Things to Love about PR

There is a mild buzz of Valentine spirit in the office and chocolates being passed around. In honor of the "holiday" I give you:

Things I love about public relations:
1. Media. I love that my job necessitates me keeping up with the latest media developments, reading blogs, searching the internet, and skimming magazines.
2. Netvibes. A new discovery (thank you, PR Newswire seminar) that collects RSS feed from blogs and sites of my choice. An oh-so-easy way to keep up with non-stop news feeds.
3. Writing. As a former English major and lover of the written word, what more could I ask from a job than to be required to write, write, write all day long.
4. Creativity. For pitching stories, promoting clients, and generating excitement for a product. There's always a newer, better, smarter way to tell the story. You just have to be creative enough.
5. Dress. Representing yourself, your firm, and your client, dressing well is a requirement of the job. If you're a clothes-lover like me, being expected to look great is a great added bonus.
6. People. Communicating with people -- clients, press, your audience -- is a integral part of the job. A great story or unique product won't get you anywhere if you can't express it.
7. Facebook, myspace, linkedin. Exploring how people present themselves in this unique forum. Watching as the platform evolves from personal to professional to...

What do you love about the industry? What are the best parts of your job?

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists day.

For the past few days, I’ve been working with list rental services, collecting quotes, choosing demographics, and signing forms, to make sure that we have 200,000 names ready at the mail house when our big mail piece is (finally) ready to go. I’ve run into a number of problems in doing this: 1. it’s taken nearly a week to come to a consensus on what types of names we want to purchase and how much we’re willing spend on them; 2. we’re not willing to spend much, which means taking a lot of time getting quotes and then declining the offers; 3. we need more free lists (my job) though the time to arrange trades for them is dwindling.

Decisions were finally made yesterday – yea! – so by the end of today all should be in order to be done by deadline. My organizationally inclined brain is pleased as the constant back-and-forth of the past week had been getting a bit frustrating and being the representative voice of indecision to the various list companies was making me look like I don’t have it together, which I hate.

Today I work on the in house mailing list. A list, which, despite having a few thousand bad entries, is not entirely disorganized. It shouldn’t take too much clean-up to get it ready for the mail house and the task, should give me a pretty mindless, relaxing morning.

A few things I’ve learned while working on collecting mailing lists:

- List services generally need a week to process an order, but can often do it quicker.

- Mailing lists are (usually) cheaper than email lists.

- When selecting demographics of a list “AND” is the assumed conjunction – creating a highly specified list. Specify “OR” if you want a collection of all the selected demographics.

- Lists can be marked by the mail house, showing you which lists are most effective in generating a return.

- List generally cost between 10 and 25 cents per name, with a minimum amount per order.