Public Relations Hiring Growth, at Agencies and in-House

Marketing Job Watch Sep 29 2010

By Shareen Pathak

Public relations, often downplayed and misunderstood by the rest of the marketing community, has become a central part of most marketing plans. The sector is diverse, offering opportunities to connect the business with the public. It is also difficult work, with outreaches often leading to dead ends and strategies not panning out. But best of all, it's hiring.

Rising revenues and companies' growing realization of the importance of having a public relations team, whether retained or in-house, are helping that growth along.

Demand Growth

According to a survey by the Council of Public Relations Firms (CPRF), 65% of firms interviewed experienced higher revenues in the first quarter of this year compared to last year. "In January this year, business started picking up and all the positions that were frozen last year and in 2008 opened up again," said Lindsay Olson, partner and recruiter at New York-based Paradigm Staffing.

There is a general feeling of optimism among businesses, leading them to hire more PR professionals, either in-house or through agencies. That is having a trickle down effect on PR shops as well.

At Ogilvy PR, there is a general feeling that business is going to pick up. "Depending on your niche, companies are cautiously embarking on new campaigns," said Sheri Leonardo, senior vice president at the PR heavyweight. "Pharmaceuticals and healthcare are especially hot." Ogilvy current has 61 positions open, according to its careers page, from senior vice presidents to digital media strategists to account directors.

Since the crisis, businesses have also been increasingly interested in tapping into the value of having a public relations team. Gary McCormick, the chair and CEO of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), said that crises and social media are pushing businesses to pay attention to their PR budgets. "There are repercussions for businesses who used social media incorrectly, or didn't use it at all, and suddenly they're realizing a need for PR," he said. "We are the ones who understand how to build a relationship with a customer, and that's what they need."

Agency Jobs

Demand for social media capabilities is climbing at PR firms.

In the fourth quarter of 2009, the CPRF's survey of its members revealed that 82% expect to see social media PR demand increase in 2010. And another survey by the PRSA found that almost 80% of its member firms look for social networking capabilities when they are hiring.

Companies will often expect candidates to demonstrate the work they have done, or to propose an innovative social media tactic at the interview itself.

"Having a Twitter account is not enough," said Leonardo. "We want to see demonstrated experience in implementing social media tactics and blogger influence research, things like that."

At Fleishman-Hillard, Agnes Gioconda, chief talent officer, said her firm has around 100 openings in any given week, across all levels and regions. Generally, entry level positions come from the internship pool, while for more senior positions they will look externally.

Like at many other agencies, there is a behavioral interview process where candidates are expected to walk interviewers through recent projects, and those with social media skills have a competitive advantage, said Gioconda.

But if you really want to go where the jobs are, turn on C-Span, advised McCormick of PRSA. "Watch the Congress, and watch the careers," he said. "Anytime there is a public discourse on the environment, for example, public relations will need to be there, and will need to staff up."

Corporate Jobs

There is an increased demand for internal communications, according to Maryanne Rainone, a senior vice president at recruitment firm Heyman Associates who specializes in hiring on the corporate side.

The recession has made companies more eager than ever to reach out to their staff, and as the economy picks up, they want to make sure they're keeping them on board.

"They want to keep employees in the loop," said Rainone. "And many jobs are available at the director level."

There is also a lot of need for digital media specialists in-house. Following in the footsteps of Gatorade, every company wants a "hub" where they monitor and target social media to find out what is being said about their brands.

At the corporate level, subject matter expertise is not as essential as in agency jobs, said Rainone. "What they want is someone who can make a strategy around communications," she said. "They won't have to have that technical expertise."

A common career path is moving from an agency job, where you may get to try out all sectors and types of companies, finding your niche and then moving to corporate.

But according to Leonardo, it gets "boring" very quickly, and she'll often see people boomerang back to the agency. "There is a lot of movement," she said.

Write to Shareen Pathak

http://sales-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SB128578316844742183/Public-Relations-Hiring-Growth-at-Agencies-and-in-House

The news is, that pitch was paid for

James Rainey reported in the Los Angeles Times today about a "new" phenomenon -- experts appearing on the news are actually shills for the products they are presenting. It appears that to fill the large amount of news time, producers are neglecting to ask who's paying the experts.

It's a good article and worth the read.

Coverage of Koran Case Stirs Questions on Media Role

Brian Stelter wrote in the September 9, 2010 issue of The New York Times, "A renegade pastor and his tiny flock set fire to a Koran on a street corner, and made sure to capture it on film. And they were ignored.

That stunt took place in 2008, involving members of the Westboro Baptist Church from Topeka, Kan., an almost universally condemned group of fundamentalists who also protest at military funerals.

But plans for a similar stunt by another fringe pastor, Terry Jones, have garnered worldwide news media attention this summer, attention that peaked Thursday when he announced he was canceling — and later, that he had only “suspended” — what he had dubbed International Burn a Koran Day. It had been scheduled for Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Unlike the Koran-burning by Westboro Baptist, Mr. Jones’s planned event in Gainesville, Fla., coincided with the controversy over the proposed building of a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan near ground zero and a simmering summerlong debate about the freedoms of speech and religion.

Mr. Jones was able to put himself at the center of those issues by using the news lull of summer and the demands of a 24-hour news cycle to promote his anti-Islam cause. He said he consented to more than 150 interview requests in July and August, each time expressing his extremist views about Islam and Sharia law.

Stelter goes on to quote Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, who said, “The freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish.”

Read the entire article here.

Sacred Memories: A 9/11 Ritual

by Rabbi Irwin Kula — Posted: September 11, 2009

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-irwin-kula/sacred-memories-a-911-rit_b_283534.html

I live in New York City. Two friends, including someone at whose wedding I had recently been the rabbi died in the World Trade Center. The acrid smell came through my apartment windows for days and sacred ashes, which I wiped away with tears, fell on my window sills for weeks.

My children who were 13 and 10 at the time were cut off from me and my wife as they could not get home from school on 9/11 because the subways were closed. The father of one of my daughter's playmates from the time she was a toddler was killed on 9/11. The fear we felt was unforgettable and the innocence our kids lost forever so very sad.

So what message would I like to send out today 9/11? What memories do I want to preserve and wisdom do I want to learn at least for today? No words at all. Simply the following chant (using an ancient melody used to chant the Biblical book of Lamentations which describes the destruction of Jerusalem) of actual final cell phone conversations of people, who in the face of terror and the dearness of the vanishing moment, showed no anger or any desire for revenge but simply and heroically witnessed a yearning to love and the faith that love ultimately swallows up death.

Listen to the chant here

Tips for Handling Telemarketers and Junk Mail

(1) The three little words are: 'Hold On, Please...' 

 Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt. 
 
 Then when you eventually hear the phone company's 'beep-beep-beep' tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset, which has efficiently completed its task.
 
 These three little words will help eliminate telephone soliciting.


(2) Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end? 



This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone. This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a 'real' sales person to call back and get someone at home. 
 
 What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call, and it kicks your number out of their system. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their system any longer!!! 



(3) Junk Mail Help: 


a) When you get 'ads' enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these 'ads' with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away. 
 


b) When you get those 'pre-approved' letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope. Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular 44 cents postage, 'IF' and when they receive them back. It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return envelopes. 



c) One of Andy Rooney 's (60 minutes) ideas: Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn't get anything else that day, then just send them their blank application back! 
 If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't on anything you send them.
 
 You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 44 cents.
 
 The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let's let them know what it's like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they're paying for it...Twice! Let's help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that's why they need to increase postage costs again. You get the idea!
 
 If enough people follow these tips, it will work ---- I have been doing this for years, and I get very little junk mail anymore.

E-Mail Tracker Programs

Received some good intel that I would like to share about e-mail tracker programs.

By now, I suspect everyone is familiar with snopes.comand/or truthorfiction.com for determining whether information received via email is just that: true/false or fact/fiction. Both are excellent sites

Advice from snopes.com VERY IMPORTANT!!

1) Any time you see an email that says "forward this on to '10' (or however many) of your friends", "sign this petition", or "you'll get bad luck" or "you'll get good luck" or "you'll see something funny on your screen after you send it" or whatever --- it almost always has an email tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and emails of those folks you forward to. The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of 'active' email addresses to use in SPAM emails or sell to other spammers Even when you get emails that demand you send the email on if you're not ashamed of God/Jesus --- that is email tracking, and they are playing on our conscience. These people don't care how they get your email addresses - just as long as they get them. Also, emails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease "how would you feel if that was your child" --- email tracking. Ignore them and don't participate!

2) Almost all emails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards. All it was, and all any of this type of email is, is a way to get names and 'cookie' tracking information for telemarketers and spammers -- to validate active email accounts for their own profitable purposes.

You can do your Friends and Family members a GREAT favor by sending this information to them. You will be providing a service to your friends. And you will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam emails in the future!


 Do yourself a favor and STOP adding your name(s) to those types of listing regardless how inviting they might sound! Or make you feel guilty if you don't! It's all about getting email addresses and nothing more.

You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause, but you are NOT!

Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later and very possibly a virus attached! Plus, we are helping the spammers get rich! Let's not make it easy for them!

ALSO: Email petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress of any other organization - i.e. social security, etc. To be acceptable, petitions must have a "signed signature" and full address of the person signing the petition, so this is a waste of time and you are just helping the email trackers.

Interesting partners in cancer research fundraising

The Seattle Times has an interesting blog today about relationships between cancer research and corporations. Blogger Kristi Helm gives two examples of questionable tie-ins. The first is between cancer research and Fat Bastard wines. The winery will donate money to breast cancer research up to $75,000 by donating 25¢ per bottle of wine sold. However, research has shown that women who consumed an average of two drinks or more a day had a 24 percent increase in breast cancer over non-drinkers. The second example is tanning salons donating money to Vitamin D breast cancer research. In this case, by tanning more you can donate to breast cancer research while increasing your chances of getting skin cancer.

Read the blog by clicking here.

Also, to learn more about those "pink ribbon" campaigns for breast cancer research, click here.

The Growth of Farmers Markets

CBS Sunday Morning had a segment this past weekend on farmers markets. It reported what I've learned five years ago.... vegetables are better when you buy directly from a farmer. Unfortunately, the report didn't cover our wonderful market in Brattleboro but overall the piece was informative.

Here's the transcript or you can check it out by clicking here.

(CBS) Been to the supermarket this weekend? These days you have another choice: Farmers markets have taken root in cities across the nation. Martha Teichner takes us on a tour in our Sunday Morning Cover Story guaranteed to make you "green" with envy...


As farmers markets go, it isn't impressive: One little stall in the lobby of an office building. It's not impressive, unless you consider where these vegetables were grown . . .

The roof.

"It's a 40,000 square foot rooftop farm, it's about an acre," said Ben Flanner of Brooklyn Grange. "And we're growing 50, 60, 70 different varieties of vegetables."

Flanner and four friends are running a commercial farm, seven stories off the ground, surrounded by a to-die-for view of the New York City skyline. The soil, a million pounds of it, had to be raised a sack at a time by crane.

"There's thousands and thousands of empty rooftops across New York City," he said," and it just makes sense to do something productive on them."

Commercial farms on city rooftops may not be a trend, yet, but the growth of farmers markets in this country definitely is. Just out: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture figures showing the number at 6,100 plus, up 16 percent since 2009, meaning more than 850 have opened just this past year.

"Speaking of the USDA, it has a farmers market every Friday outside its Washington, D.C., headquarters, where Deputy Secretary of Agriculture (and farmers market booster) Kathleen Merrigan shops regularly.

"The access to the fresh, high-quality food, the joy of connecting with a farmer, really should be for everybody," Merrigan said.

"Do you think in the last few years, something fundamentally has changed about how Americans see food and the access to it?" Teichner asked.

"I think people are waking up," Merrigan replied.

Madison, Wisconsin, has the nation's biggest farmers market. Naturally, it sells local cheese. Every region showcases its own specialties, from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Me.

In Maine, Anna and Eli were shopping: "We've got some carrots, some basil, tomatoes, blueberries."

Just randomly stopping shoppers, especially younger ones, what's clear is that shopping at farmers markets isn't just fun . . . it's serious, part of a socially responsible life.

Teichner indicated the pregnant belly of Anna. "He's going to eat well!" Anna said.

"Yeah," said Eli. "He's getting food from, you know, his community."

(CBS)

For decades we've been hearing about the death of the family farm, but consider this: Farmers markets and other forms of selling straight to customers are helping to keep farmers in business.

Third generation Maine farmer John Snell makes twice as much money selling at this Portland market as he would selling wholesale to middlemen.

Now, this next piece of information may come as a shock:

Snell says a farmer with 1,000 acres or soybeans and corn in rotation do NOT make more money per acre. "No, no. Their gross, per acre is significantly less, which is why they're farming 1,000, 2,000 acres, where we're probably farming for vegetables, maybe, 25."

Stacy Brenner grew up in the suburbs; so did her husband, John Bliss. They're part of a new wave of committed farmers.

"It's about eating well and living well, working hard," Brenner said. "I don't need to go the gym; I just go outside and do a little work!"

"None of this is about money; I want enough to live on, but that's plenty," she said.

They operate Broadturn Farm in Scarborough, Maine.

Brenner says CSA produce is the "bread and butter" of their farm.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Customers pay $500 a season for a weekly share of the produce.

Instead of going to the farmers market, members (as they're called) come to the farm.

"They know exactly where the food is grown, they see how the food is grown," said Bliss. "And they leave with a really, I think, broadened perspective on farming."

(CBS)

The USDA is now spending roughly $5 million a year as part of its new Farmers Market Promotion Program.

The first grants were announced last September, on the day first lady Michelle Obama launched the new "By the White House" market in Washington.

"This market is not just about food, it's about our community, and this is just the beginning of the discussion," she said.

Much of that discussion is about how to make healthy food available to lower income Americans in urban areas considered "food deserts."

Farmers markets that accept government benefits are seen as one answer. Washington, D.C., markets match them with what they call double dollars.

"My granddaughter is covered by WIC, and her mother, you know, is covered by WIC," said Gloria Foss.

"Today, I'm planning to get some melons and some corn, and with my free dollars, if they still have the crabs over there, I'm gonna go for some crabs," Foss laughed.

Sure enough, they did, caught the day before, steamed that very morning.

But here's a question: Without double dollars or WIC or some other government program, are the people who need access to fresh food most, priced out of farmers markets?

In season there are bargains. But in Washington, Mark Seibert sells his organic milk for approximately $12 a gallon, with no apologies.

"We feel that the prices we charge reflect true costs of production and getting here to market it," Seibert said at his Clear Spring Creamery stall.

At New York City's Union Square market, Brazilian chef Marco Moreira is concerned about price but he's more concerned about quality.

Salad at $12 a quarter-pound? "This is worth every penny," Marco said.

"It's a guest of honor but, you know, so you use it carefully," he said.

It's Wednesday, and the market is crawling with chefs, not to mention on average 60,000 other shoppers, all looking - just like Moreira - for their "guests of honor" . . . those perfect chanterelle mushrooms or maybe teeny, weeny little cucumbers the size of your thumbnail.

Teichner sampled some parsley she described as stronger than normal. "That's why I recommend everyone tasting, all day long," said seller Franca. "Tasting is believing."

Moreira's restaurant, Tocqueville, is half a block away and features a daily greenmarket menu.

"The ingredients speak for themselves, so you don't really need to do a lot to them," Moreira said.

Back in the kitchen, Moreira's composition takes shape:

Tomato confit, corn salad, crispy zucchini flowers, chanterelle brown butter vinaigrette . . .

"A little taste of summer," Moreira said. "Let's see if it works!"

Grilled lobster meets the green market, in all its glory.

(CBS)