Research, Objectives, Programming, Evaluation and Stewardship (ROPES) is one of the main methods used to plan a communications campaign. In my college program, we memorized it as freshmen, dissected it as sophomores, critiqued its use as juniors and applied it as seniors. My favorite part was always stewardship. I think of stewardship as the continued communication and relationship management after a campaign is complete. As I started my first week in a new city at a new internship, I couldn’t help but look back and evaluate how stewardship has played a role in my search for a job.

Upon graduating, I created a blog, began tweeting and built a website to catch employers’ attention. At month four of unemployment, I realized social media wouldn’t suffice. I swallowed my pride and got serious. I decided to regard my non-employment status as a case study.

ROPES had been ingrained in me, so I began with research. I read PR professionals’ blogs, studied LinkedIn pages and spoke to friends who had already been hired. The results were overwhelming. Not only were my health-insured, salaried friends using social media, they were also integrating conventional techniques like hand-written notes, volunteering and job-shadowing. They all seemed to be relentlessly searching to improve themselves by conversing with other professionals.

I needed to step up to this bustling level. I started contacting any PR professional I knew and some I didn’t. The support of those professionals led to more introductions and more networking. The key was keeping up with everyone I was communicating with.

Success came quickly. In two weeks I had a temporary job.

Fourteen days of actively networking accomplished what I had wanted for four months. I was blindly arrogant after graduating, and assumed the perfect job would find me. Being proactive in today’s economy is important. Creating and cultivating lasting relationships is crucial.

Stewardship is the most important step in job hunting. Unfortunately, it is also the easiest to ignore. The best piece of advice I can give is to persistently engage professionals in conversation and follow up with contacts. I learned the hard way that stewardship can make all the difference.

It’s no secret that consumers have the power to affect (negatively and positively) brands, especially through social media. But when it comes to travel, a bad review can definitively be a deal-breaker.

A recent study by travel industry researchers PhoCusWright titled “Social Media in Travel: Traffic & Activity” revealed that for one in four online travelers content from social networks influences their decisions when planning a vacation.

The research firm also found that social media use among travelers is rapidly growing, with a 34 percent increase in unique visitors to social travel sites from 2008 to 2009. And 60 percent of online travelers use a social media network.

But for travel consumers, social media becomes even more useful during their vacation or hotel stay. Today, complaints go beyond the traditional “I want to speak to the manager.” With the capability of venting their frustrations to a larger audience only one click away, hotel guests understand the power of posting online reviews about their stay on websites, blogs and Twitter. In fact, the PhoCusWright study revealed that 27 percent of travelers post reviews online about a travel-related product or service.

Although some properties are taking the time to listen to what their customers have to say online (take a look at this article from the Wall Street Journal), some hotel marketers are falling behind in adapting.

According to a survey conducted by Vizergy and HSMAI titled “Best Practices for Maximizing Your Hotel’s Online Revenue,” 40 percent of hotel marketers don’t have a tactical plan when implementing a social media program. In addition, 70 percent of survey participants said that they monitor online reviews on a monthly basis.

I can imagine that reading online reviews is probably not a highly desirable daily task, but managing a hotel’s online reputation takes more than checking in once a month. After all, your guests are fully armed with powerful social-networking weapons, and they are not afraid to use them.

Throughout college, students are constantly being told to prepare for the “real world.” Learn this because you’ll use it in the “real world,” in the “real world” you’ll have to do this, in the “real world” you’ll have to do that, in the “real world” you’ll have bills, etc., etc. etc. … But what’s the “real world” really like for most recent grads?

For some lucky ones, you’ll move off to some fancy high-paying job with flexible hours and lots of vacation days, live in a brand new high-rise condo in the best part of town, meet lots of great and interesting people in a new city and continue to party like it’s 1999 at least three times a week like you did in college.

For the other 99.9 percent of us, life will be quite the opposite of this fantasyland …

The truth is that your first and biggest battle you’ll face after graduation is finding a job.  In today’s economy it tends to take several months for recent grads to find a job. I was lucky enough to land this job about four and a half months after graduation but I still have friends who are on the hunt for a job in their field over a year past graduation. If you find yourself struggling to find a job I would offer this advice: don’t take it too personally or beat yourself up over it, it’s a bad economy and almost 10 percent of the country is out of work, so it’s probably not entirely your fault. Just be sure your resume and cover letters are personally tailored to each company you apply for and brush up on your interviewing skills.

The learning doesn’t stop because you’ve graduated, in fact, if you’re lucky enough to end up at the right job you’ll learn more in your first year of working than you learned in all four years of college. Always be eager to learn, it’ll help you in the long run and only make your job more interesting.

The monetary aspects of the “real world” can be both a nightmare and blast at the same time. On one hand you’ll be forced to make difficult decisions like what health insurance you’re going to dedicate a fourth of your pay check to and how much money you should put away each paycheck for retirement; neither of these questions is very sexy, but they’re important decisions recent grads are faced with in the “real world.” The beauty of having a steady job and paycheck is you have some leeway to spend your money at ease and rest assured that another paycheck is coming again soon. Unlike your college days, you can go out and rack up a $100 bar tab and still be able to eat the next week and afford to buy those great shoes you’ve been dreaming about without having to sell half of your life’s processions on e-bay!

The most difficult aspect of the “real world” that grads have to deal with is that even though you have a paycheck and respectable career it still may not be enough to move out of mom and dad’s into a fancy high-rise downtown. In the “real world” there’s no all-inclusive dorm where your best friend is just next door and you’re walking distance from everywhere you want to be all for under $500 a month. The reality is that most of us will have to either move back into mom and dad’s place or live in a hole in the wall in the middle of nowhere.

Now I don’t want to sound too pessimistic or scary here but the “real world” is no fantasyland and it’s not easy, but before you enroll to be a sixth-year senior, let me assure you that if you keep an open mind and adventurous spirit the “real world” is also quite exciting. Remember all of those mornings you snoozed through your alarm and said to yourself, “Man, I really don’t want to go to class today because I’m never going to use any of the stuff that my professor is talking about!”

Well, I can honestly say that in past few months of my job I can’t think of one morning I’ve woken up and not wanted to go to work … Sure, I’d love it if my office opened at 10:30 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m. but who wouldn’t want an extra two hours of sleep in the morning?

So, recent grads, if you take nothing else from this blog learn this: the “real world” is not the perfect place you made it out to be in your head, but just remember the future is yours and only yours to build. Maybe Miss Cleo from the Psychic Friends Network claims to know what’s in store for your future, but other than that no one else knows, and that’s exciting.

I read the blog written by Julie on April 28, 2010, titled “That’s the way it’s always been done,” and it made me think about the Keys.

So many visitors don’t come to the Florida Keys and Key West or bring their kids there for vacation because they think the Keys are for party people and there is too much revelry down there for them. Every time I hear this it makes me want to grab them by the head and shake them.

On the contrary, the Florida Keys and Key West is a great destination to vacation with family and friends. There is a variety of wholesome activities available for everyone in the family, from fishing and snorkeling to dolphin encounters and butterflies.

Yes, there is revelry, college students and T-shirt shops, but that usually only takes place at night on Duval Street where all the bars are located. If you plan well, I am sure you will enjoy a great vacation.

Some suggestions for family friendly activities are: Florida Keys Wild Bird Rehabilitation Center, Dolphin Research Center, Marathon Turtle Hospital, feeding the tarpon at Robbie’s Marina, John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, kayaking in the Lower Keys, Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory and Pat Croce’s Pirate Soul Museum.

So next time you are planning your vacation consider the Keys, and don’t forget to send your friends a picture postcard of the great attractions you visited and what you learned.

A University of Alabama study examined how and why students chose public relations as their major and found that most respondents stated they chose public relations because they liked to plan events and they liked people.

Public relations is about interacting with people who communicate by texts, emails, wall postings and Twitter feeds. What you write has a lot more to do with it than how many friends you have.

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information. No longer is public relations based on shaking hands and handing out business cards. Connections are important, but how fast your Internet connection is can make or break you. Having the latest information is key.

A regular day at the office consists of blogging, updating client websites and social media pages such as Facebook and Twitter, posting videos and releases, reading all the Internet, print and broadcast clips that come in and distributing them to clients mentioned in the articles, sending out press releases and answering media requests for accommodations and attractions.

Being a people person is such a small part of what it takes. Public relations is not about you, it’s about your client.

My advice to any student interested in pursuing a career in this industry is to get several internships early on in their studies and focus on their writing. Be up to date on all the social media venues and practice getting your thoughts out in 140 characters or less.

At the eight-month mark.

It’s been exactly eight months and 16 days since my first day on the job with NewmanPR. On Oct. 1, 2009, I was the nervous newbie, striving for perfection, yet missing the mark time and time again. A lot has transpired since that time and although I am reminded daily that I am still a newbie, I thought I’d share with you all my professional growth and experience thus far.

I can honestly say that in just eight short months I have learned more than I could have ever imagined. Granted, I am surrounded by intelligent, industry veterans who are teaching me the ropes, one step at a time. I have interviewed a lovely pair of cruise-enthusiasts, ages 97 and 100, on the other side of the country for Star Clippers’ magazine, written countless press releases, manned the press room at Cruise Shipping Miami and witnessed the true meaning of crisis communications during the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better I earned a promotion from account coordinator to account executive. I do understand that this position was earned through blood, sweat, tears and a pair of agency partners who simply adore me. Not to mention my newly earned “Diva” title, but that’s a whole other blog entry.

From the company’s holiday luncheon and office potluck, to the yummy office breakfasts every Friday and those unforgettable happy hours after work, I can honestly say that I am having a blast. This is where I belong.

Trust me, I have bumped my head more times than I would like to admit, but along the way and with each experience I have learned important life lessons.

Lessons Learned at the Eight-Month Mark

Andy, the agency’s senior vice president, taught me early on to assume nothing and question everything. Being able to think analytically and independently is key to being a great media/public relations person and is also an important life skill. He also shared with me classic YouTube videos, and in vivid details, a story about his college sweetheart turned wife. The moral of the story was that true love is blind. But that too is a whole other blog entry.

From Buck, the agency’s executive VP, I’ve learned the importance and beauty of succinct, clear writing, in addition to many other things that I don’t have time to mention here. He introduced me to cool Lebanese stations on iTunes Radio, the super cool Zuper Pollo restaurant that I have yet to visit and all the latest trends in social media. Buck also gives me random projects to complete and his old New York Times Book Reviews that I love so dearly. Each day he convinces me that he really is the coolest mature person I know.

Julie, senior account supervisor, has turned me into a savvy little blogger. Although she may not know this, she teaches me daily how to work smart and crank out those press releases, both the exciting ones and the not-so-exciting ones. From her I also learned that Corn Pops cereal contains less sugar than Raisin Bran plus fiber. I’ve come to believe that only highly attractive moms are privy to those type of facts.

My most recent lesson came directly from the big man himself, Stuart, the founding father of NewmanPR. He advised me to project my voice and be confident at all times. After all, PR is a fun industry and should resonate as such. Lesson(s) learned.

Looking back, I guess it’s true what they say, every moment is an experience and full of life lessons. So stay tuned … this is only the beginning!

BP's CEO Tony Hayward.

A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and The Press, conducted June 3-6 among 1,002 adults, found that more Americans trust the news media coverage of the BP oil spill than the government or BP itself.

According to the survey, “Fully 67 percent say they have a lot (20 percent) or some trust (47 percent) in information on the oil leak coming from news organizations, compared with 51 percent who have at least some trust in information from the federal government and 39 percent in information from BP.”

And for good reason. It’s been 55 days since the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig burst into flames in the Gulf of Mexico and BP is still struggling to plug the leak and repair their tattered reputation.

For weeks, BP flooded the airwaves with misinformation and self-serving remarks from their U.K. Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward. Initially, the oil giant said the spill was leaking 5,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf and the government accepted this information as fact. Then on May 27, a government-led task force hiked the number to an estimated 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day. The latest figures estimates that upwards of 40,000 barrels of oil per day are spewing from the leak, polluting the waters in this region, killing precious marine life, destroying the wetlands in Louisiana, and wreaking havoc on the fishing and tourism industries along the Gulf Coast.

What I found most surprising about this poll is the fact that the American public actually trusts the mainstream media because as we all know, the public has long been distrustful of news media organizations, instead turning to nontraditional media outlets, i.e., The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, for their news, especially us millennials.

As recently as September 2009, a Pew Research Center study on the public’s distrust of the media revealed that “Just 29 percent of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63 percent say that news stories are often inaccurate.”

On the one hand, this latest poll showing the public’s revived confidence in the mainstream media is seemingly a step in the right direction for the media, yet given the disastrous handling of this crisis by BP and the government, one has to question just how much progress the news media is making in terms of restoring the public’s faith in their “fair and balanced” reporting.

Quoting National Public Radio’s reporter Frank James, “Given how poorly the energy giant and the Obama Administration are seen to have performed in the public’s eyes, I’m not sure being trusted more than them says a whole lot.”

Yes indeed.

I hate starting off with a disclaimer, but this is one of those situations where though the guilty party deserves to be publicly embarrassed, it wouldn’t be right to do so. Let this story of a hurtful headline that will never go away provide a cautionary tale for other travel writers who post stories directly to the Web without editorial review.

In January a young female passenger on a Star Clippers ship was brutally murdered on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Star Clippers is our client, so we engaged in crisis communications regarding the incident and Star Clippers’ subsequent decision to cancel the rest of its ship calls at Antigua for the balance of the season.

Violent crime had been increasing in Antigua, and this was another in a string of attacks on tourists to the island. The tragic incident garnered widespread media coverage. Following the capture of a suspect and his subsequent confession, the attention died down.

Following discussions with the Antiguan government regarding the safety and security of passengers, Star Clippers’ management decided to return to the island during the coming winter cruise season. Wanting to avoid the negative publicity such an announcement would bring, the line did not make the decision public — other than to publish it in a brochure and on its website.

A sharp-eyed cruise reporter who had covered the murder story extensively noted the return of Antigua to Star Clippers’ itineraries and sent me an e-mail query. We responded with this statement:

When Royal Clipper and Star Clipper return to the Caribbean for the upcoming winter cruise season, Antigua will be back on the roster after being pulled last season over concerns about the safety and security of passengers.

“Star Clippers has been assured by the Antiguan government that they have improved security on the island, particularly in the areas where our guests visit,” said Jack Chatham, president of Star Clippers Americas. “We will do a site inspection prior to our November 2010 port calls in Antigua to determine if all our concerns have been addressed. If we conclude that issues of safety and increased security have not been resolved to our satisfaction, we will change the itineraries of Royal Clipper and Star Clipper to include alternative ports of call.”

The reporter wrote a fair and balanced article about the fact that the line had decided to return to Antigua. Another reporter for an online travel news site, call her Z, read that story and contacted us for the statement.

When Z’s story ran the following day, we were shocked and angered by the four-word headline that managed to be cruel, sensational and in extremely poor taste simultaneously. I dashed off a very angry e-mail to Z and her editor demanding that the head be changed and some distorted language be edited, but before the client approved my note, the headline was altered.

Unfortunately, though the headline was changed, the URL still had the offensive headline in it. I quickly changed my e-mail, toned it down a bit and asked for the URL to be removed. It finally was changed, and the article gradually made its way off page one as more stories came in.

At the end of the day I went to write a post about the incident. I planned to publish the offensive headline while protecting Z’s identity. However, a quick Google search using the headline took me directly to the renamed story. I asked a colleague to conduct the same search and she had the same results.

That offensive headline, which insulted the island of Antigua and flippantly disregarded the murder of a young woman will live on online forever.

Which should be a lesson to anyone who regularly posts web content without the intervention of an editor: If you publish a mean-spirited, gratuitous, insulting headline on the web, you can never make it go away. You can replace it, but it will always be there, a barely hidden hurtful thing that could come back to bite you.

On his Social Media Explorer blog, Jason Falls logged “Here’s a Little English to Doctor the Spin.” Falls seems to be saying there are two kinds of public relations: good PR and “good” PR.

The difference for Falls seems to be that good PR is effective, honest and transparent, while “good” PR is effective, dishonest and its motives are obscured by the practice of “spin,” which actually is bad.

The bothersome notion in all this is that many well-intended people, companies, organizations and political movements have not just fallen victim to good spin, but have exacerbated the problem by repeating it. When my friend and noble public relations professional Geoff Livingston recently told us (or more likely repeated an assertion that) fried chicken causes breast cancer, I shook my head at another unfortunate and unsuspecting victim of good spin doctoring.

Trouble is, Livingston never said that fried chicken causes breast cancer. He made the same point about obesity as a precondition of cancer that Falls made. But Falls needs a fall guy, so Livingston gets misquoted. Livingston does get rather lost in the maze of cause marketing, arguing that perhaps KFC should have reserved its pink buckets in support of the Susan B. Komen for the Cure breast cancer fundraising for its grilled, not its breaded and fried chicken.

I would argue that any food sold by the bucket can’t be good for you unless you’re a horse.

So Falls stands Livingston up as his straw man to illustrate how gullible we are, how ready to believe a one-sided story instead of listening to all the facts and drawing one’s own conclusion that is immune to “spin.” And this susceptibility to spin, he seems to say, is a societal problem:

But what happened to us as a society that we’re so apt and willing to believe a one-sided story? When did self-directed decision-making leave our conscious?

Did “good” PR kill good PR? Is our ADD society producing droves of drones who’d rather accept the common thread rather than raise a hand and ask questions? Will the consumer-based marketplace reverse the trend or will the socially adept extremes dictate popular belief?

Falls does make passing reference to the polarization of our political discourse these days, but I think he, like the rest of us with working brains, is afraid to try to suss out the driving forces behind the Tea Bag Party. Because that doesn’t appear to be the working of “spin,” but some deeper, scarier form of ignorance.

No, I think Jason Falls missed his own point here. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “spin” will out. In other words, BP’s attempts to do a little spin behind the Gulf oil disaster were met with almost universal condemnation. KFC’s attempt to hide its homicidal chicken in a worthy cause was met with derision. People get spin — they know it when they step in it.

What’s missing is a healthy skepticism, the tendency to not believe and to question everything. Now at some point, you have to stop asking the same questions (Hey birthers, are you listening?) and make a decision based on the information you’ve gathered. But the point is to gather your own and not to simply accept what the guy in the $800 suit tells you.

Perhaps it’s due to information overload or perhaps it’s just the need to carve out a space and stay in it — I’ve made up my mind, don’t confuse me with the facts. But that’s a conscious decision, one that is made by thinking people, skeptics, not drones.

I agree with Falls that the level of discourse in our society is appalling, even alarming. But I refuse to blame it all on PR spin — public relations just ain’t that effective.

“The Independent” newspaper has a hand-wringing article about how public relations agencies — primarily big names like Edelman — are bypassing the traditional route to the consumer, which is through the media, and going direct.

Well, duh! Welcome to the 21st century, Independent!

At our agency, we realized that we would have to change the way we do business when Florida’s last full-time newspaper travel editor became her paper’s full-time business editor. That’s an alarming prospect when your business is consulting for clients in the leisure travel and cruise industries — to whom do we send information?

Here’s how the Independent breathlessly sums up the situation:

In generating their own video and text-based digital content on behalf of clients, they are not only taking the bread from the table of a weakened advertising sector but encroaching onto the old territory of television and press companies.

OK, so what’s new here? We’ve always created video content in the form of B-roll and spot news and we’ve been creating text-based content in the form of press releases, advisories and backgrounders for decades. The difference is the media itself, or the means of transmission.

As newspapers shrink and television newscasters eschew provided video, public relations professionals have turned to alternate forms of transmitting our news content. Those new media — websites, blogs, video and photo-sharing sites, and smart phones — have proliferated, and with them have expanded the opportunities to reach a massive consumer audience without the intermediary layer of journalism.

It’s absolutely necessary that we do that today to remain relevant to and effective for our clients. But the Independent still worries:

Mike Morgan, CEO of The Red Consultancy, is doubtful that PR can fill a void in news provision. “PR agencies in a strange way need to become more like news agencies, because we are going to produce more I suspect. That’s the more depressing end of media fragmentation,” he says. “We are not the best at filling that gap and I think it’s going to lead to some trust issues with consumers. Clients still need the third-party endorsement of traditional media.”

Morgan demonstrates a woeful lack of understanding of the way consumers consume news and measure credibility online. They don’t read “traditional media,” they get their information from websites and RSS feeds and blogs. And if they want to assess a product or company’s credibility, they ask their friends on blogs and in online chat groups.

The new way of doing public relations isn’t killing advertising or newspapers. Those media are dying because they are not adapting to a fundamental change in the relationship between information resources and information consumers.

Fortunately, PR is nimble enough to adapt to these changing conditions and modify communications strategies and platforms to speak directly to consumers and hopefully influence their behavior on behalf of our clients.

The secret to achieving those goals is, of course, transparency. Edelman is up-front about what they are doing and why — and they are unapologetic, which is what apparently rankles the hand-wringers at the Independent.