Claire Young, PR and communications executive at RedBalloon, chats with B&T about what the dilemmas are facing modern PR and what RedBalloon is doing to change up the game.
This Wednesday, Young will be one of the five PR and communications guns participating in a PR webinar at 1pm eastern standard time. The webinar PR: Art vs Science? will discuss what in the world a modern PR professional has to do to prove their worth.
She will be joined by Twitter’s Nathan Burman, Hook Communication’s Peter Hook, Amazon Web Services’ Peter Witts and Meltwater’s Ambera Cruz as well as the editor-in-chief of B&T David Hovenden.
“A modern-day PR professional needs to be a jack of all trades. A typical day could see me contributing to PR and content strategies, editing videos, optimising audio, uploading content to our website, in an SEO training session, reporting on our brands media presence or training spokespeople. No two days are the same and I need to keep up to date with industry trends to ensure my skills remain relevant,” Young told B&T.
“There’s also a common misconception that working in the communication industry means you don’t need to be good at maths, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. You can have all the data in the world off the back of a successful PR campaign, but in order to truly benefit from it you need to be able to access it, analyse it and draw actionable insights from it. It’s about insight over intuition.
“I thought my maths journey ended when I left Year 12, but I’m often creating Excel pivot tables which allow me to easily summarise and analyse data from our PR campaigns.
“The RedBalloon PR team is small but nimble. Our CEO Nick Baker is big on cross-team collaboration so we’re working as part of a broader marketing team to implement and amplify our communication efforts.
“At RedBalloon we see people as people and not job titles. Our business recognises that PR practitioners have a broad range of skills to offer an organisation – skills which might not typically lie within a standard PR position description.”
For more information on this Wednesday’s webinar, click here.
