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Ten Thousand Coffees Chat With Lisa Kimmel

Lisa Kimmel - Edelman

From early morning meetings to late night client dinners, Edelman Canada’s President Lisa Kimmel is a busy woman. Thankfully she took time out of her schedule to talk to young professionals for a Ten Thousand Coffees group chat.

Here are some takeaways from our conversation:

  1. No matter how hectic your job, it’s important to make time for yourself so you can stay healthy. Lisa exercises 3-4 times/week and appreciates the alone time.
  2. In an agency environment like Edelman, a good PR professional is highly adaptable, reflexive, flexible, solution-oriented, collaborative, curious and able to deal with overwhelming client responsibilities.
  3. A few of the most important skills for a PR professional are sales, public speaking and critical thinking.
  4. Effective internal communication, something I was particularly interested in learning about, involves honesty, transparency and frequent discussions. An account executive should understand the strategic plan for the entire agency and open communication makes this possible.
  5. Employment engagement is an essential priority. Lisa advises employers to recognize that employees are your best advocates, so equip them with the right tools to talk about your company at a party.
  6. An effective employee engagement program invites contributions from employees at junior and senior levels so management can gather insights for operations.
  7. Media companies like Facebook and Twitter sometimes eliminate clients’ agencies as the middleman and go straight to presenting solutions to clients. This is an obvious threat to agencies who want to be involved in all campaigns, so some agencies like Edelman are starting to partner with media companies like The Globe and Mail to present solutions to clients based on joint capabilities.
  8. Lisa understands the value of information interviews, but young people should realize that she’s inundated with requests. Tell a story in your email invitation to capture her attention because too many people say, “I’m passionate about public relations and want to meet with you over coffee.” If and when you are awarded an information interview, make sure you come prepared. Know your elevator pitch and research the senior employee’s company.
  9. For job interviews, ensure that you can articulate your point of view on the industry. Do enough research so that you can confidently predict future trends and think about your portfolio so you can describe the work you’re most proud of doing.
  10. Young professionals without a family should take advantage of opportunities to work abroad, such as landing a job within your agency’s international network.

Behind The Brand: Best Buy

Elliott Chun

Name: Elliott Chun

Position: Communications Manager

Education: Visual Arts and Sociology, Western University; Public Relations, Humber College

Professional role model: Richard Branson. He’s a tremendous leader, showman and will one day take us up to space.

Favourite Best Buy purchase: My Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone. I never leave home without it and would certainly be lost without it.

In 140 characters or less, what is your favourite part of your job?

Working with an extremely talented group of people, publicizing everything Best Buy, including our vendors, community work and services.

What are your daily responsibilities as a Communications Manager?

I’m constantly discovering creative ways with my teams to promote and story-tell the fantastic things Best Buy is achieving in Canada. I also protect our brand and build campaigns to engage media and customers while identifying and building a community of advocates.

What are the perks of working at Best Buy?

There are too many to list! First off, the biggest perk is working with incredible people. I genuinely enjoy working regularly with a talented group of people. This includes the gifted team at our head offices in Burnaby, our stores, agency and vendor partners and our senior leadership teams. Secondly, as a guy who naturally loves tech and uses it to simplify and enhance my life, the staff discount comes in handy. Additionally, when I’m at the head office, I always appreciate having access to the subsidized, modern gym, as well as the B.C. trails, which are liberating when heading out on an after-work run. Lastly, the food services in our common areas at the head office and regional offices are a nice perk too.

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Brands Prank Consumers

You never know what to expect from leading brands on April Fool’s Day. When I sourced content for this roundup, the images and videos I saw ranged from silly to strategic. BMW’s giveaway was probably the most expensive to execute, although Honda’s SUV customizations weren’t cheap either. Kenneth Cole is a sophisticated brand, but they took a risk and went the immature route to target young animal lovers. The videos are ranked in order of personal preference, which is the same as their order based on # of YouTube views. Enjoy!

Kenneth Cole

[2025 Update: Unfortunately, the YouTube videos for the BMW and Honda ads have been removed.]

Instagram Inspiration: Happy New Year

Many top brands were eager to help consumers ring in the new year. Overall, I noticed that brands posted more GIFs and short videos this year, which signals progress. Last year’s round up included only three posts and this year’s list includes three categories to help marketers with content development on Instagram.

I hope you’ll bookmark this for future reference and maybe even print it in colour to discuss at your next brainstorm meeting!

Inspiration for Small Businesses

While evaluating posts in my feed, I looked for simple posts that small business owners can learn from and treat as templates for future holiday posts. With the right stock photo and some text overlay in a program like Adobe Photoshop, a post that looks like this one from Aroma is fairly easy to create.

Hot On The Street - Happy New Year - 2015 - Aroma - Instagram

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Talk Is Cheap 7

Hot On The Street - Sarah Prince and Martin Waxman

Martin Waxman

Introduction

Talk Is Cheap is an annual conference presented by the corporate communications and public relations students at Centennial College. Last year, I went with my friend Rachel who has a CPG client-side marketing role. It was helpful to compare notes because she found the digital insights interesting and I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about traditional media relations. This year, I was excited to go again. I had a chance to hear different speakers, see familiar faces and extract practical tips.

Location

Centennial College – Story Arts Centre @ Pape Ave & Mortimer Ave

Outfit

Ann Taylor LOFT black jacket, Roots X Douglas Coupland ‘I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain’ ironic graphic t-shirt, Mavi skinny jeans, Sam Edelman black suede boots

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