PR Word of the Week #26: @Hao_Nguyen’s favourite PR Word

Today’s guest blog post is by Hao Nguyen. Hao is proof that if you work hard and put yourself out there you can succeed at anything. Hao and I met through good ‘ol Twitter. Despite being on opposite ends of the world, Hao and I were both students of PR and were both excited to meet interesting people in our industry. Hao is an account coordinator at Expresso Communications and is also currently completing his Bachelor of Communications (public relations) at Griffith University in Sydney Australia. You can catch him blogging about public relations and interviewing PR Pros on his blog: That PR Dude.

My favourite PR word: Content

There used to be a time when PR mainly meant media relations, i.e. you have a story that you push, you send out a press release to your media contacts and hope that you’ll be able to score some coverage. I’m exaggerating a little here, but that was the gist of it.

Nowadays, with so many platforms, channels and publishing tools widely available, PR professionals no longer have to just rely on the media to get their story out; they can also create their own content. Don’t get me wrong, media relations and press releases will always be important to PR, but now with creating your own content being so simple and mostly free, it allows the PR industry to really take hold of a story and run with it.
Shoot and upload a video, snap and share some photos, publish a blog post, create a podcast. All these things can now be done so easily. Then you’ve got channels like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Quora, etc., where you can just as easily distribute content.

It’s such a cliché isn’t it – “content is king.” But how else can you describe it?

Content

(kənˈtent)
noun

Something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts: a poetic form adequate to a poetic content.

Example:

Okay, so long story short – I was a university student, working part-time at a place I hated, looking to jump into my PR career as soon as possible. So to put a little spark in my job search, I decided to start up a blog where I wrote about my thoughts on the communications industry.

Slowly I built up my blog, reaching out and interviewing PR professionals, getting their perspectives on a range of topics until one day, one of the people I interviewed offered me an internship. Three months later I’m working as an Account Coordinator for her agency.

There wasn’t an application form, cover letter or resume – just one little blog with a steady stream of content and it scored me a job.

So for the PR students out there job hunting – don’t sit there and send out resumes while waiting for the phone to miraculously ring. Get out there, set up a YouTube channel, set up a podcast, build a blog, start a portfolio of writing samples – just keep churning out content and show potential employers how proactive you are.

I couldn’t have said it better myself Hao!