Employability Opportunity

Please see below for a great opportunity from GoThinkBig for students wanting to become more employable, prepare for life after graduation and get a head start on their competition!

“GoThinkBig.co.uk is an online digital hub launched by o2 (o2 Think Big) and Bauer Media to bring you the inside scoop on exciting work experience opportunities, valuable career advice, amazing insider contacts and exclusive tips to set you up for your dream career”

GoThinkBig provide thousands of career-related opportunities alongside fresh editorial content produced by young people, for young people. GoThinkBig tackles youth unemployment in the UK by supporting young people aged 16-24 to develop their work skills and improve their employability.

They are holding a FREE event in Leeds on the 14th May 2014 which will be an interactive and informative event focusing on the roles within in Business run by one of O2’s franchise stores.

The event will involve hearing more about the different roles in business including marketing and management roles. There will also be a chance for students to bring their CV and cover letters to be reviewed.

Students who are interested in attending can apply here: http://www.gothinkbig.co.uk/opportunities/want-to-know-what-makes-a-business-14th-may-2014

An Analogue Living in the Digital World

From the beginning of a student’s time at university, it is drummed into their minds to be socially active online – we are encouraged to use:

• Twitter - to make contacts, follow the latest trends and news;
• Facebook - to keep in touch with the friends and post personal feelings;
• Blogging - to write about PR topics or personal interests such as lifestyle, beauty, food, etc;
• LinkedIn account, to connect with potential employers. 

We are told to be media savvy, and socially switched-on: a message I embraced whole-heartedly.

Social media mapping

The online environment is something that for our generation seems natural, but when we go offline what are we leaving behind?

Indecision, be gone! I’m taking the PR path…

I have always been rather indecisive about the path I want to take in life. I insist that this is simply a large spectrum of ambitions and aspirations, and what’s wrong with that? I have considered and dipped my toes into many different career pools, from dancing and performing arts, to interior design. I even contemplated construction management, before finally settling upon the study of Public Relations and Communications here at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Job hunting via LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of those social networks that you have but possibly hardly use. Well, that used to be me, until this year. Tutors and lecturers are always telling us to get on LinkedIn because there are so many opportunities to network yourself on there - they’re actually right!

Image sourced from: www.britishlogodesign.co.uk 

How formal is formal? How brands should act on social

Brands walk a tightrope on social media. The last thing you want to be is boring, but that doesn't mean that you should be too corny either. Levels of formality on social media these days are hard to get right, and depend on the industry that brands are in. For example, consumer brands (particularly food) have more freedom to be light-hearted and comical, whereas I find some tech brands to be very utopian and professorial.

The Past Three Years

With less than two months left at University and our dissertation hand-in looming, I wanted to have a chance to look back on the past three years.

I remember my first class and the look on everyone’s face when we were asked ‘what is PR?’ It’s fair to say, not many of us knew. Well, after three years I still probably couldn’t give you a perfect CIPR definition, but I am definitely much more confident when faced with that question.

Our first year was also the time we met Gerard Choo, one of the few faces we would see regularly throughout our uni life – from our first PR Skills seminar to our dissertation lectures.

Crisis management and the tragedy of flight MH370

Since the disappearance of flight MH370 on the 8th March, the media has had myself and the rest of the world gripped.  With the technological society that we live in today and the vast amount of tools available to us, how exactly can a modern day flight carrying 227 passengers just vanish? It’s taken over two weeks of hard work and countless theories to finally get a logical answer to the question on everybody’s minds.

Malaysia Airlines have without a doubt faced an upwards battle with regards to PR and crisis management, with the world ready to scrutinize their every move. With huge pressure from the press as well as the hunt for the missing plane, did Malaysia Airlines handle their PR during this crisis appropriately?

Round-up of some great campaigns from March 2014

March has been and gone, so it’s a perfect time to have a look into some of the standout campaigns from the past month. The Breast Cancer no make-up selfie campaign is up there with the best, and such a great cause, but as we mentioned it last week let’s look at some others.

Twitter: The perfect place for a PR stunt

Twitter allows brands to show their personality and to create an identity online, when this is achieved it can create perfect PR stunts. All it takes is creativity, simplicity and intuitive for a brand to form a PR stunt which gets everyone talking and even better…it’s free!

Here are two brands that have caught my eye this month:

Jaffa Cakes

Chancellor George Osborne announced in his budget statement there would be a new shaped pound coin as it is believed that 3% of existing £1 coins are fake.

Jaffa Cakes were fast acting and responded to the tweet from the Royal Mint, George Osmond and the HM Treasury by recreating the new £1 coin in the form of a 12 sided Jaffa Cake and an amusing hashtag #ReduceJaffaCounterfeiting

Manifest Comms - Guest Lecture

(Photo from Manifest Comms website they have won lots of awards!!)

Last week we were lucky enough to receive a lecture from Alex Witham and Lizzie Marlow, both of whom are Leeds Met PR Alumni and are now working at Manifest Comms in Leeds.

It was a really great, informal and conversational lecture and I thought I would share 5 key pieces of advice that I jotted down during their talk:

Agency VS In-House Experience

The chances are you’re probably going to get a lot of experience throughout your degree. I have undertaken placements and a year-long internship with various Leeds agencies throughout my time at university. Sorry to reiterate everything that’s always being preached, but it really is true – experience is invaluable to help you succeed in your degree and PR career.

Despite having a lot of experience under my belt, one thing I regret is not having undertaken a placement with an in-house PR department. I have always wondered how each experience compares and how they differ in developing an entry level practitioner’s skills.

This week I asked a number of course friends to comment on what their respective in-house/agency experience taught them. Adding to the comments, you’ll learn why I love agency work later in this article…

#Nomakeupselfie

The no-makeup selfie campaign has been a successful way of raising money and awareness for cancer support, with Cancer Research receiving over 800,000 donations and raising £2 million in 48 hours. This campaign is a great example of how social media can be hugely important for communicating important issues.

An Interview with Blogger Olivia...

Blogging has become a social media platform for the fashion gurus of modern society, but do we really appreciate or even recognise the hard work and creative posts?  It has given people like us, the encouragement to try different trends and venture away from the easy options, exploring more than one colour and unleashing that inner Gok.

Twenty year old and fashion fanatic Olivia, reveals her award winning blog: www.whatoliviadid.com, her journey into the fashion industry and “what Olivia did” to get where she is today:

The campaign that I love in February

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) launched the Blood Doesn’t Grow On Trees campaign on 21^st February, and the campaign is still running to date.  As a regular blood donor and a communication student, this campaign caught my eye.

Image sourced from blood.co.uk

The importance of SEO

For a long time now SEO (search engine optimisation) has been thought of as a dark art, black magic or an immeasurable formula. However with the growth of the internet age, this area of Public Relations is not to be overlooked.

Search engine optimisation in its simplest form is to try and make companies feature higher in Google’s rankings when entering keywords. It is important however, not to overuse these keywords as Google has the right to penalise and even take down your site off their search results pages. The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase traffic to a particular website in order to increase sales. A good way to measure how successful an individual is performing in his or her job role is to see the amount of hyperlinks they attain back to the company’s website.

Image sourced from Google

What is PR to me?

When I was younger, I always had a misconstrued perception of the world of Public Relations. People who worked in PR to me were glamorous socialites who drifted from celebrity party to record label office on a daily basis. They went for lunch at top LA restaurants and fraternized with the ‘In crowd’. This is because television and the media always represented PR practitioners in this way, especially our American counterparts.

The Spin Crowd TV show

Image sourced from Google

You’re the new tea boy

So it’s the first day of your placement at the PR agency that are willing to take you on as a first year student, you start to question what to wear, how to do your hair, am I good enough to be there, what happens if they don’t like me, what should I do?

Image sourced from Google

How to get employers (P)interested in you

We are all aware of how we need to act online. But as Public Relations students, we are advised on how to use social media as a platform, and as a way to promote ourselves like a brand.

 Whether you are using them to show off your antics from last night, or using them effectively as a way to build connections.Now more than ever lecturers, potential employers, PR practitioners and other influentials are taking to online networks to see how you behave on the sites.

Meet the Media: William Stewart, Times Educational Supplement

Two weeks ago, I attended an event along with fellow Leeds Met PR student, Bryony Czujko. The evening – organised by the CIPR’s Yorkshire and Lincolnshire regional group and the Education and Skills sectoral group – took the form of a dinner with William Stewart, reporter and features writer for the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and two-time winner of the CIPR’s National Education Journalist of the Year award.

It offered a chance to hear William’s interests and priorities as a journalist, what he and his colleagues are looking for and how they prefer to receive potential stories.

Times Educational Supplement journalist, William Stewart