StevenSilvers.com

Read this before you send that resume cover letter

Dear people wanting an entry-level PR job:

Thanks for your interest.  We’re thrilled that so many of you visited our firm's web site. Those of you who didn’t should consider a different career. Or go work for one of our competitors.

You all have nice resumes.  That’s expected.  But we read your cover letter first.  This was your chance to tell us why we should be interested in you versus the 90 other people who also want this job.

Unfortunately, many of your cover letters were poorly thought out and badly written.  Several were stunning in their awfulness.

Next time you submit your resume somewhere, make sure your cover letter doesn’t get you rejected because of mistakes like these:

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

Hyphenation hate.  If your letter reads that “I’m a first class writer with an all out attitude 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.

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 you telling us that “It requires a lot of hard work and an exceptional team of employees for a business to become and remain successful.”  Leave the bromidic insights to us pros.

Missing something important.  One letter we received was 400 words long and didn’t mention our company once.

A wrong view of how the working world works.   We know you want things out of life.  We also know we don't want self-absorbed newbies who says things 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 a novel.  If we have to go to the bathroom in the middle of reading your letter, it’s too long.

Good luck out there.

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

(Originally posted in 2010.)

GBSM has opening for entry level PR staffer

My firm GBSM, Inc. has posted this job opening:

GBSM, Inc. seeks an exceptional professional to serve as senior executive assistant for our  growing corporate communications, public relations and crisis management practice.  The position requires one or two years experience in a PR agency, consulting firm or communications department.  You must have absolutely superb organizational, administrative, research and project management skills.

Responsibilities include all facets of principal support, scheduling, research and assessment, materials creation, contact management, social networking, conferences and events, distribution, community outreach, media relations, reporting and other areas.

For consideration, send resume with cover letter directly to Steven Silvers, Principal, at stevensilvers@gbsm.com.  Please put “Attn: New Staff Position” in the email subject line.

Denver-based GBSM has a 23-year track record in providing management consulting, strategic communications and public affairs services to help clients through the increasingly complex nexus of business, media, government and community. Learn more at www.gbsm.com.

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.
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Corpcomm chief Snyder to leave Frontier Airlines

Frontier Airlines corporate communication chief Steve Synder is leaving the company to join ProBuild, the nation’s largest supplier of building supplies.  Steve makes the transition in mid-November.  Good luck, my friend.
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Scattered links of interest

Twitter’s ROI (Forbes.com)
There is a potential danger in that too many people will employ Twitter as a short-cut for customer service.”

Prepare now for “resume tsunami” (Ogilvy Impact)
“With a variety of signs pointing, if somewhat tentatively, toward an economic recovery, it’s not too soon for companies to begin thinking about how they’ll keep their top performers.”

We need a swine flu newsroom (Newsvetter)
“In matters concerning life and death I don't want to be forced to rely (solely) on a news media obsessed with body counts and hot zones.”

PRSA’s meaningless condemnation (O’Dwyer’s Blog)
“…How about revealing the source of your anger? Who in the world are you talking about?”
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Submit links to scatterbox@stevensilvers.com

More and more job applicants rejected because of what they've posted on social media sites

CareerBuilder reports that 35 percent of 2,600 hiring managers surveyed decided not to employ someone specifically because of what that person posted on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter or blogs.

When I first wrote about the “The Transparent Generation” in 2006, only a small percentage of employers made it a point to research job candidates on social media sites.  Today almost half do so.

It’s bound to be standard practice before long. 

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Proof that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't

Anyone who’s been a boss knows this already, but new research from NYU Stern confirms that executives who choose between two rotten choices – like eliminating healthcare or firing people to avoid going out of business -- are likely to be blamed no matter what choice they make.
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Why most companies should just ignore all those anonymous rate-your-employer sites

Internet Evolution blogger Chris Poley points to another aspect of employees using the Internet to ridicule the companies they work for. [Read Scatterbox: Managing the Unmanageable.]

One way they do this is through Internet sites that rate companies based on anonymous input from current and former employees, and even people who only tried getting jobs with a company. 

But the impact these user-generated sites have on a company’s reputation is debatable.  Glassdoor.com, for example, touts its “inside look” at more than 26,000 companies.  Large companies like Wal-Mart list hundreds of anonymous comments, which in reading lead you to the not-so-shocking revelation that some people like their employers and some people don’t.  Many other companies garner only one or two comments, most of them rants about stupid bosses and rotten culture.

Basically it’s like listening to strangers on the bus to work.

To be sure, some companies use search engine optimization – also hyped as “online reputation management” – to push negative comments deeper into the Internet clutter.  Other companies have their flacks post anonymous positive comments to counter the anonymous criticisms (the ethics of which are for another post).

Most employers, however, simply ignore the sites.  And in most cases that’s the best approach.

Why?  Because without attribution, scientific basis or mass context these opinion boards have as much information value as random graffiti.

It’s no surprise that a relatively few unhappy, unnamed employees are more likely to gripe online.  And that creates representations way out of sync with more credible reputation measurements.  Look up insurance giant Aflac on Glassdoor.com, for example, and you get a 5,000-employee company with a “neutral company rating” because half of the 26 comments that make up the score are from people like the agent who wrote that “they have no morals and they don't know what their [SIC] doing there.”

Meanwhile, Aflac was named 2009’s most reputable and ethical insurance company by Reputation Institute's Global Reputation Pulse, an annual public survey of the nation's 153 largest corporations.  Second year in a row, too.

It doesn’t take a PR expert to know which image matters most.
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Managing the unmanageable: Employees talking about your company on the Internet

Here's one of the questions I hear most:

"How are we supposed to manage what our employees say about us when they're on Twitter and Facebook all the time?"

Executives worry about social media in relation to two things: risk to the company and loss of productivity.  Both are legitimate concerns. Yet many of those same executives are downright tepid about bringing up the productivity issue. It's as if they're worried about sounding ridiculous, like the old dolt who doesn't get this World Wide Web hullabaloo.

Or perhaps they've seen studies like the one claiming that employees who use the Internet for personal reasons are nine percent more productive. Researchers in Australia report that "workplace Internet leisure browsing, or WILB, helped to sharpened workers' concentration."

There you go. Can't argue with an acronym.

But even CEOs who buy it are concerned about how social-networking employees might be representing the company. And they dang well should be.

Deloitte's 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey found that 75 percent of working Americans think it's easy to damage a brand's reputation via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media services. Yet a third of all employees say they never even consider what their boss might think before posting something online.

This is scary stuff.  It means that a good chunk of any company's workforce could include people with the same kind of mental disposition as the two Domino's employees, aged 31 and 32, who posted a video of themselves spitting on food and stuffing cheese up their nose -- all while laughing that "somebody will be eating them, yes eating them... Now that's how we roll at Domino's!"

In the first 48 hours, more than a million people watched the gross-out video just on YouTube.  Internet exposure and news coverage hit like a hurricane. And in only four days of tracking, consumer perceptions toward one of the nation's most popular brands went from great to rotten.

Domino's responded comprehensively and is even being credited with being the "Tylenol crisis" of the new media era.  But winning a PR trophy doesn't come close to accounting for what that little video prank cost the company in lost sales, bad publicity and ridicule, penalties paid for health-code violations, costs associated with managing the crisis and the expenses of investigations and litigation.

And unlike the Tylenol crisis, the image of a smirking Domino's employee sticking cheese up his nose will keep showing up on the Internet forever.

In a New York Times story, a Domino's spokesman underscored the real bottom-line risk of social media:

"We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea. Even people who've been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino's, and that's not fair."

Companies must have comprehensive social media policies in place, and many do. But rules alone won't change how many people behave online. In a world where so many employees (and bosses) could give your brand a black eye, it will take considerable internal culture-building and communications programs to ensure they don't.

Technology savvy or not, that gives every CEO good reason to wonder how much time their people are spending on social media.  And what exactly they're doing there.
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Links & Resources

• Deloitte | 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey Results
• New York Times | Video prank at Domino's taints brand
• USA Today  | Domino's nightmare holds lessons for marketers
• Domino's | CEO YouTube response: "Disgusting Dominos people"
  
• Scatterbox | Transparent generation realizes downside to growing up online

Inside Denver's economic development machine

Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation's new blog gives an inside look at how the region's business community works to attract new employers and investments.

"Clark's Cone of Silence" is named for Metro Denver EDC honcho -- and decent electric guitar player -- Tom Clark, who is referring to the old Get Smart gag about a big transparent cone that was supposed to keep conversations confidential but didn't.

"We've also learned that this mechanism doesn't work," Tom said in an announcement.  "So we thought, let's give people outside of our 'Cone of Silence' an inside look at not only what we do every day in economic development, but more importantly, why we do it."
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