It’s a bad time to be in the industry.  People are losing their jobs left and right, and as a junior employee who’s probably not bringing in new business, how do you keep your job?  Regardless of the economic climate, there are a few tips that will not only help you keep your job, but make you indespensible as an employee and make it easier for you to work your way up the corporate ladder.

Be reliable.  When I started in the industry, one of my team leaders gave me a piece of advice I’ve given to every junior PR person I’ve worked with.  Senior people are juggling multiple projects and clients and are generally extremely busy.  When they delegate something to you, they need to be 100% secure in the fact that it will get done.  Be reliable, and you’ll become a go-to person with a reputation for getting the job done, and making life easier for those who have the power to promote you.

Have an eagle-eyed attention to detail.  It’s not enough to merely get the job done.  If you’re given a task that needs miles of corrections, you’re not adding value – in fact, you may be making life more difficult for those who are delegating to you.  Pay attention to the details of your contributions as well as others.  Proofread, fact check, follow proper formatting guidelines, and make it a rule to submit everything letter perfect.  It’s a supervisor’s job to maintain quality control, but the less that needs to be controlled, the better you look.  Assume whatever you provide to your superiors will be sent to the client unchecked, and work to acheive that level of polish.  It will not only help now, but even more when you’re directly interfacing with clients.

Figure it out.  Training is the backbone of any successful PR firm, but certiain things are expected to be part of general education.  While performing a media scan may require formal in-house training, there are many things that can be figured out simply through a quick Google search.  Ask for guidance, but only after you’ve made a bit of an effort to figure it out for yourself.  It will make you a better person.

Become a better writer.  Even if you think you’re the best writer in the world, get better.  If you’ve got awards for your pithy prose and penetrating poetry, get better.  No matter what you do in this industry, you’ll need to be a great writer.  If you’re not – get another job.  It’s not enough to be good at a certain type of writing – you need to be able to adapt to any style, any voice, any message.  It takes practice, but work at getting better at it.  It might be a while before you’re writing copy or messaging, but work at it.  There’s nothing worse than a PR person who can’t write.

Enjoy the grunt work.  Your main job is to make life easier for the people who bring in the clients and keep them happy.  This means photocopying, web research, data entry – all of the exceedingly boring crap that nobody wants to do.  Enjoy it.  Revel in it.  Ask for more.  The more you understand of the minutiae of the work, the better you’ll be at the bigger stuff – strategy, estimating, etc.  Nobody really likes the work, but if you can do it with a smile, you’ll be respected by the people who rely on you.

Be patient.  It’s really difficult to work with a junior PR person who thinks they should be managing partner.  Sure, you want to move up and make more money, have a better title, and do the more interesting work, but you need to prove yourself first.  Show you’re hungry, but don’t be pushy about it.

Bring a big brain.  Nobody expects you to come up with the next big idea – and that’s all the more reason that you should be dedicating your spare time to building that.  Read, research, interview, understand – be voracious in your quest for knowledge, and apply that big brain to problems that your firm needs to solve.  Whether it’s a best practice for something small, a new process for developing media lists that will save time and money, or another supplier that will give better results cheaper, keep bringing those ideas to the table.  There is nothing more appreciated in a junior employee than drive and ambition.  Keeep it below obnoxious level, though, and never expect more for your trouble than a “Good idea.  Thanks.”

Those are my tips for succeeding as a junior PR person.  Have any that you’d like to share?

Image by Duane Storey via Flickr

If you find yourself in downtown Ottawa tomorrow morning at 7:30 with a hankering for a bagel and some piercing insight on social media and community, stop by the offices of Gowlings at 160 Elgin and join us at the fourth Ottawa Social Media Breakfast.  Now, we’ve been at capacity for over a week, so there are no guarantees that you’ll get in if you haven’t already signed up online.  In the meantime, if you want to assure yourself a ticket for the upcoming breakfasts, swing on over to the sign-up page at http://smbottawa4.eventbrite.com/ and add your email to the waiting list, and we’ll let you know about upcoming breakfasts.  We’ve sold out almost every time, so it’s a good idea to act fast.

You may ask: why do we do this?  Because, as Captain Hammer of Doctor Horrible‘s Sing Along Blog says:

It’s not enough to bash in heads,
You have to bash in minds.

We’ve got some exciting things to announce in the next little while, including our new season sponsor – Gowlings Law – and our upcoming speakers.  Stay tuned, and I hope to see you at breakfast tomorrow.

I have more beta invites and memberships to sites that I’ve used a handful of times than anyone should ever have.  While I am admittedly in the geeky minority, the reason that many of these social networks and potentially useful (though not always) memberships end up abandoned, only to live out the rest of their days in my bacn folder is because social tools, by their very nature, require a social aspect to be truly useful.  Facebook without your friends list is really nothing at all.  Twitter without followers and people to follow would be a lonely exercise in yelling into the ether in 140 character chunks.

The answer up to now has been either to search and find your friends on every network you want to join, or to allow sites to search your email (eek!) for people who have already signed up.  Of course, this doesn’t work if they used a different email to sign up than you use to email them, and we’ve already seen what can happen when unscrupulous bottom-feeders like Quetchup get involved with that.

Cue DataPortability.org, a working group comprised of some of the major thought leaders in the social networking space.  Their vision is to create a framework where my contacts on Facebook can be the same as my contacts on Bebo, can be in my email address book, can be hooked into Twitter.  This is part of a larger movement to create online web standards dictated by users, not by companies who want to lock down a file format or a proprietary codec.

What does it mean for the future of social networking?  First, it means that users have a lot more choice, which means that the larger social networks will need to step up their game.  Like any media, once consumers aren’t locked down by restrictions, they will consume media in the way that suits them best.  Second, it means that niche social networks (like dopplr or Upcoming.org) can thrive.  Without the massive barrier to transporting your social graph from one service to another, social micronetworks can form and, more importantly, monetize.  With no more need to reproduce your friends list, social media can become more pervasive, both online and off, with the control held by the user and not a corporation.

The movement also has privacy implications for anyone involved.  If I provide my contact info to someone via one social network, in theory it means that it can propagate to all of those social networks.  It also means that the Chinese wall between your business life and your personal life (if you have one… I personally think they’re overrated) comes down, and all of a sudden Ernie “the Keg” Smith from university and your boss are connected by one degree.  Also dangerous, but these are things that are in many cases already happening, and the discussions at this level will hopefully address these points.

So far, Facebook, Google, Plaxo and a host of other major players have joined the discussion, which is extremely positive for the group.  The big players need to buy in, and the niche players need to have their concerns addresed as well for this to work.  What will come of these discussions remains to be seen, but hopefully it will lead to the user having more control over their own data, rather than companies like Facebook simply monetizing that data and providing little to the playground other than a grassy field and an unblinking eye watching everything you do.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the new social advertising features on Facebook, one of which, of course, is Beacon.  For the uninitiated, Beacon gives advertisers a few lines of code to put into their site that allows that site to publish the actions of its userbase to their respective Facebook pages.  For instance, you add “Gigli” to your Netflix queue or Zip List, and through internet magic, all of your friends can be informed about that action, assuming the companies have added these few lines of text.

Yeah, a little big-brotherish, but is it a huge violation of privacy?  I probably don’t want anyone to know that I’m renting a Ben Affleck movie, but not a big deal, right?

Now replace “movie” with “engagement ring,” and you have this comment from a guy named Will on Charlene Li’s blog:

I purchased a diamond engagement ring set from overstock in preparation for a New Year’s surprise for my girlfriend. Please note that this was something meant to be very special, and also very private at this point (for obvious reasons). Within hours, I received a shocking call from one of my best friends of surprise and “congratulations” for getting engaged.(!!!)Imagine my horror when I learned that overstock had published the details of my purchase (including a link to the item and its price) on my public facebook newsfeed, as well as notifications to all of my friends. ALL OF MY FRIENDS, including my girlfriend, and all of her friends, etc…

ALL OF THIS WAS WITHOUT MY CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE.

Ouch. This is obviously something that Facebook didn’t think through before announcing it, and something that Overstock adopted without a strategy or considering the repercussions.  How many kids are going to find out what their parents bought them for Christmas because it shows up on their Facebook page?

This is the tip of the crisis iceberg for both Facebook and Overstock.  If I were Facebook, I would alter the API to ensure that it was impossible for sites to transmit information without the consent of the person whose personal details were about to be broadcast to the world.  If I were overstock, I would either implement this change directly, or completely discontinue use of the service pending Facebook’s changes to the script.  The benefits of letting people’s friends know that you bought a vase on the internet is far outweighed by the vocal anger of their most plugged-in users about being betrayed by both the retailer and their social network.

The problem with a parasitic relationship is that if the parasite kills the host, there’s no more food.  Like Hugh says, “The minute the Facebooks of the world forget they are replaceable, is the minute people like me move in for The Kill.”

[via: PR Squared]

Now that blogging has hit its cruising altitude, all eyes have been on the steady climb of social networking as it entered the mainstream over the past year. With the successes of 2007, most notably the astounding growth of Facebook and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn, there’s a growing trend toward companies and organizations creating social networks of their own to create this “community” thing they’ve heard so much about. Many have been collossal failures (Wal-mart, I’m looking at you), and some have been mild successes.

At my day job, this is something that I’ve discussed in length with many clients looking to enter the realm of community, and one major thing that stands out from each of these conversations is that the reality of social networking is far more complex than it seems on the surface. I’ve taken notes from these conversations, and have tried to boil them down to a few things to keep in mind when conceptualizing a social network.

Incentive. So you have the newest social network. Start by assuming that nobody cares and work forward from there. By asking people to sign up, you’re asking them to spend something more precious than money – you’re asking them to spend time, so you need to make sure that the reward is worth the ongoing investment. Things like contests and prizes are ingenuine and have diminishing returns. Incentive has to be real and ongoing.

Validity. Is the content going to be valid and useful to the target user? Facebook’s main feature is that it allows you to keep up-to-date with a lot of people, which is meaningful to university students and young adults, but is much less meaningful if your target is dentists. Think benefit for the user, not benefit for the publisher. The more beneficial it is for the target user, the more likely it is to be suggested to someone else by an exisiting member.

Exclusivity vs. Openness. There’s no right or wrong here – but it depends heavily on your target group. A social network for doctors or lawyers will likely benefit from exclusivity, but exclusivity will obviously affect the growth of the network. Interestingly enough, Facebook grew at first because it was exclusive to university students, but ultimately exploded when it opened its doors to everyone. Would it have worked without that exclusivity? Hard to say, but my gut says no. On the other hand, do you know anyone who uses Google’s invite-only Orkut?

Mass. The playgound is only as fun as the people playing in it. The key is to provide enough equipment to keep the early adopters occupied until everyone else gets out for recess. If your community is built on the interaction within a closed system from day one, momentum will be hard to build and attrition rates will be high. A traffic flatline means death for social networking – especially at the beginning.

Activity. How active does a network require the user to be? University students may be content checking a site every half hour when they’re procrastinating writing a paper, but if you’re trying to attract people with any level of seniority in a professional environment, the site should still be useful even if it’s only viewed once a week or as needed. LinkedIn is a good example of this. I visit the site once or twice a month, usually to accept an invitation. If I had to do it much more than that, the obligation would likely outweigh the benefit.

Focus. General interest is fine for a general audience, but for a narrow audience, keep a narrow focus. The ones who want generalized discussion will already be on Facebook, and don’t want to have the same thing in two places. Of course, you can’t control the topics of conversation, but the tools you provide will alter the focus.

Networking. This is a no brainer. Sure, social networks will let me spam my friends and ask them to join me in some virtual space, but how does it improve my network? Can I make new friends or acquaintances based on interest? Facebook isn’t very good at this because of its locked-down nature, but it’s intended to be for friends. If you have a site based on interest, then networking is an important part.

Aspiration. Is the network aspirational or factual? Most fall into the latter category, but there is potential in an aspirational network for those who want to craft their ideals. Second Life’s success was based almost entirely on aspiration – to look cooler, to live in a cooler place, to fly… to get a virtual blowjob while naked skydiving. God, Second Life is stupid.

Ease of adoption. How easy is it for me to get up and running and start benefitting from your network? Mass has a lot to do with this, but a lot of the details are in the design as well. If I need to spend months learning the features and trying to get my friends to sign up before I can get the desired benefit, then I’m likely going to abandon it. Establish real benefit and make it easy to get to – even for the newbies.

Feature to noise ratio. How many features does your site have? How many are garbage that nobody will want? Facebook had the right idea by treating their core network as an operating system. The features you want are there, and if you don’t want them, you can delete them. If you want something else, you can build it. Chances are, your site isn’t going to be as robust as Facebook, so separate the good from the bad, and think about a cohesive system that’s easy to use.

This is just a list made from notes I’ve taken talking with clients about what they want to do in the social networking sphere. The bottom line with any social network is that you have to think value to the user over value to the company, or you will fail. Too many ads means more revenue, but people abandoning ship. Focus on selling means a happy CMO, but nobody willing to put up with the hard sell to get what little value there is out of the site. Fake profiles and testimonials saying great fake things about your brand means a well-paid PR firm, but users will see through it.

Social networking is powerful, there’s no doubt about that. The potential that it provides, however, will be harvested by people who think about customers first and business second.

I’m going to be heading to FacebookCamp in Toronto this evening.  Judging by the guest list, there should be some very interesting discussion on integrating Facebook into a social media program.

If you’re there, be sure to say hi… and save me a place if you can.  I’m getting to Toronto at 6:10 for a 6:30 event.

One of the things I love about my job is the fact that I am in a position to hear a lot of “draft” marketing plans for a lot of huge brands.  In many ways, getting to hear what brands want to do is much more interesting than hearing about what they actually do.  Of course, we’re NDA’ed up the ying-yang, so I can’t ever talk about specifics, but it does give tremendous, if anecdotal, insight into trends in the advertising world.

In general, however, I’ve noticed that over the last 6 months, brands have become much more interested in the idea of social networks, even if there aren’t a ton of them actually creating them.

To me, this brings to mind two questions.  First, how can brands, who ostensibly must be singularly concerned with driving their bottom line create a genuine social network that people want to be a part of; and second, how long before the web is just a tangled mess of brand-related Facebook clones?

To the first point, I think that progressive brands with smart managers will figure out how to create meaningful networks around products, but I expect that the most successful will not come from the big guys – the more nimble startups will likely continue to rule the day and create the most successful brand networks.

Mack makes an excellent point on the Viral Garden that outlines perfectly why the biggest players will likely be the least successful in creating social networks:

The best online communities are the ones that let users easily connect, as well as create, exchange, and share relevant content. Communities form when users have a sense of ownership in something larger than themselves. Communities do not form around the idea of being monetized.

To the second point, I think there is a major opportunity available to whoever can take the avalanche of micronetworks that is to come, and create a way to hack ourselves out of the mess that it will inevitably cause.  Until that happens, I’ll stick to Facebook for my fill of human econtact.