Today is apparently National Publicist Day. It seems you can choose any day of the week and there’ll be some reason to celebrate but for me I really DO want to celebrate this day.
I’ve been working in media relations for 20 years this year, and it has been a very interesting and wild ride so far. With a saturated market for content, and shrinking media outlets it’s more important than ever to have someone there to help you find your voice and then to have that voice be shared to the right audiences. That’s where we PR people come in.
We are thoughtful in finding ways to get your stories into the news, we're creative with budgets, and we're great connectors of people. It’s a unique skill set that makes a good PR person, and I am proud to employ a talented few, and know many more.
I never set out to be a PR person. I went to business school and studied marketing, but then when I landed my first marketing job with the BC Wine Institute, doing media relations and PR and sending press releases became part of what I had to do in my daily scope of work. (So I went back to school and got my PR certificate on evenings and weekends while I was working, and made sure that my education could meet the skill set for actual work I was doing.) Two decades later, I am so proud of the body of work I have produced.
Thanks to PR I have made numerous relationships across North America - some that I’ve turned into long-lasting friendships; and I have found myself among the cohort of other publicists in Vancouver that we love to collaborate with on an almost weekly basis. Here at Town Hall Brands I am lucky to have killer personalities working on our PR team: Amy Chen, Genevieve Dufresne, Maddie Clerides, and Mr. Sujinder Juneja, who each continually advocate on behalf of our clients to make sure their stories get told across different mediums each and every day.
To all my fellow PR people, and to my own team - Happy National Publicist Day; #gogetit!