We recently had the chance to speak at a breakfast honoring high school students who were preparing to graduate.  It was fun meeting the students and hearing all of them talk about exactly what they wanted to study and the job they would have in four years.  I agreed with the eagerness, but told them not to get discouraged if their choice of study changed multiple times like it did for so many of us!

One of the main focuses of our speech was about a topic that is relevant to young professionals in the workplace today.  If we are able to remove the element of the “unknown” about college or life after college, how much easier would that make things?  It may be simpler than you think.

Start to view classmates as co-workers, teachers as bosses and classrooms as offices.  The challenges you face today are not any harder than challenges you faced in college; they are just different.  You move from one phase into the next with more knowledge and experience than before.  Use your experience from college as comfort by realizing that you have handled each situation up to this point well enough to be in your current position.

What other similarities have you noticed between college and career that have benefited you?

Here is a small excerpt from Life Before Noon, which is available on Amazon:

Section 3, Lesson 2

Once you are into your career it will be easier to identify things with past experiences.  If you can develop the discipline now, it will put you one step ahead of your competition after college.  Employers are going to want someone who is ready to work and be able to step in with the smallest learning curve.  You, of course, will have to learn about the job itself, but the preparedness you undergo in college will allow you to apply this knowledge in any job in any field.  Realize this now, and it will pay off later.

—–

This is the second post in a series of guest posts on Life Before Noon from the team at College State of Mind.

Check out the site and the other blogs that were also listed.

Thanks to Online Degree Programs for including us!

There are plenty of books out there that steer guys down the right career path, but they only apply to students who spent their nights studying for finals instead of enjoying life. What good is a 4.0 GPA if you can’t hold a conversation with a co-worker?

At College State of Mind, we are a limited liability company that serves as a marketing and consulting firm for young professionals. Our objective is to see both current students succeed in college and graduates succeed professionally. Our first literary work, Life Before Noon, has been very successful and the writing process was an enjoyable one. It serves as the foundation for the work we do today and the direction we wish to go in the future. The book is available from college bookstores, such as University of Tampa and Bradley University, to Barnes and Noble or most easily through Amazon.

While academic success is required for graduation there is not enough emphasis on the social development one goes through in college. At College State of Mind, LLC we use that development into success. We are very excited at the opportunity to work with everyone at Life Before Noon: A Millennial’s Manual. Together we have it all covered for both the male and female perspective. Each week we will be posting some tips/lessons targeted to guys, but valuable nonetheless for someone of either sex. We look forward to hearing from you and networking in the future. Feel free to visit us at College State of Mind.

Here is a sample of what we will be elaborating on in the upcoming posts…

College is a phase of life that you eventually have to leave, but that doesn’t mean you have to grow out of it. You learned way too much in college to not take something with you and apply it every day in and out of work. Once you realize that “life after college” does not have to be different from “life in college”, you can concentrate on more important things, like securing a job. The first step in being successful in life after college is accepting that there is a life before noon and you must be part of it.

In the early days of social media, the trend was to think of blogger relations the same way as traditional media relations. It took little or no time to realize that just doesn’t work. The world of blogger relations continues to evolve, resulting in a dynamic set of practices to ensure success.

There are some pretty solid basics, like the three R’s.

• Respect,
• Relevance and
• Relationships

Beyond those fundamentals, there are some valuable new do’s and don’ts as well, like Communications Conversations‘ “Blogger Relations: 5 tips to hone your approach.” The tips include:

• Do your homework.
• Don’t overlook the ‘B-listers.’
• Get to know the blogger.
• Don’t pitch. Collaborate.
• Don’t be afraid to give it away.

All the evidence points to the fact that blogs are only going to continue to grow and draw in more readership. Public relations has recognized this is not a medium to ignore or disrespect.

What are some other key things to keep in mind when working with bloggers?

-Rachel

I guess officially, I became a grown up or adult when I turned 18, but I think that when I turned 18, I told myself that it was now okay to do even more dumb things than what I was doing when I was younger.

And somehow this was all okay.

“Oh, you’re still young,” they said, “You have time to grow up.”

No one says that anymore.

Now, it’s about decisions you make today will affect your future, you’re too old to be acting like that, you’re a serious person now.

I’m sorry, but what? I guess graduating and getting a job makes me a serious, who knew. I woke up one morning with grown up stamped on my forehead?

Apparently so.

And there’s so much pressure in being a grown up. First with college and jobs and then relationships.

It me makes me want to ask, what is the rush?! What happened to taking things slow, winging it and going with the flow? Living in the moment and enjoying life as it happens and not as you plan it, which is hard for me to grasp as it is because I am a compulsive planner, but really…

And, sometimes I feel as if I’m in over my head and I want to run as far away as possible. Run away from the responsibilities and the questions and the seriousness of it all.

Is that what being a grown up is about?

Being afraid?

Because, I’m obviously not handling any of it well.

I don’t want to grow up.

-Aida

For me, the idea of media pitching has always in a little intimidating. In part because my only experience with “pitch rooms” were small, glorified closets with windows on the door so anyone walking by could see and hear you. Despite having a degree in PR and print journalism, I still feel ill-equipped to pitch the media. Web sites like the Bad Pitch Blog and the PR Spammers Wiki don’t help uneasy feelings. Nothing like the potential of having a professional misstep displayed for the world.

Apparently the distaste for media pitching doesn’t end with the inexperienced. According to the Bad Pitch Blog, PR pros “hate media relations and as they rise in the ranks they’re inspired to cast it aside” because they’ve never quite learned how to do it right.

But, by combining some best practices from job hunting (something the ranks of the entry-level are very familiar with) and sales, the Bad Pitch Blog lays out some useful (and funny) guides for those new to media relations in the post “Get Real About Media Relations.” Among their tips are to learn from sales people, the most effective sales people understand and meet the needs of prospects. Similarly, the most effective news pitches are the ones that have been tailored for specific outlets and journalists and give them something they want and need.

Another tip covered from the job hunting world is to think of a news pitch as a cover letter. When you write a cover letter you’re focused on showing the employer why they should care about you. When you write a news pitch you should be focused on showing the journalist why they should care about your story.

Lastly, the post highlights the need to make the best of the opportunity. There’s a lot to be learned from media relations beyond just how to write a news release and get hits.

- Rachel

Not sure where to start with Web analytics? ClickZ’s “Web Analytics Interpretation 101” offers a few key tips to understanding and interpreting Web analytics data. Or do some searching on Google Analytics’ blog for beginner topics.

How many people got to the page? When did they get there? How did they get there? Why did they leave? Analytics can easily answer any of these questions, but it’s what you do with these answers that matters.

Web analytics give comm. pros the ability to get inside the minds of their publics, and make changes. For communication campaigns, continuous evaluation is crucial and you can easily achieve it with real-time analytic updates.

Are 65% of visitors leaving when they get to your about page? Change it. Try something new. You can make the changes your site’s visitors want and need as you go. That’s the beauty of the flexibility of the Web.

And even more beautiful, with Web analytics outputs you can make informed changes and that’s what the numbers-minded people in business like to see. So, you can get warm, fuzzy feelings and the other guys get their charts. It’s a win-win situation.

-Rachel

The evaluation piece of any PR campaign is vital to demonstrating, documenting and communicating your success.  For traditional PR tactics, there are a few tried and true measurement techniques (anyone who’s ever had a PR internship can vouch for the still reigning importance of news clips). For social media methods, new measurement tools pop up every day, making it difficult to stay on the top of the most effective ways to capture what’s really going on.

When planning social media measurement, there are a few key questions that can help set you on the right path.

• Who are you measuring for? This should be an easy enough question to answer, but there’s no reason social media metrics tools can’t be applied to any person or organization. You can measure your own personal brand, a local campaign for a small organization or something a Fortune 500 is doing. There’s nothing too big or too small.

• What are you measuring? The key in any evaluation process, whether it’s social media or not, is to make sure you’re getting at what was really important.  Not all metrics are created equal and those focused on behaviors, awareness and attitudes are not all the same.

• How are you going to measure? This is where things can get a big complicated. Luckily, there’s no shortage of options out there. It’s making the right choices that can be a challenge. PRWeek recently posted some social media measurement cases with input from experts. The experts list out which sites they would monitor, the tools they would use and how they would analyze the info. Getting some input from some experienced pros out there can be beyond valuable.

• Why are you measuring? The reasons are endless, but most can come back to return. Return on investment, return on information, return on engagement, return on relationship.

By thinking through each of these questions, you’ll be able to get together some pretty powerful evidence to support your campaign, organization or even your personal brand. Are there other considerations you think of when planning social media measurement?

-Rachel

We’ve got Southwest Airlines who booted someone off a flight for being overweight. That person -  who happened to be Kevin Smith, a director with over a million Twitter followers - took the Internet bombarding the company with tweets detailing the ordeal.

About a month later, the ongoing conflict between Greenpeace and Nestle regarding the candy-maker’s use of palm oil came to a head when environmentalists took to Nestle’s global Facebook page. The negative posts on Nestle’s page were met with poor responses and then no response at all.

First and foremost, these cases demonstrate the absolute, undeniable importance of social media monitoring as part of a PR strategy. From making smart choices about which channels to attend to and what needs to be monitored (quality v. quantity? numbers v. sentiment? company v. issue?) to using the right pieces of technology to streamline the process, social media monitoring has been documented in the blogging world for years now and continues to see advancements.

But monitoring isn’t what went wrong for Southwest and Nestle, they seemed to be doing that. There’s a next step that’s proving crucial: action. While these two examples don’t lay out ideal organizational responses, would it have been worse if the organizations didn’t respond at all? Silence is not accepted in the social media world, and even a slow response puts an organization in a negative light.

The lesson learned? Social media monitoring can’t happen in isolation of proactive communication and engagement.

-Rachel

These all-important battles have impacted our society - for better or worse.

So who are the next two big contenders to take up a fight? According to Jim Tobin from Ignite Social Media, it’s about to be time to chose sides between Facebook and Google.  In a post today on Mashable, “Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile,” Tobin highlights the use of Facebook Connect and Google Buzz, the impending trend toward “social commerce” and the possibility of Facebook and Google drawing revenue from users’ transactions.

Based on the comments on Tobin’s post, there isn’t a clear front-runner and a lot of people are hesitant to make any decision at all.

The trend of converging social media - Twitter and LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, Google Buzz, etc., has it’ pros, but keeping a professional and personal life separate has already become all but impossible.

My uses of Facebook and Google are radically different, and I’m perfectly content visiting both sites separately. Facebook is my go-to social network to keep up with friends and family. With my privacy settings locked down, it’s not a space I want to use to engage professional contacts or very casual acquaintances. Google is my go-to for everything else. And, I still like to keep my professional networking to LinkedIn or Twitter - two sites I feel like I can easily manage.

What do you think about this approaching battle? Do you see a clear winner?

-Rachel