Welcome Raving PR Fans

PR students, interns, practitioners, and (ahem…) flacks like me, plan to gain and share something in this blog. Whether you are aligned with an agency, have your own business, work on the corporate, government, nonprofit or other sides, we want to hear from you.

I suppose I have earned a right to share experiences from my time on the front lines. Now as an entrepreneur and adjunct professor, I am jazzed to learn from the newcomers in our field and the self-starters of social media technology. When I landed in PR, intranets were the hottest thing. And the Internet was Al Gore’s dream. I started with an internship at Universal Studios while at Rollins College and then scored my first job as a community relations coordinator for Tropicana. I flashed forward to corporate communications director roles for medical technology start-ups, then Abbott Labs’ corporate marketing team, and a two-year stint in consulting. I finally found a sweet spot when I started The Ballast Group in 2006.

All of these PR jaunts have left me raving about our profession and how we see the forest through the trees. We hold the proof of why entrepreneurial ventures, mid-cap companies, consulting firms, Fortune 500 brands and nonprofit organizations seek PR counsel to help shape their messages, develop their stories and measure the impact so that we find and refine ways tell those stories again.

This blog is designed to entertain and to dialogue about current situations and new trends. It is also intended to share strategies and instigate ideas. Let’s laugh at the “OMG and WTF moments and how we turn mix-ups into magic” as one of my colleagues says.

Convey what we do best. Ask: why do we do it? How do we do it? And who do we do it for? Jump in. Tell your stories. Comment. Connect the dots. Let’s reinforce why, ON MOST DAYS, we are generally Raving PR Fans.