Campaign Write

The endless campaign

There's a concept in politics that a candidate's re-election campaign begins the moment after the candidate wins the election; this is not a new strategy, it is one that has been followed by politicians for decades. Given my love of politics, the contest of ideas and the art of political campaigning, I have decided to adapt this strategy to my career.

I have never really thought of job hunting as a political campaign, but the idea struck me this morning and it makes for a perfect metaphor. Just like a politician, I am engaged in a competitive campaign to secure my next position: I have a platform (my resume), I am making promises about what I can deliver (my answers to interview questions), outlining plans for the future (my ambitions) and I can only be judged on my record (again found in my resume). Along the way I may be joined by third party supporters (my referees) and I am will encounter strong opposition (other candidates), but in most cases the race is there to be run.

How do politicians win campaigns? The answer is that they never stop campaigning. Once a politician is in office (in government or in opposition) he/she relentlessly goes about fulfilling their promises as part of their campaign to have another opportunity to implement their promises after winning the next election.

I am not advocating that you start looking for a new job the moment you land your next position, however it always pays to be a step ahead. I know this because I haven't followed this advice at all through my career.

Another element of political campaigning that can be applied to job hunting is this: the last 4 Australian Prime Ministers (Kevin Rudd, John Howard, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke) all had prominent profiles before they won an election or the leadership of their party. Even though Bob Hawke was in Parliament for a short time before becoming Prime Minister in 1983 he was, as leader of the union movement, a prominent figure in public policy for decades. The strategy here is to become known in the field that you want to work in even before you land that ideal job.

Any decent PR/ marketing type should know how to build their own profile. Tweet, join groups on LinkedIn, start a blog, network with people online and offline. Sell yourself; that's what campaigning is all about.

I really enjoyed writing this post and I have a lot more to say about this issue, so I'll post more soon. I'd love to read your thoughts on the endless campaign; you can comment here, reply to me on Twitter @campaignwrite or join this discussion on LinkedIn.

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

 

Healthy consultations deliver healthy results

Since the new year I have changed the way I am looking for work. Sure, I am still responding to job ads - there has been an encouraging spike in positions, particularly in the health care space over the last few weeks - but, I have come to realise that applying for roles through online portals is not the path to success.

Neither do I believe that meeting up with job recruiters or headhunters is the way to go. I have not had many positive experiences with these types of agencies: they either do not put me forward for the roles I want, or they do put me forward for roles that aren't really me. At the end of the day, job agencies are there to fill vacancies to ensure they earn a fee; any job seeker who believes the agency is on their side isn't getting the whole picture.

When I last recruited for a junior media/ PR role a few years back I received more than 120 applications for a 3 day per week role paying about AUD $43,000 including 13 percent superannuation - that's small change. Of the total number of applications, only a handful had any relevant experience and the successful candidate later explained her poor on the job performance to me with the comment "If you pay peanuts you get monkeys" which of course meant that even in her own eyes, she wasn't that great.

So, my guess is that each time I apply for a role online my resume is thrown into the mix with at least another 150 applications. To even get to interview stage is a great achievement: I remember what it was like to read 120 applications: I paid great attention to the first 20 that I read; I lightly skimmed another 30; and the rest? Unless something instantly stood out about the applicant/ application I didn't even bother reading past the first few lines of the cover letter/ resume.

If neither agencies or job boards are the way to go, how do you go about landing a perfect job? Well, chances are you and I are in competition for similar roles so I am not going to give you all my secrets.

In the last few weeks I have decided to be the Anti-George (Seinfeld freaks will know what I mean). Think out of the box, think about connectivity, think about being 'real' rather than being another emailed resume for your potential boss to ignore. Being genuine and passionate can open doors where they were previously closed or where no door previously existed.

I'll share more thoughts on this soon.

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

Healthy consultations

I got sunburned today, but it was worth it! While down at the beach I caught up with a friend whose father is a medical researcher. My mate, a marketing type, is helping his Dad to bring a new type of medical test to market. With more than 5 years experience in the health care space, primarily focused on communications with General Practitioners, it looks like I will be doing some consulting on this project. Most likely I will be involved in running some planning/ brainstorming workshops and putting together some promoton/ media strategies, so that's a win.

I love working in the health care space and using my knowledge and background to assist clinicians to help their patients improve their health. The rewards of this work are far more than monetary. In my last role I loved working on the consumer/ patient side more than the clinical; it was easier to relate to and I felt as though I was making a (small) contribution to the health of Australians.

I look forward to doing that again, I've really missed that aspect of my work. Importantly, when this project goes ahead I will have the opportunity to build on my experience in health care and develop new skills; what a win.

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

When news gets too local

We had a Victoria Police helicopter hovering over our house this morning. The chopper was there for more than half an hour. The noise was horrendous, our dog was barking mad and our young son was unhinged. The helicopter belonged to the Channel 7 News, so I gave the network news room a call to find out what all the fuss was about.

The reporter who answered the phone gave me all the details I could ever want. His words were: "The chopper is helping police to locate a suspect". I thought it must have been a robbery, but then I thought, a major news network wouldn't send their helicopter crew out for a robbery. My mind turned to the worst possible reason: murder.

As you can see from this news report, my gut instinct was spot-on. The alleged crime (no one has been charged as yet) took place in the suburb next to us, but the man alleged to have carried out the killing decided to return home to hide after the act. Trouble is that he lives just a few streets from us.

The news just became way too local.

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

Who you gonna call?

I am just about to start hitting the phones - time to do some cold calling. I am not directly calling people to ask if they have work available, rather I am looking to get in touch with people whose knowledge and experience I respect and value.

In any case have you landed a job through cold calling? My wife scored a graphic design role that lasted 5 years and served as the launching pad for her own business. The person who is now the PR manager at one of my previous workplaces called me and I gave her a job - now she's the boss!

Please post your cold calling stories - wins and losses. I am going to need some tips!

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

I won't become a PR dinosaur!

Yesterday I visited the Melbourne Museum with my son and my mum. There was an interesting symmetry seeing how my mum used to take me to the museum when I was younger. Putting whimsical reminiscing  to one side, seeing the dinosaur skeletons/ fossils (by far our son's favourite part of the museum) inspired me to declare: "I won't become a PR dinosaur!".

I completed my PR degree more than a decade ago; since then the world, and this industry has changed. I studied PR 1.0. I learned about media relations back when the 24 hour news cycle meant that a story kicked off on talk back radio in the morning and then appeared in the newspaper the next day. Back in those days, 'engagement' meant getting onto talk back radio or sending a handwritten or printed letter in to the government/ company/ stakeholder, etc. Way back then 'social media' meant going to the pub to have a drink with a journalist.

In the decade since I completed my degree, I haven't had the opportunity to undertake new courses or attend many industry seminars. Largely my professional development has been focused on learning on the job or reading publications such as CW (Communication World) from the IABC or Strategic Communication Management from Melcrum - admittedly I have only really focused on this type of reading in the last few years. I have also largely avoided networking outside of the industry sector I have been working in.

As I move into the second decade of my career, I have come to realise that I have to keep moving forward. I can't rest and assume that I know it all. So, this year, to avoid becoming a PR dinosaur, I am thinking and acting differently. Most of my free time is now spent learning. Inspired by Julien Smith (who reads one book a week), I am focusing on reading as much as I can in 2010 - and not only books. I am reading every blog post, web article, industry journal and text book that I can get my hands on. I am excited to read books like The Cluetrain Manifesto and Trust Agents. Each time I log into Twitter (via Seesmic) I am anticipating what I will learn from the people I follow. I want to learn and grow in a way that I never have before.

I am keen to share ideas, knowledge and experiences with people in the PR, media relations, social media, crisis communications, community engagement, blog space. This is why I spend so much of my free time on Twitter and LinkedIn. These tools, together with this blog, have opened up whole new avenues of learning and are key allies in my quest to be the best practitioner I can be, now and into the future.

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

10 ways I changed in 2009 - Part 2.

Yesterday I began to explore ways that I had changed in 2009. The post ended up growing a little longer that I had anticipated, so let's pick up where I left off!

6. So, Twitter is more than comic books and rock stars?
I have had quite a few Twitter accounts. I started off tweeting under my real name, then I split my account with two Twitter streams, one personal and one professional. However, on the professional side I had few followers and I paid little attention to really using Twitter to build my PR knowledge and network. My personal Twitter was more successful and I quickly amassed an army of followers who wanted to read about my thoughts on pop culture. I was following my favourite comic book creators and had geek out moments when pop culture figures responded to my tweets. I used Twitter to have conversations with musicians that I admire, such as Matisyahu.

However, approaching Twitter in this way meant that it was little more than a procrastination tool. Hours and hours would vanish from my day as I tweeted, retweeted and replied to tweets about the latest happenings in the worlds of Spider-Man or music. I had a lot of fun, but despite my large army of followers I had very few conversations.

As my free time became more and more rationed I began to realise that I was misusing Twitter, I wasn't getting the most out of my twexperience. When I left my job in health care in the middle of this year my commitment to development and to building my network began to grow and now Twitter is an integral tool in achieving my goals in this area.

7. Back to school with you young man!
Another realisation came to me around August when I was startled to see that 10 years had gone buy since I earned my Graduate Diploma in Public Relations with Distinction. A whole decade had gone by without me engaging in significant study outside of the Real World School. After meeting with the Marketing Manager in my previous workplace I became certain that studying a marketing degree in 2010 was the way to go. Since then I have thrown myself into the social media mix and found that I love the possibilities that social media provides in areas including media relations, issues management, building relationships with stakeholders and crisis communications.

At this point I face a dilemma: do I begin a marketing degree which will be an expensive (from a time and money) pathway or do I undertake a short course or a series of workshops on using social media? I will have a good think about this over the holiday period as I need to get a march on my education plans early in 2010.

The world of PR has fundamentally changed since 1999. When I studied, Web 1.0 was barely functional. I will go back to school next year and I view doing so as an opportunity to not only grow my knowledge base, but to meet new people in PR/ media/ marketing/ social media.

8. Old media vs new media
For the entirety of my career I have focused on what I now like to call Old Media. Particularly in the last 5 years I have built my skills in working with, and against, journalists to build and protect the public image of my workplace. I believe these are my core skills and my achievements bear this out. However, the days of the old school 24 hour news cycle are gone. The old rules of journalism are outdated; everyone is a journalist these days! The old approach to media relations, to focusing on building brand through print (including industry journals), radio and television exposure is almost old fashioned. These outlets are still important, but news websites and blogs are the new media tools that allow your message to potentially reach millions of readers (customers).

As I become more comfortable in the new media space, I look forward to gaining a role where the journalists I interact with are from the Old and the New Media. New Media also provides amazing opportunities to smart PR people. The concept of the Social Media Media Release is one that I hope to explore in a new role in the new year.

9. Building my brand.
My brand is more than my resume; that's perhaps the most important lesson I learned in 2009. Some years ago I was successful at building my brand in the world of comic books, now I am applying the same lessons to build awareness of who I am in the world of PR, communications and social media. For the first time in my career I am employing a uniform and targeted approach across a variety of online platforms from LinkedIn to blogs to Twitter to face-to-face networking, building recognition of who I am as an individual, as well as a PR practitioner. This is a marathon exercise, not a sprint and I feel that I have time to explore and develop my brand in the new year.

10. I will survive!
Between the ages of 2 and 7 I had 3 bouts of open heart surgery; I have an artificial heart valve that has been clicking away in my chest since 1981. My personal world view has always been that if I can survive 3 heart operations I can make it through anything! Yes, it has been a tough year. I am an out of work husband and father, but I am not worried. I am hungry, I am ambitious, I am dedicated and I am a survivor.

 

Happy New Year!
Thank you for your regular visits to this blog, for reading my posts here and elsewhere, such as Twitter. Thank you for engaging with me and for supporting me as I move through this career transition. This blog is only a few months old, but writing here continues to be a very rewarding experience.

Here's to a happy, health and successful 2010!

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

10 ways I changed in 2009 - Part 1.

The year is not over yet, but it has been a mad one. My career has gone on a roller coaster ride and my family life has been enriched by the birth of our daughter just 3 weeks ago. This year has also been one in which I have grown and changed in ways I never imagined.

1. It's my career, stupid! My re-discovery of ambition.
I feel embarrassed to admit this, but my 10 year career in PR hasn't been marked by driving ambition; until now. Over the last decade I haven't had a vision or a plan of where I want to go or a map of how to get there. I have stumbled from job to job without giving much thought to how any potential/ new role fits into an overall plan.

Earlier this year, as I began to experience rising frustration in my work and in my position within a large and changing organisation, I was initially at a loss to explain the emotions I was experiencing. This was much more than a 5 year itch, I told myself. The core of my exasperation was that no matter how hard I worked, no matter the results I delivered, my career was no longer progressing. I was stuck in a rut. I had also been looking for work for some time and months of being successful at landing job interviews, but not jobs, was exacting a toll.

A fire began to burn in my belly as I grew hungrier and hungrier to achieve what I had never been allowed to. I wanted more out of my career: I sought greater financial rewards, but I also wanted tangible personal and professional growth. I began to realise that the organisation that I dearly loved was not the path through which I would achieve my ambitions. That realisation was disappointing, but it also focused my efforts to finally take the next step in my career.

The motivators of my ambitions changed too; ambition was no longer about me and what a larger salary would allow me to buy. With a growing family, my ambitions became focused externally onto my wife and kids: now I want to succeed for them.

2. I quit!
As circumstances within and outside my control began to change I came to a dramatic decision and quit a job I had held for 5 years. I walked out with nothing else to go to. I took a huge risk. I remain proud of that decision because it was proactive and empowering, it was about me saying that I was in charge of my destiny and that I was willing to risk everything for the chance to grow again.

3. Info Freako, there is no end to what I want to know.
After a long (and rather stupidly vain) period of assuming that I knew it all because I was the National Manager - Media and Communications, I came to realise that gaps in my knowledge and experiences existed and were presenting barriers to me taking the next step in my career. After years of shying away from professional bodies and ignoring industry journals, websites, discussion boards and blogs, I suddenly wanted to read anything and everything I could get my hands on.

The rise of social media, and especially Twitter, has fueled my new found hunger for information. Sites such as LinkedIn have boosted my professional network, but also provided great forums for discussion of key industry trends and developments; best of all the www means that I can discuss key issues and areas for development with experts from across the globe.

Each discussion leads me to another idea or area of new found interest; as an example I have spent the last few days getting my head around Google Analytics after reading a number of tweets on the importance of web analytics. Up until a few days ago the most powerful analytics tool I had ever used is the graph that charts my reader numbers here on the Campaign Write blog. Using Google Analytics, I can go much further; I can see what content my visitors are looking at, I can determine how long they are spending on my site and I can discover how they came to my blog in the first place. Over time, this evolving picture of my readers will help me to be a better, more responsive blogger and will hopefully help me to grow the readership of this blog.  

4. From comic book geek to social media geek.
Since my late teens I have been a comic book geek. Over the last 16 years I have purchased and read thousands of comics and have kept most of them (to the frustration of my wife) in long boxes to be read on a rainy day. Some of the comics in my collection are worth a little money, but most were worth a lot from the point of view of sheer enjoyment. Between 2003 and 2007 I worked as a reporter and columnist for a handful of comic book/ pop culture websites and also advised a number of small press publishers on PR and marketing. I was active on dozens of geek message boards and even got a few of my own comic book stories published and green-lit (most of them were never produced).

Being a comic book geek was something that I was always proud of, something that always defined me in my adult years - until very recently. The last great hurrah of my geek days came when I left my longstanding role in healthcare and spent $100 at my local comic book shop. In the six months that have passed since that day I have not spent $1 on comics and the comic books and graphic novels that I do have are neglected on bookshelves and in closets gathering dust.

I am still a geek: my love for the Star Wars movies and the Battlestar Galactica TV show are great examples, but these days my true expression of geekdom can be found in my hyper addiction to social media. All of a sudden I need to know all about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I fret when I can't update my Facebook status or tweet away. I am learning about SEO and analytics. I have a Tumblr page for my professional thoughts and a Posterous page for indulging those last traces of sci-fi geekdom in my system. 

5. Social media isn't so new to me. Plugging in to the network.
I first discovered the term 'social media' only a few months ago. I struggled to come to grips with this emerging new field of communications until I realised that I had been blogging and been on Facebook for years. I am NOT naive enough to believe that this entitles me to claim to be an expert, but I am not as much of a Luddite as I may have thought I was. What is new to me about social media is using it beyond the realm of 'social' to build my professional knowledge and network.

I am no longer so interested in following musicians and comic book artists on Twitter and I have dropped out of many of these types of groups on Facebook. This is not an attempt to alter my image to make myself more employable, that's pretty shallow. Rather, I really am changing. I am committed to learning and to building a professional network that I abandoned for too long.

Already my renewed dedication to LinkedIn and Twitter are yielding results; I am building links with inspiring people and, most importantly, the internet has become my learning tool. Rather than studying textbooks or taking notes from academics, I am sharing and gaining knowledge from real people which is why I prefer to think of 'social media' as 'network media'.

In my next post I will continue to chronicle my evolution in 2009. Thanks for reading!

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

What did you get for the holidays?

We don't celebrate Christmas, but I decided that I would buy myself some gifts this holiday season. Here's my shopping list:

1. What Color Is Your Parachute? by Dick Bolles.
2. The Cluetrain Manifesto by Christopher Locke.
3. Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

I have a book store voucher, so I will be using that to pick up the Parachute book. The book has been recommended to me by a number of people and it is commonly referred to as 'The Job Hunter's Bible'. I am mostly interested in it in terms of using the book as a resource to develop and implement a job hunting plan. I haven't gone about my job hunt in a particularly strategic way, but intend on doing so into the new year.

I have no idea what The Cluetrain Manifesto is about. I know that it was originally published in early 2001 which seems like a lifetime ago. However, so many positive reviews by people I respect and admire and references to the critical role this book has played in the evolution of social media put it on the 'must read' list for me.

I follow Chris Brogan and Julien Smith on Twitter, and I particularly find Chris's observations, his website and his blog of value in terms of learning about the evolving suite of communication tools known as 'social media' and communication and PR in general. Both Brogan and Smith have such a large profile on the social media scene, that it seems a no-brainer for me to read this book.

I am not a fast reader, but I am hungry for information. I am determined to use this time between jobs proactively, to learn and develop myself so that I have even more to offer my next employer; reading these books is all part of the plan.

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.

Getting a coach

As part of my efforts to re-define my career and secure a new job in the new year, I am considering taking up the services of a career coach. The ultimate irony is that these types of services are expensive and many of the people seeking this type of support, just like me, are out of work. None-the-less I feel as though I have stumbled through the last few years of my career and getting some focus to my job hunting and my future direction appears to be a great way to go.

I also expect the experience to be confronting, in fact I hope this is the case. After a long period of being half-arsed about my career progression, its time to supercharge things as I head towards the admittedly false new dawn of turning 40, which is just a few years away. I have a picture in my mind of where I want to be in my career by the time the Big Four Oh arrives, I just haven't got a clear map that sets out how to reach this destination.

While my immediate need is to find a new job, the long term plan is what needs the most nurturing. In fact, I expect the career coach to be next to useless in helping me to find a new position right now, but I am looking to them to add value on where I go from here. I'll keep you updated on how things go.

I am also meeting up with a relative of mine who is an executive recruiter. The last thing that I am going to do is ask this person to find me a job, but I respect their success and value their insights into the shape of the job market in 2010.

If nothing else at least these meetings will give me some renewed focus heading into my job hunt in the new year.

I'm campaigning for my tomorrow.