A feel-good Friday post: The magic of mentors
I had dinner with one of my favorite mentors last night (Nicole Rodrigues of Voce Communications), and it reminded me of how essential it is to have mentors guiding your professional life, no matter what industry you work in.
I can’t tell you how inspiring it is to hear from someone older, wiser, and more experienced than me. All of our dinner conversations over the years have given me invaluable guidance about planning for the career path that will bring me to my goals and dreams.
I have so many mentors it might seem ridiculous to some – about 10 total – but in my mind, you can never have too many. Especially when mentors can come to you from so many different areas of your life: Your parents, significant others, close friends, colleagues present and former, teachers and professors…the list continues on.
The important thing is to make sure you always have someone you trust that can be an advisor, sounding board, and all-around rock as you navigate through the treacherous waters of life.
In particular, one piece of advice Nicole gave me last night really resonated with me: Think of every step of your career as a stepping stone toward your ultimate goal.
Your first priority is to figure out where you ultimately want to end up, and every decision you make in your career should support that vision. A lot of times it’s easy to get mired in the day-to-day grind, and before you know it, months and then years go by in the blink of an eye. How do you know you’ll be where you want to be? The only way is to consistently evaluate your life and career goals and make sure you’re staying on track.
Getting a mentor is step one. Good mentors will give you candid and honest advice and look out for your best interest whether you’re going through a rough patch or celebrating your successes.
Need a mentor and don’t know where to start? There are a lot of resources out there, but here are a few of my faves:
- My favorite career expert maven, Penelope Trunk, on mentoring
- My friend (and oftentimes mentor) Larry Chiang’s article on mentorship
- Inc Magazine’s guide to Finding a Mentor
- “The Value of a Mentor” by Katharine Hansen
- About.com: Choosing a Business Mentor (and Getting Them to Choose You)
I’m also a big believer in paying-it-forward, so I try to be a good mentor to my friends and colleagues as well. I want to be just as open and available to others as my mentors are to me, especially because the newcomers of today are the leaders of tomorrow. Building those relationships early will always come back to you with positive karma.
[The above image, I Will Give You An Advice by ambergris on Flickr, used under Creative Commons]
Why the Publicity Bubble in PR Begs Popping
There’s been talk lately about the PR pro’s evolution from publicist to social media strategist. While I wholeheartedly support the increased attention to social media, the underlying message is disconcerting. For too long, media relations and the hot pursuit of “ink” has been our reason for being. Let’s pop that bubble right now.
PR has never meant press relations, but to look at the industry’s widespread propagation of that mantra it would seem that is the case. How is it that we term ourselves publicists, when our true role encompasses so much more? Perhaps if we treated the industry as a more strategic practice instead of focusing on getting a stack of clips, we’d have more seasoned and capable professionals in the field instead of an army of cold callers smiling, dialing, and pissing off droves of journalists and bloggers in the process.
It’s interesting that despite the growth of social media and the decline of mainstream media, the importance of the latter has stayed virtually the same. There’s still a lot of resistance, most of all from PR professionals, to admit that traditional media relations is declining in importance and we live in a brave new world where social media is taking over.
A hit in the Wall Street Journal is a great coup and will no doubt cement the reputation of your brand with your consumers, your business partners, and your competition. But it’s becoming less and less valuable to the bottom line as social media grows exponentially in influence.
One example that continues to blow my mind is when a client of mine was included in a Thanksgiving-day GMA segment – a major accomplishment for our team. The client saw thousands of inbound leads occur as a result and was pleased as punch with the results.
Imagine his (and our!) surprise a few months later when we secured the client blog coverage on TMZ – which was still a relatively small celebrity-focused news site at the time – to phenomenal results that blew GMA’s out of the water. When a niche-focused Web site can bring in more bang than a nationally-syndicated morning show, you stop and pay attention.
The Internet tips the scales in favor of social media by making it far easier to track online coverage that leads to site traffic, leads from that traffic that convert into sales, and gauge customer opinions by participating in the online discussion.
Beyond online coverage’s potential for being far more successful than mainstream media coverage, the possibilities for community engagement is endless and gives companies a better chance than ever before of dialoguing with their most important publics: The end user. These direct-to-consumer conversations are arguably the most important for a company, and PR can strategize for and drive those conversations.
Social media provides PR professionals an opportunity to take back their rightful role as big thinkers, strategists and high-touch relationship builders, relegating media relations to a more modest (and arguably more deserved) position with the rest of a company’s key audiences.
It’s no wonder most clients still value the old school “ink” and pooh-pooh social media coverage as a lesser accomplishment when we so poorly represent ourselves as mere media lackeys. Yes, it’s time to expand beyond the publicist role, but in the process, we should realize that we never should have represented ourselves so narrowly in the first place.
[The above image, "POP!" by N1NJ4 on Flickr, used under Creative Commons]
[I originally contributed this post to my friend Chris Lynn's blog, socialTNT.]
