhead transparencies and much more. I never knew that public relations do that job.

 

From going over this chapter I think it would be really helpful to others.  Also when a public relations professional adapts to many different methods it is not only going to benefit you but also the organization.

 

I think that this chapter really helped me out and it can help many people out that maybe done know much about these subjects. For every one of the different writing it goes into deeper detail of what all needs to be done to make it good.

 

Screenwriting (Photo credit: BLundin)

 

Lets Go Blues

English: Louie, Blues Maskot. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Cardinal season coming close to an end what does that mean? What else do us St Louis fans have to look forward to? Well I know that before the Cardinals season was coming to an end, I was waiting for the hockey season to start-up. Come to find out that NFL was on lockout. This upset a lot of hockey fans including myself.
As of Tuesday Oct. 16 the Blues have announced that the hockey season will start-up. They will have their first game on Nov. 3 and the season will hold 82 game schedule. Even thou it’s starting up late its better late than never. The most important thing now is that all the rearrangements have been made and have been worked out. I can’t be more excited to get the hockey season rolling.
I did not want to believe that this lockout was about some revenue. The players didn’t think it was fair of who was getting all the money for the revenue so the players wanted their share. When the players didn’t get what was asked they went on lockout. As of Wednesday Oct 17 NHL commissioner Gary Bettman gave a new proposal for the players coming to an agreement of 50-50. If you would like to read more about it, this article “New NHL proposal sparks hope for hockey season” will give you more information about it.

Original NHL logo, used until 2005. A version of the logo features it in the shape of a hockey puck. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CAT Chapter 15 Persuasion for Individual Action

 

An example of direct mail used by political campaigns, from the U.S. Presidential campaign of 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This chapter has taught me a lot about direct mail and brochures. I have never really noticed how important of a role direct mail plays in public relations. I learned that direct mail is not only done by e-mail (which is what I thought) but it’s also done by sending actually letters or any other communication that can be mass produced.

 

A good point was brought up to my attention. Direct mail can reach anyone in the whole world. When I send out direct mail it goes out

 

in a mass messages. This is a huge advantage because I will be able to reach multiple people. One thing I will always have to keep in

 

mind when I write is that your audience only has so much attention and time when reading any sort of information. I will have to grab the attention in the first paragraph. Not only do I want to grab their attention but if they do decide to keep reading you want to make it semi short depending on what your writing.

 

On page 404 in the ethical issue section it provided me with great guidelines for ethical practice of public relations. I think it was really helpful for me and it can be for others as well, we need to be aware of them.

 

Another page that I found really helpful to me was page 412 and it talked about brochures. Before reading this chapter I was clueless on this topic. I have never one a brochure before so it was really interesting learning about it. I found page 412 it almost gave me some sort of guidelines as to what needs to be put in the brochures. Brochures and public relations definitely go hand in hand.

brochure_delft_03 (Photo credit: nilsmengedoht)

 

Hoping for 12 in 2012

St. Louis Busch Stadium (Photo credit: WildChild1976)

As we all may already know, the Cardinals have made the playoffs and haven’t made the best 1^st game but we also know is that they play great under pressure. They know what’s important. When it comes down to us loosing the last game of season and being done for the year or winning that last game and going to playoffs they make that win and we go on. We have seen this last year and other years as well. We hope to see year go well for the new coach and of course our Cardinals go 12 in 12.

The first game of playoffs didn’t quite go as the Cardinals have hoped. We had everything going for us, all the players were ready to go but yet what happened? Was it Yodi Molina when he hit an easy ground ball double which could have put Cardinals in the lead? Or was it Jaime Garcia who gave up runs. We can’t really blame one of the other. This is the ways baseball works, it’s really unpredictable. If you have missed the game on Sunday I have a couple videos that are pretty good. If you want to read a little bit more about the 1^st game I would suggest you read the article that I found, it was definitely worth the read.

Gulf Coast League Cardinals (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CAT ch 6

 

© is the copyright symbol in a copyright notice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

In chapter 6 I have learned a lot of information on legal influences on Public Relations writing. Before entering the PR work I might want to know one of two things on the legal influences, so I won’t get into trouble.

 

We have touched upon this topic plenty of times in other PR courses. This is just refreshment so no one will forget. How embarrassing would it be to possibly get fired because you weren’t clear on a copyright law?

 

A few thinks that I took away from the chapter: is that when I get into this field restriction and limits change over time and it’s my responsibility to stay on track. This chapter taught me to double-check my work before accidently crossing the line and then being too late and possibly losing my job. Having a lawyer working with you or your company is a great idea, it could be very helpful but you got to make sure that you stick to the same story when it comes down to any legal issues.

 

I always knew that writing is really important in this field but I never knew that not writing properly could possible cause legal implications. It seems as that a lot of issues that go on in PR have to deal with the ownership rights, which would make sense because it falls into copyright, trademarks and more. On page 131 I found the symbols of the key commands to be very helpful if you don’t know what they mean. It was interesting to see what stands for what.

 

Businesses Facebook Mistakes

Image via CrunchBase

With Facebook being the post popular social utility you would think people would think twice of what they are putting on it. We have talked numerous times in class about having a clean Facebook and making a good presence on it. Yet still for some reason it does not register to people and they continue to put not very smart things on it. Not only do people do this but businesses hurt themselves in a little bit different way as well.

The article that I came along gives 5 mistakes that businesses make on their Facebook page. I believe that this is a great way for businesses to look over their page and possibly make some improvements. I know some of the mistakes that were made by the businesses were a surprise to me but after reading through it, it made more sense.

The 5 mistakes are: There is no “I” in Facebook, Using a Personal Account for Your Business, Leaving URLs in Status Updates, Not Posting Enough, Ending All of Your Status Updates with a Question. Look at them and think about it. Also you can go to the actual article “The 5 Mistakes Marketers Continue To Make On Facebook”and read it and it will explain each one of them better.

Facebook Notifications Management (Mark as Spam!) (Photo credit: @superamit)