This is a guest post by Sam Peters.
It is a fact that the US spends more on healthcare than any other country of its kind. The total estimate for national healthcare coverage is up to $2 trillion a year and with costs on the rise companies are looking for ways they can cut budgets without negatively affecting their employees. One such way is through employee wellness programs that get employees into exercise, and helps them to reshape their daily habits into a health conscious lifestyle. By offering incentives for employees to participate in these programs healthcare companies are working with employers to help lower costs more efficiently.
According to one report companies using wellness programs have revealed less absenteeism as well as a higher retention rate for current employees. Other benefits of workplace wellness programs were lowered rates of illness and injuries at work, improved morale and relationships between the employees, and an overall increase in work productivity. Healthcare costs were down between 20-50% and short term sick leave was reduced up to 32%. The participating individuals lost weight, improved their health and stamina, reported lower stress levels and overall felt better about their personal wellbeing.
Different ideas for promoting health within the work environment include allowing the employees to have access to a gym by having one on sight or offering a discount to a local club. Some businesses are starting sports clubs for their workplace which not only encourages health, but fun and team work as well as great marketing for any teams that might wear jerseys. Incentives are always a huge plus as well like running various promotions for weight loss, walking, or other healthy activities and then giving out gift cards, weekend trips, or other prizes that will motivate people to participate. Some firms are even partnering with companies like Keas who specialize in providing fun and enticing wellness programs that can get up to 70% of the workplace involved in healthier living.
Other great things enterprises are doing are to offer health screenings and classes for people to be more educated and aware. One case study showed 185 program participants who had not previously been heart patients of any kind, but tested as high risk through a cardiac screening at work. After six months of working with a wellness program almost 60% of them were retested and found to be low risk and normal. Another document showed a comparison of companies that did these programs versus those that did not and they saw that businesses that did the programs reduced healthcare costs by as much as $1,400 per person, versus the others who did not intercede that only saved $6 per person a year.
The reality is these work programs are not just saving money, but they are saving lives. In addition they are bringing morale back to the workplace and improving work quality and productivity. Any company, regardless of size can benefit from some type of wellness program for their employees. The long term will result in healthier happy employees and a stronger, better business.
Sam Peters is a writer who enjoys writing about career development.
This is a post by PR Columnist by Alison Kenney.
Lately I’ve noticed more and more reporters skipping the interview and “writing” their articles based on email interviews.
For a case in point, take this recent HARO query:
“Emails only, please, no phone calls. And please don’t email to arrange a separate interview, I’m just looking to hear some comments from all y’all. Thanks guys.”
While there have always been reporters willing to run with the verbiage PR pros give them – such as lifting a quote from a press release when covering breaking news – now, however, the practice is being used more often and not just for breaking news stories, but more frequently in feature articles.
A couple of well-regarded blogs have commented on this practice recently, although mostly from the perspective of the media.
American Journalism Review wrote about the practice from the journalists’ and editors’ point of view (which is well worth a read). The post expresses concern that email interviews “promote lazy reporting and the use of unreliable sources…”
PR Daily recently asked, “Is the phone interview dead?” and lamented the lack of color an email interview has in comparison with a phone interview, as well as the lack of natural “back and forth that comes from a conversation. Plus, there’s no personal relationship building, however slight, when everything is done in written form.”
In response to the PR Daily post, Clay Ziegler did his own experiment and called a dozen working journalists to quiz them about their interview method preferences. He concluded that the phone interview lives and why that’s a good thing.
Like most changes wrought by new technology (and social media, in particular), old practices may not go away, but new practices – including using IM, Twitter, Facebook and email to get information and quotes for a story – are becoming more and more accepted.
What can PR pros expect as email interviews become accepted practice?
Get with the program – if you need media coverage to communicate your, or your client’s, story, get used to the new way of doing things and accept that some reporters prefer to work this way.
Be prepared – don’t stop at the point of pitching a story; think it through; have your point of view fully vetted and your quote ready.
Enjoy having more control – the good news about email interviews is that there is less chance of being misquoted or of having a reporter pick up on the one throwaway line in an otherwise stellar phone interview.
Use email interviews to bridge distances – if a client is traveling in another time zone and phone interviews aren’t convenient, email interviews can save the day.
Realize that no one speaks like PR quotes in real life – if you email in a corporate-approved quote, and the reporter fails to use good segues or connectors, the result will be a string of presser quotes that fail to add real perspective.
Keep an eye on which outlets use email interviews judiciously and properly – sloppy use of email interviews, in which its clear the writer used email for speed and convenience above all else, can devalue the quality of the media outlet’s content, thereby decreasing the value of your placement.
What do you think? Have you experienced many email interviews lately?
Alison Kenney an independent PR practitioner with more than 15 years of PR consulting experience. She is based on Boston’s North Shore and has worked with organizations in the technology, professional services and consumer industries. She writes a bi-monthly PR column on LindsayOlson.com. You can find her at www.kprcommunications.com. Learn more about Alison Kenney.
This is a guest post written by Jonathan Rick.
“We’re gonna make your logo pop! We’re gonna make the
IPREX globe spin! And we’re gonna make the buttons beautiful!”
“A button can be beautiful?” asked a skeptical Susan.
“Oh yeah!” beamed a confident Jesse.
It was at this moment that Jesse had Susan. He’d been muddling through the meeting, but this burst of bravura, energy and passion was sincere and infectious—a gust of fresh wind that won him the contract to redesign SusanDavis.com.
Similarly, when I myself interviewed with Susan, things coasted along for the first 15 minutes. She asked about my experience; I provided conventional answers. Then she deployed her pet question: “If you were an animal, what would you be?”
”That’s easy,” I grinned. “I’d be a dog.” It was at this moment that I had Susan. With great pride and obvious pleasure, I regaled her with stories of my miniature schnauzer, Wyatt.
One final example. I was one of three interviewing a potential subcontractor for a Defense Department project. It was clear this husband-and-wife team could do the job, but they lacked fire in the belly. And because it wasn’t clear that they really wanted the gig, it wasn’t clear if they’d be fun to work with.
Sensing this, my boss’s boss changed direction and pinged the pair with the following question: “Can you tell us about any of your extracurricular activities that relate to the military?”
The husband tilted his chair back, searched his memory, then tilted forward. “Sure,” Chris said, as he proceeded to uncork a heartfelt narrative about a recent weekend when he was home playing video games. When his wife returned, she told him about a veterans charity she had just read about. The story so moved Chris that he dropped his controller and stayed up all night voluntarily coding for the nonprofit.
“If these guys can sacrifice their lives for their country, I can sacrifice a night’s sleep,” he said with a gleam in his theretofore sleepy eyes. It was at this moment that he had us.
To an artist like Jesse, attention to the seeming minutia of Web design was no big deal. To a PR guy like me, naming five national reporters mattered more than discussing my dog. To an engineer like Chris, proposals ought to be won or lost on their merits, not on what the bidders do in their spare time.
Yet what all three of us failed to appreciate was the import of passion. Fortunately, we each were tossed a soft ball to rectify this. Not everyone is so lucky. It shouldn’t take prompting to light your fuse.
Passion, of course, isn’t a substitute for talent. It is, however, a key differentiator, revealing what makes you tick, what drives you, what you’re capable of achieving in the right circumstances. To exude such enthusiasm is to show character. To withhold it is to be average.
So, the next time you’re in an important meeting—be it an interview, a sales pitch, even a date—relax that uncomfortable façade, slacken your stilted smile, and unbottle your passion. No doubt, you’ll be more comfortable. And more successful.
Jonathan Rick, a social media strategist in Arlington, Va, blogs at No Straw Men and tweets at @jrick.
This is a guest post by Derek Pangallo.
Hi, I’m a political scientist in Washington, DC working on and writing about political new media and online advertising. Reach me: derek.pangallo(a)gmail.com
Stand Out
No matter the industry you seek to get ahead in, you want a resume that makes a splash. In this post I’ll share some practices I’ve come up with that make you more appealing to the recruiter, and let you get some passive feedback from them. This isn’t an article encouraging you to add your twitter profile to your resume. In fact I’ll make a point to discourage it. The focus is leveraging technology to make your resume work better.
Every hiring manager has a different process, so we must acknowledge that some people read the resume before the cover letter. It’s also likely you’re resume will never be printed unless you get called in for an interview. For these reasons, the first overall impression of the resume is of utmost importance.
Micro-Managing Perception
The best way to control the first-impression experience of your resume is to use the PDF format. Word documents look messy with all the rulers and toolbars, plus on a foreign computer’s dictionary, your ethnic last name will get the dreaded red-squiggly underneath. No point in racial profiling yourself.
What’s really great about PDF: using Adobe Acrobat professional, you can set the initial view properties of a document point-by-point. I have my resume set to “fit to page” upon opening, so the recruiter gets a bird’s-eye view before ever deciding if I’m worth scrolling down for. Even though you can’t actually read any of my experience or skills, you have to admit it’s a damn sharp resume. Interest acquired, awe accomplished.
You can also set options on the document like “full-screen viewing” and “hide all controls”; don’t do this. When opening a PDF like this up, Adobe gives the warning “this document is trying to take control of your computer” or something — that’s not the first impression we’re looking for.
Link Click Tracking
There are a couple ways to get feedback once your resume is in the figurative hands of a hiring manager. The easiest is to shorten the links in your resume using http://goo.gl. Add the shortened URL as your link, leaving the display text as the actual destination. On my resume it looks like this:
Blog: www.derallo.me
If you hover with your mouse, you can see the link points to http://goo.gl/cTRpE. For the end user, there is no difference after clicking, but we can now track when and how many times the link was clicked. Just add a “+” symbol to the end to see a link’s analytics: http://goo.gl/cTRpE+
You can use this method regardless of where you are directing your visitors. Periodically checking the “all-time” clicks on your links will give you an idea of how many recruiters bothered to click through to your blog, Linkedin, or portfolio.
If you want even more data about outbound clicks on your resume, you’ll need to be directing traffic to a site you control and have a Google Analytics account associated with it.
Google Analytics
Using Google’s Free analytics tool, we can massage out even more data about the appeal of your resume. We can see exactly which job recruiter did the clicking, what city they were in, how long they stayed on your site, and much more. I’ll presume that you have a Google Analytics account and have it installed on your site.
This time around our desire isn’t to make links shorter, it’s to make them longer. You may have noticed longer URL’s with “UTM” codes in them. These are codes that tell Google Analytics where you were referred from. Organizing for America and Twitter both use this prominently in their emails.
For your first tagged URL, use the Google Analytics URL Builder. You enter the URL you will be redirecting to, then enter a campaign Source, Medium and Name (somewhat overkill for our purposes, but all three are requires.) I use one character, “r”, for source and medium, and change the “name” field for every resume I send out. Now you can tell exactly which resumes earned you clicks, drill-downing into that data.
Intelligent Use of Landing Pages
A quick word about where you’re actually directing traffic: make it count. Have a custom page on your blog just for talent-seekers. Also, optimize your LinkedIn profile make an impression. One way to do this is to rearrange profile elements so your recommendations are at the top. And definitely make sure LinkedIn users outside your network can see your photo — this is not the default setting.
What I’ve found
I’ve been utilizing these techniques for a few months now, and here’s what I know for sure: most of the jobs that call you for an interview still only clicked on one of your links. The lesson is that your resume only needs one link. Make it count. Depending on the job you’re looking for, link to your LinkedIn, your blog, or your portfolio. Don’t make it your twitter account unless you’re applying to work at Twitter, or your last tweet is always the first thing you want a prospective employer to see.
Questions/Improvements? Leave a comment or reach me on twitter, @derallo.
A guest post by Jonathan Rick.
In the current edition of her e-newsletter, Claire Kittle, who runs the Talent Market staffing agency, recounts an anecdote that immediately rang true for me. With Claire’s permission, I’m reprinting the story, which I’ve edited slightly.
“I get dozens of applications every day, and you would be amazed to see how many seemingly intelligent candidates do not follow instructions. If I had to put a number on it, I’d estimate that 50% of applicants fail to send me what my clients request.
I used to give all candidates the benefit of the doubt. I would follow-up with them and ask for the information they neglected to send the first time. But I learned that those same candidates often still fail to follow instructions on the second (and third!) attempts, and worse—they frequently get belligerent about being asked for more information!
Here’s a sample scenario:
Me: “Are you free for a phone interview Friday at noon? If so, what’s the best number where I can call you?”
Candidate: “Yes, that will work!”
Sigh. Now I’ll only throw the life preserver to candidates with very strong resumes, but I still file away the fact they didn’t send the right information off the bat.
All this prompts the question: If a candidate can’t follow instructions for a job application, how will that person perform on the job? Will he take direction? Will his work be sloppy? How will he treat your customers? It’s hard to say for sure, but the initial data points don’t bode well for his future as an employee.”
Indeed, although I don’t work in HR, I encounter this bugbear routinely. A recent example:
Vendor: “Please provide profile details.”
Me: “Can you let me know if you can’t get this info from the document I sent this morning?”
The vendor’s response? Silence. Apparently, she could; it was just easier to ask someone than to find a previous e-mail herself.
I learned this passive-aggressive technique from an old boss. Rather than explicitly point out a mistake I had made, he would take the mistake to its logical conclusion. For example, if I wrote that a campaign would run from April-March (rather than March-April), he might reply, “When did our month-long budget get extended to a year?” While my first reaction was, Huh?, upon reflection I appreciated the humor—and gentle guidance.
So, what can we do to minimize these miscommunications? While people will always and forever be lazy, the principles of Web writing suggest separating out anything crucial from the body text. To wit: Any questions or requests should be put in (1) list (2) format, or at least be bolded or highlighted. The extra time this takes upfront will save you from wasting time down the road.
Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist living in Arlington, VA. He blogs at No Straw Men and tweets at @jrick.
This is a post by guest columnist, Alison Kenney.
I’ve blogged before about how content is king and I really believe this will become a major issue for marketers and PR pros in the future. The ability to create fresh, distributable content will soon become core to PR and communication plans.
To illustrate my point: Forrester Research recently announced that, while global adoption of social networking is still on the rise, content creation “experienced no substantial growth in the past year.” This “lack of growth in social creation translates into a lack of fresh ideas, content, and perspectives,” said Forrester Research Consumer Insights Analyst Jacqueline Anderson. “For example, one-third of online consumers in the US regularly watch user-generated videos on sites like YouTube. But, only 10 percent of US online consumers upload videos they’ve created to public sites. The traits required to create social content are unique, and at this moment, the consumer market interested in these behaviors has plateaued.”
While more and more people will be accessing social media to reach new content, fewer and fewer people will be creating that content, and thereby demand for social media content will increase.
This is a golden opportunity for PR professionals who are trained in promoting new ideas, changing the conversation, establishing brands, driving authenticity and attracting attention.
Are you fired up yet?
If so, visit these sites for more tips on creating content for social media:
HubSpot’s Blog Better with an Editorial Calendar and Style Bank
Social Media Today’s 40 Useful Things You Can Share on Twitter Besides Blog Posts
Ann Wylie’s Tipsheets on Writing, Communication
Blue Pencil Consulting’s Fight Writer’s Block with Talk
CopyBlogger’s Writing for the Social Media Everyman
Social Media Examiner’s 9 Ways to Use Social Media to Inspire Your Writing
USA Today There’s an Art to Writing on Facebook or Twitter – Really
Alison Kenney an independent PR practitioner with more than 15 years of PR consulting experience. She is based on Boston’s North Shore and has worked with organizations in the technology, professional services and consumer industries. She writes a bi-monthly PR column on LindsayOlson.com. You can find her at www.kprcommunications.com. Learn more about Alison Kenney.
This is a post by guest columnist, Alison Kenney.
It’s back to school time, and that has me thinking about PR courses and accreditation. Most of the PR professionals I know majored in English, Communications or another liberal arts degree. A few majored in Public Relations; even fewer have their masters in PR or Communications. Clearly, you don’t have to major in these subjects to work in the field. Many successful PR professionals switched gears or leveraged a degree in a different field.
PRSA’s Accreditation Program, the only certification program for our industry, is another story altogether. It’s a certification geared to those who’ve been working in the industry for some time as it judges your aptitude in various PR knowledge areas, e.g. research, planning, implementing and evaluating programs, ethics and law, etc. I know several PR professionals who received their APR, but overall fewer than 25 percent of PR practitioners are accredited.
Which leads me to wonder: is accreditation worth pursuing?
The PRSA stresses the importance of a national standard for legitimizing the profession and building accountability. Andy Beaupre, CEO of Beaupre & Co., agrees and blogged earlier this year on why PR accreditation makes more sense than ever. And, while there are no hard numbers that show professionals with the APR mark earn more than their non-accredited colleagues, survey results show that PR professionals find accreditation to be a source of pride (91%), a help in developing professional skills (78%), provide personal benefit (75%) and help resolve ethical dilemmas (58%). This blog from the PRSA member site underscores those reasons and highlights the satisfaction the writer got from earning her accreditation.
Others argue that an APR mark is not necessary as it only confirms the knowledge that can otherwise be ascertained by reviewing a PR practitioner’s work record. SHIFT Communications principal Todd Defren blogged several years ago that accreditation is not the solution to the PR industry’s perception problem and not the benchmark for demonstrating competency.
What do you think? If you have an APR, what made you pursue it? And has earning accreditation improved your career satisfaction? Please leave your comments below.
Alison Kenney an independent PR practitioner with more than 15 years of PR consulting experience. She is based on Boston’s North Shore and has worked with organizations in the technology, professional services and consumer industries. She writes a bi-monthly PR column on LindsayOlson.com. You can find her at www.kprcommunications.com. Learn more about Alison Kenney.
This is a guest post by PR Columnist, Alison Kenney.
Changes in the media landscape and the growth of social media have altered the role of PR. Now, to a greater extent than ever before, many PR pros are tasked with the responsibility of producing and managing content.
If this sounds like something you’re dealing with, here are four tips to make your role as content developer and curator easier:
Tip #1: Plan Ahead
PR pros are used to working with editorial calendars, the published calendars of scheduled editorial features at given media organizations, and there’s no reason we can’t create our own calendars for planning blog topics (and their contributors), scheduling tweets, and planning video. Start with a goal in mind: how often do you want to publish your content? Then, determine what you’ll have to do, and when it will need to be done, to achieve that goal. Next, fill in the deliverables with ideas for content…more on that below.
Tip #2: Look for inspiration
A common exercise at blogger gatherings is to undertake a 30-day (or 60- or 90-day) blogging challenge, where each blogger commits to writing something every day for that period. The goal of the exercise is to establish good, consistent habits to keep the content flowing. I’ve seen blogger challenges that ask each blogger to write about certain topics on each day of the challenge, i.e. on day #1 everyone writes about where they find inspiration.
Tip #3: Find new life for the content you’ve already got
Social Media consultant Mack Collier says that over time, many bloggers have learned how to either repurpose existing content, or to create new content that can be distributed via multiple social channels. Collier points out that content can come from repurposing white papers, PowerPoint presentations, and questions submitted by customers. New content can easily be created with folks you see everyday – think of video interviews with company execs and customers and recording the goings-on at industry events.
Tip #4: Change it up
Does your creativity dry right up at the thought of writing a compelling introduction, several supporting points and a thought-provoking summary? A blog post doesn’t have to be in essay form every time. HubSpot’s Beth Dunn suggests using a Style Bank to spur creative blog entries.
What are your tips for keeping the content flowing?
Alison Kenney an independent PR practitioner with more than 15 years of PR consulting experience. She is based on Boston’s North Shore and has worked with organizations in the technology, professional services and consumer industries. She writes a bi-monthly PR column on LindsayOlson.com. You can find her at www.kprcommunications.com. Learn more about Alison Kenney.
This is a guest post by Derek Pangallo.
Through much trail and error, I may have written the *perfect* cover letter. No — not bragging: I’m still getting turned down after each interview (I’ll write another post when I perfect that.) The simple method I have been employing runs contrary to conventional wisdom, but has taken me from a 1% to a 10% call-back rate.
After sending out a thousand applications and only landing about 10 interviews, something had to change. Literally my Gmail storage limit was maxing out from attaching my resume so many times. I decided to take a (qualitative) scientific approach at writing a better cover letter.
A student of Political communications, I subscribe to a lot of fundraising emails. A LOT. Most of them are pretty ineffective, all the way from subject to signature; after automagically knowing my name, “Derek–”, there isn’t much feeling of personalization… it’s all “me, me, me; donate donate donate” (Here’s looking at you, Barack.) I thought hard about what language hit the right nerve in these emails.
Next, I dug out the cover letters that actually worked (one of the better ones was addressed to Lindsay.) I went through each, looking for common words, phrases, or conventions. Synthesizing those letters into one, I ended up with the standard four-paragraph template you could read about on any number of websites, but with one notable exception: parentheses.
What could it be about use of parentheses — usually discouraged in formal communications — that made my letters click? I wasn’t sure, but was confident enough to keep using them. And while continuing to apply for the same kind of jobs, my success rate increased by 10 times. After further thought, I now understand what makes parenthetical commentary so
effective.
Parentheses let you be personal and professional simultaneously.
No one wants to read a cover letter. The letter is the arbitrary barrier to entry, the price of admission showing you’re willing to research a company, caring enough about the job to invest the time. Parentheses let you prove you understand convention while giving you carte blanche (almost) to speak as yourself, making a personal connection with the reader.
Parentheses are an aside, the inside joke between two professionals. Where the letter is the white-washed outside persona, the parentheses are a just-for-you nudge and whisper. You’re able to convey personality with a sense of humor and amicability — without using exclamation points, emoticons, or saying “I” too much (as feels like a problem in this post,
sorry.)
Long story short: write a standard cover letter, then spruce it up with parenthetical commentary. Some of those annotations you might turn into “real” sentences. You’ll create a more enjoyable read for the hiring manager and will likely be rewarded Just don’t over-do it (you wouldn’t want to come off as schizophrenic, either.)
Let me know how it works out: @derallo or derek.pangallo[@]gmail.com
Derek Pangallo is an Online Community Manager, Communications Consultant and Advertiser aspiring toward a Political New Media career on Capitol Hill. He hates talking about himself in the third person and thinks anyone whose Twitter bio is written as such should be banned from the Internet.
This is a guest post by PR Columnist, Alison Kenney.
In last week’s season opener of the AMC series Mad Men, Peggy Olson tells Don Draper “we’re all here because of you.” The episode also shows Don’s struggle with revealing his personality – he blows a profile opportunity with AdAge before getting a second try at answering the question, “who is Don Draper?” with the Wall Street Journal. And, not only does Don shy away from revealing his personality to the public, he also tries to quaff his support staff’s attempts at defining the company (by disparaging Pete Campbell’s attempt to portray the agency as a scrappy start-up and by calling Peggy’s guerilla PR tactic a ‘shenanigan’).
Whether you work for a global PR firm, a boutique agency, your own solo practice or part of an in-house department, chances are you’ve come across PR ‘personalities.’
How important is it to have a recognizable personality behind your business?
First of all, having a recognizable personality behind your PR brand (recognizable in a good way, that is) can help attract business. Publicizing agency leadership is a form of in-bound marketing in that it helps prospective clients understand who they’ll be working with and what they’ll be buying before-hand. Anyone looking for a job will have heard how important it is to demonstrate their expertise through social media – by answering questions on LinkedIn, writing an original blog or posting comments to another widely-read blog, maintaining a web site and developing a following on Twitter. “Sharing your expertise publicly is a way of promoting yourself” tweeted Kellye Crane (@kellyecrane and @soloPR) when this topic came up on a recent #soloPR Twitter chat. “It’s also a way to practice what you preach and demonstrate that you know how to build an effective brand and reputation,” added another #soloPR chatter.
It can also help up-sell. The bigger the personality, the more valuable the counsel that person provides and the more you can charge for it. Anyone who has worked on the agency side of the PR business knows that the firm’s most senior leaders charge astronomically high billing rates when they are involved with client work.
Some clients and business partners are willing to pay higher rates for a big personality because they sense they’re getting more than just PR counsel for their dollars. I call it a rain-maker mentality — in which buyers think they’re also purchasing the services of someone who has valuable connections and is business savvy.
What do you think? Do you work with a PR personality? Do you cultivate your own professional personality?
Alison Kenney an independent PR practitioner with more than 15 years of PR consulting experience. She is based on Boston’s North Shore and has worked with organizations in the technology, professional services and consumer industries. She writes a bi-monthly PR column on LindsayOlson.com. Learn more about Alison Kenney.
This blog is to share my recruiting experiences and discuss thoughts on the job market, PR industry and technology.
Alison Kenney is an independent PR practitioner with more than 15 years of PR consulting experience.
