Tesar-Reynes

I was talking to a friend of mine who was interviewing for a senior vice president position in corporate communications.

He was steaming mad. The company had flown him into their town the night before the interview and put him up in a nice hotel. The next morning he took a cab to their location. When he tried to check in, security did not have him on their list so he had to wait in the lobby 20 minutes.

Eventually he was escorted by a junior HR person to the first appointment. He then had to wait 15 minutes for his person to finish a meeting. The interview went fine. He was then told to wait in a chair in the hall for someone to pick him up for the next interview. And so it went.

At lunch, …

I have a confession to make. As a graduating senior, I am paralyzed with fear at the thought of getting a job.

I hear bad stories about this whole category for entry-level positions: lower pay, 10-hour workdays, cutthroat coworkers, not to mention, GULP, the recession.

I’m wondering if our resident guru can provide some advice to all of us dealing with the same fears.

Tony, can you help us out here? We’re kind of freaking out.

Tony’s response:

The pressure and the anxiety of landing the first job are amazing. Everyone handles this differently. I was fortunate to be able to defer the process for a while. After I graduated from college, since I was NROTC, I went into the Navy. When my time was up I extended for 6 months to figure …

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As a PR man, I’ve taken notice of the changes the newspaper industry has made lately. It’s no secret that print media has suffered as a result of readers going online for their news.

The Economist wrote a great article a few weeks ago, American media on the brink, about this very phenomenon. One interesting point the weekly makes is that papers are starting to refer to their online reporters as “content providers.”

This sticks out in my mind because when I first thought about writing for this blog, I thought of myself as a content provider, not a blog writer. This was my job function at my internship with …

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Much as I love the Web and all the good things that come with it, I hate tech support! Most of the time, my calls are forwarded to another continent 10 time zones away and I have to communicate with a non-native speaker. The transcript below is my latest encounter. I changed the company’s name:

Welcome to DUISP(dial up ISP) LiveChat. Your chat session will begin shortly. Feel free to begin typing your question.

‘Jackson’ says: Thank you for contacting DUISP LiveChat, how may I help you today?

Tony: I want to cancel an old account that I don’t use.

Jackson: Sure , I will assist you.

Jackson: …

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I’m sure you’ve seen the latest debacle for JetBlue:

JetBlue Seeks PR Shop to Help It Out of Toilet

Last year, in my PR Cases and Crises class at Columbia, we talked extensively about JetBlue’s PR problems during the famed ice storm of Feb. ’07. Back then everyone loved JetBlue. BusinessWeek listed them as one of the country’s top 25 customer service …

My best friend is a financial director for a person in the US Congress. On a recent mailing, the response rate was less than .5%. Now a good direct response person would say that the list or the offer was bad. I happen to believe that the addresses were good; I can’t attest to the message.
This instance does remind me of the fact that people don’t respond to my messages. I sent out 37 in-mails in Linked In and I only received 12 responses. The addresses were good and the offer, from my vantage point, had no negatives.

This all brings me to a question: why don’t people return calls and …

Hello. My name is Roland Cailles. I’m a senior marketing and public relations major at Columbia College in Chicago. I also help Tony and Bob, the managing partners at Tesar-Reynes, write this blog.

I’m very excited about blogging and social media in general. When I first started college, I knew I needed to do something that would set me apart from the thousands of other marketing and PR people out there. In short, I needed a niche.

Like other college students I spend the majority of my time in front of my computer. I live on Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. I even have a couple of blogs. So I thought to myself, why not specialize in something I love doing anyway? That’s how I decided to focus my career on social media.

What I love about social media is that it’s helping to get rid of …

Welcome to the new Tesar-Reynes blog. This has been a project that has been simmering for over a year. My reluctance to kick it off has to do with the fact that it becomes one more responsibility for me and the fear that nobody will read it. We want this to be your window to the ramblings that go on in our office about recruiting, candidates, the job market, resumes and the whole integrated marketing communications business.

We hope your find our content helpful and look forward to your comments. We’ll link to other articles and sites that we’ll help you achieve your career goals, or at least add to your foundation of knowledge of our industry.

This blog won’t be all about us. Hopefully it will be a resource for people in the area of marketing, advertising, public relations, sales promotion, direct marketing, …