Turning News Into Knowledge

According to the Canadian bank RBC, Canadian female entrepreneurs own and/or manage more than 40 per cent of all businesses in this country, contributing billions to the economy each year.

How fitting, then, that the May 11 Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa event at Vittoria Trattoria featured three brilliant entrepreneurs who have each bootstrapped their way to success through social media and traditional networking.

Vivian Cheng

Vivian Cheng of Blend Creations shared her experiences in starting her internet-based business in partnership with her husband, a fellow design graduate. The two parlayed their education – Vivian with her industrial design skills and Eric Jean-Louis with his graphic design talents – to build a successful home-based contemporary jewellery business that blends their two cultures and styles.  Blend Creations, she says, enjoys a strong repeat customer base across Canada and the U.S.

Amy Yee

Amy Yee provided insights on her business – EventBots – which involves sending video recording booths to parties, weddings, corporate events, fundraisers and other events. Clients can choose PhotoBot to create on-the-spot photos of guests that can instantly be added to a guestbook, or serve as souvenirs. VideoBot, on the other hand, shoots live video that can be edited for testimonials, event coverage, and promotional material.

Amy and her husband run their bootstrapped business out of their home, all the while caring for their seven-month-old son.

Hana Abaza

Hana Abaza, co-founder of Wedding Republic and the evening’s third speaker, came up with her idea for a new type of online registry while shopping for a wedding. A little late choosing her gift and dissatisfied with the items remaining on the registry – not to mention unhappy with the need to visit a bricks-and-mortar store – she came up for the idea of an online registry where guests can buy things the couple really wants, such as cash towards a honeymoon or a down payment on a home.

The best part, she says, is that everyone avoids the hassle of spending hours in a store.

All the evening’s speakers offered several valuable nuggets of advice, including:

• As social media changes, so should you change the way you use it
• Look at blogs as the new magazines
• Use giveaways to build your audience

Speaking of giveaways, this informative and entertaining event featured – as usual – exceptional door prizes, including our donation of comedian Tiny Fey’s new book, Bossypants. We also were proud to present the three speakers with a SmartiePants gift  – Smarties in our coporate mugs.

Nor did we just give. Two of my colleagues, Peggy Prahl and Christie Witt, both won door prizes – Shopify T-shirts, and a free opportunity to open an online store on the Shopify platform.

Follow Vivian @blendcreations, Hana @WeddingRepublic, and Amy @eventbots.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that the two words most of us enjoy reading and hearing are “thank you.” And they most certainly are a pleasure to say and write as well.

I’m not talking about responding to all emails with a “thank you.” That lends itself to a farcical “After you, Alphonse.” “No, you first, my dear Gaston!” charade. But here are four scenarios where a thank-you email is a crucial ingredient in good public relations communications.

Scenario #1 – Someone compliments you on a job well done, an award you won, or a promotion you earned. While a simple thank you may suffice, if the person is effusive in his/her praise, you may want to devote a minute or two to thank her/him for the kind words. It’s also an opportunity for you to express your admiration (if true) for the sender as well.

Scenario #2 – Someone goes out of his or her way to be thoughtful. It could be unsolicited information on a job opening, a link to a site you might find useful or enjoyable, or a relevant event you might want to attend. Expressing a simple thank you for that information is simply good manners.

Scenario #3 – Someone has done an exceptional job on your project, going well beyond the call of duty. While you should say “thank you” in person if possible, consider putting your appreciation in an email and copying the employee’s direct supervisor. This sets up a win-win-win situation that makes the employee feel good, enhances her/his satisfaction with you as a project manager, and speaks well for the company overall.

Scenario #4 – Someone responds to your email granting a favour you have requested. It may have involved just a bit of effort, or it may have taken a lot of time and thought on her/his part. In the case of a relatively easy request, a simple “thank you” – that takes less than 30 seconds to type and send – is appropriate. If nothing else, it acknowledges that you received his/her response.

If the favour was larger, a more heartfelt note of appreciation is both warranted and usually very much appreciated.  And if the favour was very large, involving a lot of time and thought on the part of the respondent, there can be consequences to skipping the niceties.

Take the example here: http://www.buchananpr.com/2011/03/why-you-will-never-get-hired-at-our-pr-firm. Please do check it out, but in the meantime, here’s the gist of it. A “friend of a friend” approached the president of a PR firm to ask that she do an “informational interview” with her niece (a college student). One of the firm’s senior employees emailed a detailed and thoughtful response to the student. She copied another employee who also wrote a lengthy reply.

Time passed, but neither heard a peep from the student. There was no acknowledgement that she had received the responses – certainly no thank you (heartfelt or otherwise).

Note that in this instance it was a student who committed this faux pas, but this type of behaviour, of course, is not restricted to students.

Thank-you emails never are a waste of time. Just think of them as 30- 60-second investments in relationship building and maintenance.

Emails may be viewed by some as old-fashioned, but courtesy never goes out of style.”

I’m now midway through my seven-week internship here at MediaMiser, and everything is feeling a little more normal and a little less foreign.

There’s a wide breadth of human capital here as so many different and unique people contribute to the team in a lot of different ways. Though I still am a little lost at times, each day has given me the opportunity to properly verse myself on what the company does.

One of my main assignments has been to work with one of the media monitoring specialists, Peggy Prahl, on the weekly internal intelligence report that aggregates online articles on media analytics, social media, and anything else pertinent to communications and technology. Peggy and the rest of the staff in the Client Services Division have shown nothing but professionalism and diligence during my time here.

Some of the other tasks I’ve assisted with over these first few weeks include:

• toning articles
• building PowerPoint presentations
• extrapolating data from reports
• sitting in on calls with clients
• working on Excel documents

Every task or meeting I’ve been involved with have helped in my progression from the classroom to the work world. And every day it seems I’m either acquiring new knowledge or remembering something I’d previously learned here or in my college program.

But enough with the serious stuff – on to the cupcakes.

MediaMiser intern Eric McLean, from Algonquin College.

This group is serious about their cake! When someone gets married, has a baby, earns a promotion or whatever, they treat the group to cake. The company celebrates staff birthdays by serving up cake, and the staff blog is even called More Cake Please. (On a side note, the cupcakes the company buys are in my all-time top-5 when it comes to desserts I’ve consumed.)

These little cake breaks are a sign of just how relaxed and positive the atmosphere is here. On my first day, I was greeted with friendly hellos and was assured I could always ask for help. I appreciated this because I’ve been in school for six years, and this was my first foray into the work world.

I was nervous in those early days, but if the final weeks are anything like the first few I’m confident I’ll leave better prepared for the workforce.

Eric McLean, a student in the second and final year of the Algonquin College public relations program, is doing his seven-week internship in MediaMiser’s Client Services Division.

It has already been a few weeks since the national conference for the Canadian Public Relations Society in Regina wrapped up.  The conference was very well organized, with a good mix of speakers from not-for-profit, public and private organizations.  Once again MediaMiser participated in the tradeshow, and while the attendance and traffic was a little light—it was well worth the interaction we had with existing customers and prospects.

Back to the speakers. No one was more engaging or entertaining than Peter Mansbridge, national correspondent for the CBC.   While you would expect him to be a confident speaker, he came across as one of the most comfortable public speakers I have ever heard.  He spoke for about 90 minutes, without notes, and was funny, humble, and most importantly interesting.  His topic of ‘What makes Canada, Canada”(or something like that) didn’t have a direct theme associated with public relations, but when you think about it we are in the business of sharing stories and Mr. Mansbridge delivered quirky and patriotic stories about some of his more compelling interviews from around the world; including a very memorable interview with President Obama at the White House.  He had the privilege of being the first foreign reporter to interview the President at the White House since he took office.

However, the point that really stuck out was his story about how he got his start in broadcasting. Again it doesn’t have anything in particular to do with the public relations industry, but I thought it was an important theme for anyone who has great ambitions in our craft or any other industry–don’t forget to go out of your comfort zone once in awhile.

Mr. Mansbridge didn’t finish high school and after a few jobs ended up working ground operations for an airline in Churchill, Manitoba. One day, very short-staffed, he was asked to jump on the intercom to announce flights and missing passengers, etc.  Apparently, just like his keynote, he came across as very comfortable and smooth on the microphone.  And luckily for him, a local CBC radio program director was listening for his gate.   A night program was without a radio host, and he was offered the job on the spot and without hesitation (or any real broadcasting experience) he jumped at the opportunity. Today, he is now one of the most respected and recognizable journalists in Canada.

It probably would have been very easy to come up with an excuse to avoid speaking on the microphone that day, but Mr. Mansbridge took on a small task outside of his job description…and the rest is history. So I’m going to challenge myself, every now and then, to step outside of my comfort zone and see what opportunities come my way.

Thanks CPRS Regina! And we look forward to attending next’s year conference in beautiful Saint John, New Brunswick.