Scripps PRSSA was more than pleased to welcome Angela Martin, Account Executive at Dix & Eaton to speak to the Chapter.
Angela was a 2014 Scripps grad and currently works on content strategy and project management for a range of clients. Dix & Eaton is based in Cleveland, Ohio. She has experience and expertise on the B2B side of PR. She held a full-time communications internship with the Cleveland Indians. Her first full-time job was with Cision PR Newswire and then she moved to Dixon & Eaton. While at OHIO she was actively involved in PRSSA.
Here are some takeaways:
- Maintain every relationship you make throughout your career. You can’t go back if you don’t stay connected.
- It’s okay to move around and find your fit with a position. Post-grad internships are great opportunities to get more experience in interest areas that your education might have not taught you much about.
- The back-end of social media can be interesting, because your friends, family and people from high school might be fans of your client and not realize you are the mind behind the content they engage with.
- Experiencing sports communications work means being well-rounded. You have to wear many hats. One day you could plan a social media influencer event in 24 hours and the next day you could be handing Corey Kluber a major MLB award on opening day.
- Dix & Eaton has a specialized practice area devoted to crisis communications. They can actually become a hotline for clients in crisis to reroute phone calls. When this happens the crisis teams will act as the voice of the company as they field calls.
- One way that a crisis plan can be worked on is by simply running it as a simulation. For example, a client team might come for a meeting and they will be prompted, “A plan crash just happened, what are we going to do?” The exercise will help everyone see where they can improve their response strategy.
- A day in the life of an PR account manager during crisis might mean drafting statements and talking points to sent to a client for approval, creating proactive crisis communications manuals or media relations and relationship management.
- Consider three areas of support during a crisis communications situation: Prepare, Protect, Preserve
- When creating new ideas for clients and making decisions in general, it is important to have diverse representation at the decision-making table. You can be inclusive and balanced and avoid unethical or tone deaf decision making when your audience comes first.
- CSR Communications stands for Corporate Social Responsibility. This area of communications is becoming more prominent in the industry today, because stakeholders are starting to care more than ever before.
- Remember that communications is not about “spin” it’s about telling a story. The strength of authentic messaging cannot be overlooked.
Cade Fleming is a senior Journalism-Strategic Communication major and current Scripps PRSSA VP of PR. Keep up with him on Twitter @cade_fleming