With competition for graduate roles higher than ever, we thought it might be a nice idea to offer our top 5 tips to graduates applying for PR roles, complete with insights on how candidates can impress us and guidance on how to answer difficult questions.

1. Draw Upon Relevant Experience 

The best candidates use their relevant experience to demonstrate their understanding of PR and interest in the role. These experiences could include writing for a university newspaper, working on a radio show or organising a fundraising event. A graduate role in PR is so diverse that many things could be seen as valuable experience, however, it is important for graduates to show how they can apply their skills. For example, while it is good for candidates to say that their degree has developed their writing skills, it is even better if they go further and explain how they have used these skills to develop materials for different audiences.  

2. Be Connected

It is increasingly important for PR professionals to be digitally aware so a good knowledge of all major social media channels is essential. I would recommend that graduates set up profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and explore how these sites are used by brands and prominent people in the industry. More recent sites such as Pinterest and Tumblr are great for keeping track of emerging trends. Social media is a rapidly expanding phenomenon and candidates who possess strong digital skills are likely to stand out. Social media profiles are a great way to show off your personality and interests but always be aware of the way in which you use different sites, keeping in mind that many agencies employ social media guidelines for personal and professional accounts.

3. Get Creative

One of the key attractions to a career in PR is the creative nature of the role and the opportunity to work on original projects for clients. As a graduate, you should demonstrate your ability to think creatively, voice your opinions and bring stories to life. Keeping track of recent PR and advertising stories will not only demonstrate your knowledge of the industry but will provide you with helpful reference points if you are required to plan campaign activities during the interview process. If you have an idea which you think could help a brand represented by the agency, research how you could make it happen and present the idea to your interviewers.

4. Be Business Savvy

In addition to showing their creativity, graduates should also demonstrate their business awareness and an understanding of how PR fits into a brand’s strategy. If you are completely new to the business world, it may be useful to read an introductory business book or speak to family or friends to introduce you to key concepts of business. In our recent round of interviews, one director presented candidates with a case study, testing their business awareness and understanding of the role of PR. This demonstrates the level of importance placed on this skill. It may worth researching the mission statement and company objectives of brands you admire during the application process, to demonstrate your understanding of how companies work. 

5. Be Committed  

If you are passionate about media, a strong communicator, enjoy working in a team and are confident that PR is the industry for you, it’s important not be disheartened if you don’t get the first role you apply for. In advance of applying for graduate roles, I would advise gaining as much relevant experience as possible in different areas of the industry. This will help you make connections in the industry and make a decision about which area you are most interested in. Once you have been invited for an interview, think carefully about ways you can make yourself stand out, without appearing over confident. Following our assessment days, we received a short friendly email from one of the candidates, thanking us for our time and telling us how much she enjoyed the day. This small gesture was very well received and made sure she was remembered by the team. Although you may be eager to start on a graduate scheme as soon as possible, gaining a wide range of experience and thoroughly researching the different options available to you, will allow you to make a confident and informed decision on where you would most like to begin your career.

 Written by Clarissa Forbes, Porter Novelli

Now I don’t want to rake over old coals but, at least in our office, this video has sparked debate and has highlighted the ever-diminishing line between advertising and PR. What TNT has done here is at the core just a great PR stunt, of that I have no doubt. However, after being filmed and edited into a neat and highly entertaining package, shared across the globe and racking up millions of views, couldn’t this actually be considered a viral ad?

This video represents the new media species, the tricky grey area between PR and advertising that came forth with the digital age. Is technology at fault for blurring the boundaries between these two professions? It certainly allows for greater possibilities in the world of public relations and, in the past, the difference between advertising and PR was clearer

Typically, when it comes to advertising, you have control over your message – where it goes, what it says, for how long and in what size. On the other hand, in public relations you lose this control. The media will (or maybe it won’t) present your message as it chooses to. For all intents and purposes this remains to be true, but technical advances enforce the need for multi-media, multi-faceted content and branding. What goes for ads here is the same for PR. When you put such ads or PR examples on the internet there’s no way of telling where they’ll crop up or for how long. Either could be tweeted and retweeted for weeks or they could be forgotten shortly after you upload.

If you come across an advert in a magazine, it’s quite clear to anyone scanning the page that it is just that; an advert. PR is a more subtle art; getting clients and brands mentioned in the copy (which is what readers are after in the first place). There’s a difference in consumer perception. It’s ‘buy us’ vs (seemingly) ‘non-biased’. Again, this changes when you introduce such practices to YouTube for example. As with the video mentioned previously, how can we tell if it was filmed purely with the intention to get it pinging around cyber-space as a viral ad? Does the fact that the video got news coverage mean it was just a great PR stunt that was professionally caught on video and uploaded to YouTube? If the consumer can’t tell the difference, and PR people and advertisers still aren’t sure themselves, is this a problem? Are we doing each other’s job?

We all know that a target audience exists for a reason; we wouldn’t want to be aiming our efforts in the wrong direction. There’d be no point trying to get an article about a teen clothing line in a motoring magazine, say. But that said, with everyone having their individual quirks and interests, maybe there’s a car enthusiast out there with a penchant for fashion. This is where the internet breaks down such barriers. There’s so much more scope now, it’s almost as if ‘the internet’ is a demographic itself. Videos like this are always getting passed around by a variety of consumers of all shapes, sizes and category. And it doesn’t seem to matter who the content was created by or for what purpose.

When speaking to Stevie Benton from Wikimedia UK recently, he mentioned an interesting initiative to bring one town, the Welsh town of Monmouth, to life. So I said I’d mention it here, in case you would like to help out.

Wikimedia UK, the charity that promotes Wikipedia across the UK, has been partnering Monmouth as part of an initiative to launch the world’s first Wikipedia town to the world’s press on 19 May.

The partners, including Monmouthshire County Council, have created a project called Monmouthpedia which is about creating multilingual versions of Wikipedia pages about every notable place, person, artefact, flora, fauna in the town of Monmouth and making them instantly accessible to smartphone users in the town through the installation of QRpedia codes.

Here’s how you can help. Wikimedia is looking for PR professionals to step forward and brief the world’s media about this world’s first, in partnership with the Wikimedia team. In particular, this will be explaining how QRpedia codes and multilingual Wikipedia pages can take a town’s history and place it before an online audience of almost half a billion people a month.

The commitment will be to participate in two or three briefing calls, to clarify the task and agree on which media each set of volunteers will be approaching. Then the weekend before, an agreement to sell the story into those media, in time for the launch of ‘The World’s First Wikipedia Town – Monmouth’ on 19 May.

There’s already been media interest from all five continents and this will only intensify as the launch date draws closer. To get involved please contact Stevie Benton, communications organiser, on 020 7065 0993 or email stevie.benton@wikimedia.org.uk

You can learn more about the Monmouthpedia project here.

But is this really the case? Who is actually using Pinterest and why? Tamba have gathered some stats and created this interesting inforgraphic.

The communications professionals gathered at the three-day summit in Dublin will be able to hear her presentation on June 14. This is just 43 days before the Games begin on 27 July, bringing 15,000 athletes from more than 200 countries to the United Kingdom.

Regarded as a leading expert in strategic communication, Brock-Doyle has designed and directed communication, media and sponsorship programmes for some of the world’s biggest brands and events, including the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games.  Whilst London was vying for the 2012 games, her work as Head of PR and Media for the campaign was a facet of its success.

This summit, organised by AMEC, will see Brock-Doyle present to delegates via video conference from Canary Wharf in East London.

Barry Leggetter, Executive Director of AMEC, said: “The Olympic and Paralympic Games present communications challenges of incomparable scale. We are therefore thrilled that Jackie will be able to share her experience and expertise with us on how London 2012 are getting ready to welcome the world this summer.”

Other confirmed speakers on the summit’s line-up include: Anna Kepka, Media Insight Director Europe & North America, Unilever; Sandra Reape, Senior Consumer Insight Manager, Jameson International; Andre Manning, Vice President Corporate Communications, Royal Philips Electronics; Melanie Brooks, Media and Communications Coordinator, CARE International, Geneva and Philip Sheldrake, author of The Business of Influence.

If you’re interested in going along to the summit, it takes place from June 13-15 and includes a Workshop Day with international speakers. There’s early bird price offer in place for those who register their place here before Monday 14th May.

So, if Google’s networking system still leaves you baffled, scroll down and have a good read.

It focused on tracking consumers’ path to purchase. In this case it used the automotive sector in China as an example, but I think most of the lessons can be placed into other markets, both geographical and vertical.

TNS called this project TAPPS. TAPPS was designed to track a panel of consumers who, as I say, in this case were thinking of buying a car in China through a four month purchase research process.

Where this gets interesting is that it tracked consumers’ physical touch points with brands over this period and also the digital touch points. The digital touch points were measured by consumers downloading an app onto their laptop; this tracked all the websites they visited. (I thought that was pretty dangerous too, but apparently the panel all agreed it was fine!)

As a result of this approach, all (or nearly all anyway) of the online and physical touch points that potential car buyers had with different car brands, both through the media and direct, were tracked.

TNS reckoned that the real life purchasing decision process they identified of consumers (Figure 1) was markedly different to the traditional approach (Figure 2). Clearly this has huge implications for brands and communicators.

The consumer purchasing process according to Tapps (Figure 1):

The traditional way brands have considered consumers’ processing decision (Figure 2):

That said, the devil is in the detail and the insight that family and friends play a key role in deciding which car to purchase, while not surprising, is probably not enacted upon sufficiently by most car manufacturers. At the same time, the research showed that the websites of the brands were used by consumers all the way thought the buying process, not just at the beginning and at the end. This has implications for the type and amount of content that car manufacturers have on their own sites.

One interesting stat that stood out for me was that premium car brands have a shorter research time than other cars. I guess this is because of the power of the brand and the consumers’ pre-disposed position of wanting the status of the car, rather than being interested in the finer details like value for money and whether the car is any good!

Another very important part of the purchasing decision is previous purchaser feedback. What customers say about a brand has a decisive affect on the purchasing decision of potential customers.

Here is the split of the different touch points over the four month buying process:

All interesting stuff, and clearly there are lots of implications for other markets here. What it also says though is that there is a need for brands to produce content for their own websites, for customer reviews and within the printed and digital media. And this content has a massive impact on the consumer purchasing decision. Ah, the power of PR!

Here are a selection of images from our awards ceremonies in both Manchester and Birmingham:

We look forward to seeing you all again next year.

PRmoment hosted the PR Analytics Conference at Ketchum Pleon’s London offices on the 22^nd March. The event was attended by a number of prominent industry speakers who offered insightful guidance on how to get the required impact from PR, particularly at a time when justification of expenditure on PR is increasingly demanded.

One of the key out-takes for me is that it is clear that there can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach to public relations measurement. I appreciate that that is a view that people familiar with the measurement topic will find obvious, but I think those in the wider industry who are faced with measurement challenges on a day-to-day basis need to find ways of operating that work for them, rather than waiting for the CIPR or the PRCA to hand effective measurement to them on a plate. The signs from the conference are promising. Global organisations such as Phillips and Microsoft have some really interesting mechanisms in place, while agencies such as Ketchum have shown what can be done with the countless tools available.

Another out-take from the conference is that a basic understanding of statistics is absolutely vital for anyone looking to pursue a career in PR over the next 10-15 years. As someone who has never had a mind for numerical data, that’s quite a challenging prospect for me as I seek to begin my career. However, through attending the conference, I was able to see how public relations professionals can break down vast amounts of data into easily interpretable information which can provide some really interesting insights. One thing I would say is that any University that teaches a PR course should in some way incorporate statistics into the modules that they teach. It can’t and shouldn’t be avoided for the next generation of PR graduates.

There’s no doubt in my mind that analytics are going to play a key role in shaping the future of the PR industry. The companies who undertake analytics effectively at the moment are already able to demonstrate some fantastic results, and I fear that those who don’t grasp the impact that analytics can have will be left behind.

The PR Analytics Conference was undoubtedly useful for me as a student, having worked for a year I picked up some incredibly useful advice which I know will benefit me as I re-enter the industry. It was a fantastic event and having been to one, I’ll be on the lookout for future conferences that I hope will be as much use to me in future as this has been to me now.

Written by Christopher Hicks, PR student at Bournemouth University