StevenSilvers.com

Read this before you send that resume cover letter

Dear young people wanting the entry level PR job that I announced last week:

Thanks for your interest.  We’re thrilled that so many of you visited our company’s web site.  Those of you who didn’t should consider a different career than one involving research and information.

I can tell you that the candidates who made it through the first review had great cover letters.  Most everyone has a polished resume.  That’s expected.  Your cover letter shows us how well you break the ice.  It illustrates your ability to articulate an abstract idea – in this case, your proposed value to a strategic communications firm you don’t know and that doesn’t know you.

Many of the cover letters we received, however, were badly written and poorly thought out.  Some were stunningly terrible. 

Next time you’re sending your resume somewhere, make sure your cover letter doesn’t make self-elimination mistakes like these:

Hyphenation hate.  If your letter reads that “I’m a first class writer ready to work for a top notch company,” you’re not and you won’t.

Redundant hyperbole over and over.  If you use the word “passion” more than five times, you’re mostly passionate about not using a thesaurus.

No-brainer personality traits.  You love working with people?  Excellent. This puts you automatically above all the PR job candidates who love working with woolen farm animals.

A firm and wordy grasp of the obvious.  We don’t know if you’re sucking up or if you honestly think we’re impressed by writing that “I know it requires a lot of hard work and an exceptional team of employees for a business to become and remain successful.”  Either way it doesn’t work for you.

Missing something important.  One letter we received was 400 words long and didn’t mention our company once.  Even worse, it wasn’t a form letter.

An absolutely wrong view of how the world works.   We appreciate that you want things out of life.  But we shy away from newbies who make naive, self-absorbed proclamations like: “After significant research into your company, I have decided that this position offers me an excellent opportunity to gain valuable experience in a career area in that I am interested in.”

One more thing.  You're not writing an epic novel version of your resume.  If we have to go to the bathroom in the middle of reading your letter, it’s too long.

Thanks for listening.  Good luck out there.

Steve
. . . . . . . . .

Related:

Five things all PR students should know about their choice of career

Ten billion Tweets means what, exactly?

Most of my clients and colleagues acknowledge the expanding value of social media.  But they still don’t know what to make of Twitter.

Blogs, online communities and forums are relatively easy for them to comprehend as strategic communications tools.  But the incessantly babbling Twitter, with its Gnostic lingo of hashtags and retweeting and @replies, is not. 

So what are we to make of the fact that Twitter has reached 10 billion tweets?  Maybe a lot.  But maybe a lot of nothing.

Consider this unscientific illustration of Twitter’s contribution to productivity.  If each Tweet took on average only ten seconds to be posted and read, then Twitter would already account for almost 28 million manhours.  That’s an average year’s work for 15,414 Americans. 

What value has come of all this effort is debatable, especially when you consider that 40 percent of Twitter posts are what one study called “pointless babble.”  Probably just as many posts are babble that makes a point. 

Twitter also suffers from a growing spam and phishing infestation. A study by online security firm Barracuda Networks estimates that only 21 percent of Twitter users are genuine.

Nobody denies Twitter’s ability to spread the word.  But for many otherwise Internet-savvy communications executives, it’s still far from clear how to most effectively anticipate, respond to and leverage a free online messaging service that by design is a magnet for the world’s clutter.

Also see:

CEOs won't say Twitter and other contradictions about the hottest social media thing since the one before it

. . . . . . . . .

(Above) Social media consultant Muhammad Saleem created this excellent graphic illustrating Twitter’s path to 10 billion tweets and what’s been shown true along the way.

74JE9NAPHB25

Super Bowl ads hits, misses and dismal failures

Now that’s advertising… Audi’s “Green Police” ad – showing a world where people get busted for using Styrofoam cups and incandescent light bulbs – was exaggerated enough to get buzz going on both sides of the debate about environmental extremism.  CBS News noted that liberals and conservatives alike still don’t whether to “celebrate or denigrate the spot.”  Brilliant.

Soft sell… The Tim Tebow ad for Focus on the Family may have been brilliant, if the idea was to stir up national controversy about a single spot that turned out to be as unfulfilling as a Hostess cupcake.

Where’s-the-beef moment… The “Don’t touch my momma, don’t touch my Doritos” spot was most popular, and most-quoted in hallways and cafeterias.  You can’t escape a good catchphrase.

Next time ask if the ad before you has pants… CareerBuilder.com had a spot about a company wearing underwear on casual Fridays, then a second later a bunch of singing guys in their briefs were marching through a field for Dockers.  Viewers were confused just long enough to make Dockers' media buy a waste.

Too insipid… GoDaddy.com’s ridiculously sexist faux controversy about being “too hot for TV” is insulting to even halfway enlightened people.  But don’t give the company – or its success in pulling guys to its web site where they hope to see naked women -- too much credit.  GoDaddy.com didn’t invent T&A marketing.  They’re only doing a more tedious, amateurish version of what’s already been institutionalized by some of the nation’s largest brands.

And the worst… The incoherent “mocumentary” U.S. Census Bureau spot succeeded in generating a firestorm of criticism for wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on an over-produced public service ad.  In keeping with a dismissive tone so prevalent in government these days, the Census dismisses even the possibly that it screwed up, arguing that past experience “shows that paid advertising can motivate people to respond to the census form by mail, while saving taxpayer dollars.” 

Saying that other advertising maybe worked hardly justifies a failed concept.  But it's enough to guarantee that the census campaign will be an ongoing battle with news media, watchdog groups and activists who now have more to be upset about.
. . . . . . . . .

Reporters becoming PR people: Why it works. Why it doesn't.

More than a year ago I suggested that unemployed journalists will take many of the jobs that would have gone to communicators without newsroom experience.

That was an understatement.

In less than ten years, the nation’s news business has lost more than 14,000 jobs, some 25 percent of the entire industry.  Things have yet to hit bottom, especially for newspapers and magazines.

The result, as the Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg calls it, is the The Great Journalism Exodus.  Every PR agency, communications department and public affairs office in the country is hearing from reporters who are either unemployed or desperate to get out.  

Goldberg wonders if all these hacks make good flacks, but the volume of job candidates makes this a non-issue.  Many reporters don’t transition from the newsroom because they can't let go of their often sanctimonious cynicism about the business world.  But just as many are damn good at it.  They write better, learn faster and have better connections.  That’s why they’re getting so many of the good jobs.

What's important is how this hacks-to-flacks migration represents a tectonic shift in the relationship between sponsored message and third-party credibility.  For every public affairs officer and publicist with newsroom experience, there are many times that number of news beats and media outlets that simply no longer exist. 

The changing landscape means the best communications people will be those with skills far deeper than writing press releases and pitching stories.  They’ll need to know research, integrated marketing, community engagement, public affairs, issues management and yes, blogging and social media.

It’s worth keeping in mind whether you’re hiring a flack or a hack.  Or one in the same.
. . . . . . . . .

What Tiger Woods and other scandals really tell us about crisis management

PR and media types over-analyze the Tiger Woods mess.  There are only a couple of lessons here.  But they’re big ones.

Here’s the first: The threat of discovery doesn’t stop some people from behaving badly.

Tiger’s melt-down isn't the failure of a crisis plan. There wasn’t one. None of Tiger Inc.'s image handlers prepared memos outlining what to do if it came out that Mr. Woods enjoyed extramarital affairs like some people collect snow globes.  Damage control strategies started after the truth.  Not before.

Today’s Internet-driven reality TV culture means we’re following scandals more than ever.  We’re very familiar with the “PR angle” of every story.  This has created a belief that PR is the end result of itself.  We assume that image is a universally valued currency to be saved or squandered.  But this confuses how we rationalize self-destructive behavior by prominent people.

Take for example a recent Harvard Business Review article on responding to scandals.  In it two researchers argue that Chinese executives who added melamine to milk sold in the U.S. might have acted differently had they only anticipated people's emotional reaction people to media coverage about dead infants.

The world doesn’t work that way.  Businessmen who poison food to increase profits are criminals.  And criminals are psychopaths that by definition don’t care what happens to others. They’re bad people, not bad public relations planners.

True story.  Many years ago I was in my hotel room watching the local news when suddenly the TV showed a mug shot of my client.  The government official at the center of our at-risk youth campaign had been arrested for soliciting a teenage prostitute. 

We had nothing prepared for this.  What we did have, however, was an appreciation of how things would get worse if people thought we were treating the scandal as primarily a PR problem to be resolved with spin and posturing.  That got us through it.

In the same way, Tiger’s self-destruction also reminds us of the second lesson: That effective crisis planning is having the ability to respond to situations nobody sees coming. 

In the real world, that has to include people in charge being caught doing very bad things.

. . . . . . . . . .

Is your social media agency into social media?

Marketing cage-rattler and blogger B.L. Ochman had the audacity to suggest that companies shouldn’t hire social media experts that aren’t “thought leaders” in using social media themselves.

This generated an immediate protest from one agency executive who said they don’t need to show their expertise in social media to prove they get it.  “For an agency to build a large community of followers,” she wrote, “is more difficult than for a marketer as they don't really offer anything to the general public.”

This “we don’t sell to the public” line is an old, specious defense by ad agencies that avoid spending their own time and money on the products they want other companies to buy in mass quantities. 

It rings even less true given social media’s supposed game-changing capacity to build business.
. . . . . . . . . .

Bad News Friday usually makes things worse

Even in the always-on Internet era, many companies and government offices still rely on the old trick of waiting until late Friday afternoon to release bad news.

In most cases they're just making things worse come Monday. Here's why:

You stop nothing.  People who care most have news alerts, stock tickers and other Internet tracking gizmos to get your stuff the second it hits the fan. Your stock will still move in after-hours trading guided by speculation and negative expectations.  Media outlets will still run breaking news, except this time you’ll be covered either by reporters who know to dig for whatever you’re trying to hide or by inexperienced weekend reporters who don’t know the situation.

You create a new credibility issue.   Maybe ten people on the planet won’t perceive that you tried to bury bad news on Friday afternoon. You risk creating a whole new PR problem with stakeholders and media for thinking they don’t see you trying to sneak out the back.

You dig a deeper hole.    Friday-night announcements don’t make bad news go away.  They create a 48-hour vacuum for people to assume the worst. Some will interpret your move as a signal that there’s still another shoe to drop. You could be in a worse defensive position on Monday morning as you reopen the doors to angry shareholders, anxious employees and reporters working on follow-up pieces about your company mishandled a crisis.

You still announce on Monday anyway.  Assuming you’re somewhat successful in burying your bad news over the weekend, you’ll have to deal with the response on Monday from people seeing the news for the first time. Now you’re dealing with two sets of responses: the people who are just hearing it, and the people who saw and reacted to it over the weekend.

Bad News Friday isn’t a secret, it’s bad public relations.

. . . . . . . . . .

The State of Colorado says you should gamble because your life is pathetic.

The latest TV ad for Colorado Lottery drops the pretense of fun in favor of selling hope.

As in, you’re hopelessly stuck in your pointless little existence unless you “Break free” by winning Powerball. 

The “Don’t Forget to Play” tag adds to the loathing, implying that if you don’t win it’s because you screwed up.

The ad follows a sad-looking white-collar worker trudging through another dreary day, a huge chain shackled to his ankle.  Before eating his little peanut butter sandwich alone he buys a Powerball ticket.  That night a big red ball falls from the sky onto his little weed-infested lawn, breaking him free.  He smiles.

Hey.  Loser.  Don’t forget to play.

We all benefit from lottery revenues.  But it’s cruel for a state with as much recession-induced bleakness as Colorado to tell working people that gambling on a multi-million-to-one shot is their way out of it.
. . . . . . . . . .

Here's the full version of the health care reform bill.

For your informed consent, here are all 1,990 pages of the House health care bill with the seemingly impossible but possibly amazing promise, “To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.” 

Or the shorter, more immediately achievable title, “To give Americans a good reason not to watch St. Louis play Detroit this weekend.”
. . . . . . . . . .

Associated Press story says media hoaxes work

AP television writer David Bauder expands on the “frightening message” that media hoaxes like Balloon Boy and the fake press conference in which activists reversed the U.S. Chamber’s position on global warming are increasingly successful publicity tools.

At least, we think it’s AP television writer David Bauder.
. . . . . . . . .