Cats, kids and ’Potato boss’: Work-from-home fails and faux pas

Scene-stealing cats, kids with energy to burn, and let’s call them technical difficulties. They’ve all been part of the work-from-home experience, and clumsiness with the practice has struck everything from online church sermons to oral arguments by teleconference before theU.S. Supreme Court.

Roman Martinez: "And what the FCC has said is that when [ TOILET FLUSHING ] the subject matter of the call ranges to such topics then the call is transformed."Work-from-home mishaps have seemed to spare no industry or profession.

"Um...I am now internationally famous for not knowing how to use technology." Lizet Ocampo is a political director at a non-profit advocacy group in Washington D.C. But Ocampo is better known on the internet as "Potato Boss" after her employee snapped a photo of her as the root vegetable because of an unwieldy Snapchat filter.

"I was turning on Microsoft Teams to have a video meeting with our team at People for the American Way. So we turn on the cameras and there I was as a potato. And, at first, we didn’t know what it was but then we noticed the soil and the grass. We were like ’okay, this is a potato.’ I kept on trying to fix it. It wouldn’t work. So I just kind of sat there as a potato for the meeting."

"I think, right now, it’s very clear like who ’gets’ Snapchat..." Jessica Appelgren is an executive at Impossible Foods in San Francisco. She’s experienced similar issues with Zoom’s videoconferencing app. "’Alien eyes! Alien eyes!’ I mean, the comments were just flowing in the chat field just like, ’What’s wrong with Jessica’s face?!"

But it’s not just contending with new technology. [ DOG BARKS ] "That’s been a real problem."

Applegren says there have been far greater challenges. "In a given day, I will tell you, it is in this order: it’s the dog and then it’s the kids and then it’s my neighbour who comes over to walk the dog.

So that’s great... Parents have a very different situation on their hands with trying to keep the kids busy and work at the same time. And I think we were worried about how to model for our kids well in this time."

Companies want model employees, too. "He climbs over, he has actually created a meeting for me last week that was several hours long." Andre Hilden, a data architecture consultant in Oakland, alifornia, missed a memo from his company outlining videoconferencing etiquette. "I did not read that one."

After his cat, Tasha, crashed one of the early virtual business meetings, Hilden’s employer made an example out of him. "I had my cat on my lap, actually. I was not thinking it would be a problem. And it ended up being, coming across as unprofessional. And team members of mine saw me in the same meeting and did not like that and pointed it out, and made it the topic in the next internal gathering

in an effort to make sure that this doesn’t happen anymore."

Despite its disadvantages, working from home could very well become the rule. Videoconferencing company Zoom said it had about 300 million daily meeting participants in April. Granted, some of those may have been cats.

And even as businesses begin to reopen, many employees are still working from home and will for the foreseeable future. "Remote work is going to be a growing trend." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square announced that employees at their companies will be allowed to work from home indefinitely.

 

Unit 8

PR & Advertising & Marketing. Video

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to my youtube channel “Public relations 101”. In this video what we're going to discuss is the difference between advertising, marketing and public relations.  I've walked into many client meetings and depending on who the client is I've been called all three, I've been called a member of their marketing team, a member of their advertising team, a member of their public relations team. But what exactly am I?

The truth is I am a public relations practitioner and while the three fields – advertising, marketing and public relations - are all complementary, they all support one another in some way, shape, or form and they're all part of the family of communications. There are differences and these differences are very important to understand because if you're going to build a house you don't just use one tool, you use many tools and it's very important to know which tool does what.

So let's start off with some of the main differences between public relations, marketing and advertising. The first one and one of the most important ones is that marketing and advertising in more cases than not are one way: you are communicating your message to the public through mediums that are shared, maybe by even public relations down the road, but this is one-way messaging. Public relations is not one-way messaging, it allows for dialogue, it allows for engagement and it allows for thought leadership and feedback and that is one of the main differences that it is two-way communication.

The second main difference is that the proof is in the pudding. With advertising and marketing the return is often sales. It's not always sales, it's sometimes reputation building but more often than not you advertise or you market a product to really sell it. So by the end of your campaign you can actually see a return on investment, your return on investment - on advertising. Public relations is a little bit different because the agenda is not necessarily to sell something, although it could be that, but the agenda is also to build a reputation. It's more about building a report with your audiences, with the public, wherever your audiences might be.

The third main difference is payments. So with public relations you often are paying the public relations practitioners for their service of corporate reputation building. However you're not really paying for the deliverables that in and of themselves. So, for example, if a PR practitioner hooks you up with a TV interview or hooks you up with the press release that goes out to the newspapers, that goes out to digital portals. That actual press release is not what it's been paid for. The service of writing it and sending it has been paid for but not actually putting it out in the media. So there's a good chance that the media does not pick it up. However with advertising and marketing you're paying for that ad space, you're paying to be there, in those portals, on those newspapers, on those digital websites, on social media advertising, you're paying for that so you are assured that you will be carried. With public relations it's not so much so. So in public relations what really matters, if you're not paying for it, is the quality of your story. So an advertising practitioner and a public relations practitioner can both use televisions. But the way in which we use televisions are sometimes very, very, very different.

Let me give you an example. So, for example, advertising practitioners will create a TV corporate ad video. It'll be specialized for television, so it'll run the right amount of length, it'll include actors, they'll create a nice little TV ad, TVC as it's called a TV commercial, and then they'll buy ad space. In return for the money that they pay they are guaranteed that broadcast time. The way it works for public relations is a little bit different. What we would do, if we had a client who wanted to be on television or if we recommended that they be on television to promote their views or to promote their thought leadership concepts, then what we would do is we would phone in. So we would phone in, for example, Fox News, or we would phone in CNN, or we would phone in RT, or Al Jazeera and what we would say is: “Look, our client has this terrific idea about, for example, public relations. The way he views or she views public relations is going to change the world the way we know it. Would you be interested in coming down or having our pers, our client comes over to you and interview?” If they say yes, then the conversation moves on to the next step. There is no money involved, there is no buying ad space. The only buying that happens is them buying our idea and for them to buy our idea it better be solved.

Thank you for watching. Folks, I post new content regularly, so please remember to subscribe and like my channel, if you want to put a PR spin on your future in the communications game.

 

Public Relations Podcast

When I was at university, I did a business course that covered advertising, marketing, sales and public relations. I'm really glad I did this particular course as, although it was vast, it gave me an overview of business in general and the different careers in communications.

While I was studying, I realised that I was most interested in public relations, and so I joined a couple of associations so I could start networking before leaving university. Through one of the organisations I joined, I was able to meet lots of experienced professionals, who gave me advice on getting into the industry. I was also offered an internship in my final year. This meant I could build up my portfolio even before I'd finished studying. I think that it's extremely important, especially today when there are so many people wanting to work in PR, to do an internship to a) get a foot in the door and b) have more on your CV than simply your studies. You have to show willing and prove that you're an enthusiastic, ambitious person who wants to succeed. It was hard studying and working at the same time, but at least it prepared me for the deadlines and long hours you're expected to put in with a PR job.

My internship also meant that I built up a list of contacts in the media and PR industry itself. Both areas were very important in helping me get my first job as an account co-ordinator with a corporate public relations agency. I had to write and proofread flyers, keep track of media databases and other admin-type stuff. It wasn't the most exciting of jobs, but at least it gave me a better insight into PR and helped me decide what I wanted to do after. I didn't have much journalism experience either before working for this company, so I learned that as I went along.

After about nine months, when I felt ready to tackle something a bit meatier, I applied for a job, still within the same company, with more responsibility. I became an account executive and very quickly felt at home in my new job. That was about two years ago. I've much more contact with our clients and I play a large role in developing public relations strategies. I still do a lot of writing with press releases, but I'm also more involved in organising special events like press conferences.

I love what I do because I get to meet loads of different, interesting people every day. You have to be quite outgoing and able to communicate easily, which I guess is more of a talent than a skill. If I had to start again I'd choose to do a journalism option at university, as employers like you to have a journalism background. Otherwise, getting an internship was the best thing I've ever done and I'd do it again, no problem.

 

 

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