Spring Cleaning-Time To Clean Up Your Professional Life

With the snow melting and the sun making campus warm, it’s about that time for spring cleaning!  You can participate in spring cleaning in all aspects of your life, including public relations!  Below are some tips to keep your professional tidy:

Clean up your resume: The more experiences you get and the more activities you participate in, the more information gets added to make your resume longer.  Every so often you have to go through your resume to edit descriptions and delete less important information. It’s best to keep your resume as simple as possible to make it easy to read and get a good idea about you quickly.

Clean out your inbox: Your inbox can get super crazy this time of the year.  You’re in the middle of the semester will all of your classes and you’re probably receive emails from your current internship while you’re looking for another internship for the summer.  There is so much going on and you receive so many emails daily.  One way to de-clutter your inbox is to start by going through all the emails you received from past professors.  All those emails are just taking up space in your inbox and making you stressed out.

Clean up your social media:  Being college students, sometimes you may post a picture on Instagram, a tweet on Twitter, or a post on Facebook that is less than professional.  Cleaning your social channels is a good thing to do often so you don’t have to go through a whole bunch of tweets and posts.  Your social media accounts are a reflection of you and future employers will take a look at your social media.  It’s best to keep it clean and check it often just in case to ensure it emulates you properly.  

Clean up your connections:  It’s good to keep in contact with previous internship supervisors and other connections you may have from networking events.  Keep in contact with people you know so they what you are doing and know your future plans.  By doing this, they will be able to keep you in mind for jobs that may come across their desk.  This can help you out in the future and also could connect you to other people they may know.

Spring cleaning can be a very liberating feeling and make your life a whole lot less stressful.  Are you ready for spring cleaning?  

This guest blog post was written by PRowl staff member Kristen Hallahan.

Why Every Company Needs A #AlexFromTarget

I’m sure you are all well aware of topic that was trending on twitter, #alexfromtarget.  I mean who isn’t? The internet is a strange place. The topics the internet makes popular not the topics you would think.  PR professionals are forever trying to find that “thing” that the internet is going to take and run with.  The hashtag Alex from Target was the most random hashtag but somehow everyone on the internet love it. 

The New York Times did a study trying to figure out why #alexfromtarget was so popular.  There were many speculations that this was a marketing stunt from Target.  There was also talk about this just being some random girl, posting on Twitter a Target employee.  Trying to figure out just how this happened.  Andrew Lih, a journalism professor from American University cannot find anything.   He said “the internet is more like your local high school where inexplicably the crowd picks something that is not that interesting and elevates it to popularity status.”

As future PR professionals and working with social media, staying up to date with trend topics on Twitter and Facebook.  There is always a new topic or new hashtag that people are using throughout the country and the world.  Companies all over try time and time again to find a topic that people will hashtag on Twitter.  There is no certainty about the internet and what becomes popular becomes popular for now reason at all. 

Target used Alex, their staff member, to their advantage.  They knew just how to capitalize on the hashtag.  One part of knowing how to have a trend take off is knowing your public.  By knowing your public, it is way easier to figure out what your followers are going to respond to.  The better you know your audience when creating a content plan the more activity your company’s account will receive and also the more followers a company will gain.  What do you think about the hashtag Alex from Target?  

This guest blog post was written by PRowl staff member Kristen Hallahan.