Tips for PRs wanting to blag it in social media

Posted by Darika on August 28, 2008 · View Comments 

its all glamour, er, except online

Get ready to sign-up to every new web thing going

This perfectly observed post from Jon Silk gives tips to journalists looking to make it in PR and, as I couldn’t leave a comment for some reason, I felt inspired to do a quick list of my own on making it from PR to the social media side of murky online marketing and stuff.

  1. Don’t commit to calling yourself anything. At any moment you could be in new media / social media / conversational or word-of-mouth marketing. It’s not like your friends or family ever understood what your job was anyway
  2. Have a ready response to “have you tried latest hot new thing everyone’s talking about yet?” I find “No. i’m too busy on [made up name] it’s a closed alpha invite only community currently, but when it opens up to the rest of you next year it’ll blow your mind”
  3. Don’t succumb to Firefox pressure. How will you break your start-up client’s web platform/application/whatever unless you’re using IE? People will say you’re un-cool. Just go to their website/download their app & break it. Send screengrabs
  5. Come up with an intelligent password system. You’re, sadly, going to sign-up for every new online service going. You’re never going to remember the passwords. Best one I’ve heard of? The name of the website plus a set number = changes the password every time, while you only have to remember one thing. Genius
  6. Join networking groups and turn up to the meet-ups. It’s fun and people are nice. Oh yeah, and it might be useful one day
  7. Don’t try and keep up with everything. You never will
  8. Don’t ever feel bad if you can’t understand what some new social media thing does. Tell yourself if they can’t explain or show it simply, then that’s their problem
  9. Only say “What’s the point?” in private. One day you may regret being the person who blogged “So… YouTube, rubbish home videos. Not going anywhere” and they could be your next client
  10. Join LinkedIn. I just really like it
  11. Everything will be documented. Alternative names are the only way forward

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About Darika

  • DarikaAhrens
    Congrats, you win the prize. Yeah i had some problem with some code in there and needed to scrap it, but then none of these comments would make sense! ;-)
  • Will
    "...
    12. Disregard the number '4'. Its form is ugly in my eyes and bloggers would do well to ignore it. keep it there for accuracy, but do not acknowledge its presence. See '4' for my example. In time, it shall die and we'll be able to skip straight from 3 to 5, a far more sensible Web 3.0 regime in my opinion."
  • Nice list! I'm just getting the hang of number 6. Number 9 is critical in my view. I've just number 10'd you.

    Oh, and I've enabled comments on my blog :-)
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