Archive for October, 2010
My First PR Experience
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to start my blogging experience with a note about something that I just experienced recently. I was in a New Venture Growth class today and the professor was discussing the fact that if anyone has ever had a story about them in the paper that they had little to no control on the content of the message. Recently I went to Italy for a sailing competition as part of the MBA sailing team, we placed very well and we had a great time. When we got back everyone wanted to get a story from us about how we did. I wrote an article about it and submitted it to the school newspaper amoung other things. This statement was taken by the Sauder MBA website and they put the story on the front page of the site. They didn’t post the entire story, they just wrote their own version and stuck in various quotes from me. These quotes completely didn’t fit into the story and it didn’t really make a lot of sense. I was amazed that even though I gave a complete story to this media outlet, they were able to misread it that badly. I guess the moral of this post is that it is really difficult to get your message across when talking to the paper, and this was a case when the media outlet was on my side. I could only imagine what a story might look like if the outlet was a little bit more biased. This has opened my eyes a little bit to the pitfalls of getting marketing messages out through a 3rd party like that. As I learn more and release more stories to the media, I hope that I learn how to shape the message so that I can get my point across more clearly. If anyone has any suggestions for me they are welcome.
Thanks,
Jason Collis