If I knew all the words

Rule of thumb, one should never go into business with friends—Friends and business just don’t mix. This isn’t the case for three 21-year-old University of Oregon entrepreneur students. Jake Horton, Scott Rasmussen, and John Robinson co-founders and owners of GolfingMyWay.com, Inc. These young men believe that it is feasible to run a successful business with your best friends. With the launch of GolfingMyWay (GMW) BETA in mid-February, the site has acquired a following sole from word-of-mouth.

GMW brings a feeling of community to an individual sport. Users have the ability to discuss favorite courses, players, books, movies and video games. Also, they can compare clubs, share stories and tips all within one venue. This site helps to jumpstart a community conversation about a sport so many live, breath and dream about on a daily basis.

GMW gives young golfers a way to connect with one another. With the size of the golfing industry and the endless possibilities of social networking there is nothing but opportunities for these young men to take the basics of Facebook and Myspace and expand the features with GMW.

-My Swing: where users can upload a video of their swing and GolfingMyWay.com will outsource the video to have a professional critique the users swing.

-Pro Notes: enables users to stay connected with their pros and continue a conversation about tips they should continue to work at between lessons.

-In the Bag: feature allows users to highlight and rank their clubs, and leave comments.

GMW’s features such as In the Bag, Pros Notes, and My Swing will provide the technology to bring golf into a 2.0 world. The team is looking into patenting software, which will allow golfers to upload their score via mobile device while on the course. This device will reduce the use of paper scorecards by automatically uploading scores online to save golfers time, while also providing the ability to record a variety of stats for players to analyze where they need to work on their game.

With 42 million golfers nation-wide GolfingMyWay.com hopes to have eight to ten million users within the first five years of launching .

GMW hopes to change the way golfers not only play the game of golf, but how they communicate with one another and turn a individual sport into a group experience.

What is the point of sending a cover letter if I have an outstanding resume? Seth Godin explains why it is important to attach a cover letter with your resume. Why not have a cover letter? A resume consists of short but sweet bullet points of the type of work you’ve accomplished, but especially as a writer a resume gives you little to no justice in your writing ability. Use your cover letter as a blank canvas to market yourself.

Godin says, “I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.” As a student this strikes me as a sticky message, because most graduating college students are not that remarkable, so why be lazy and send just your resume. If you don’t have much experience you need to explain what experience you’ve had and why you’re qualified.

By including a cover letter with your resume you have the opportunity to further explain jobs, projects and accomplishments you’ve had along your professional and pre-professional career. With no cover letter you’re nothing but words on a page. Potential employers will simply toss your resume in the trash. When you have the ability to share with employers the details of jobs, you open their minds to your capabilities-take advantage of it.

If you feel as though you don’t need a cover letter because you’re resume says it all than you need:

• Stellar letters of recommendation
  
• A portfolio- which shows your capabilities in multiple areas
• A blog- which demonstrates your thought leadership in the field you wish to pursue

Without these key items you are in need of an outstanding cover letter, which explains why you’re better than the next resume in the pile. Never let your resume speak for itself, because you’re simply telling your potential employer you’re lazy and you like to throw amazing opportunities out the window.

I hope more graduating students who are applying for jobs will think twice before they send their resume with no cover letter.

What are you doing? Can you tell me 140 characters or less? Try it on twitter a microblogging application. For those of you on Facebook it is much like a Facebook status. When I was first introduced to this application three months ago I didn’t truly understand the phenomenon of this site. Who cares what other people are doing, thinking or eating every waking moment of the day? I don’t have time to pay attention to random bits of information. People do everything from promoting blogs, suggesting resources, and talking about the book they just finished.

My instructor was shocked when she shared this application with our advanced PR writing class during our three week focus on social media. But soon I joined and became hooked. Soon after my classmates jumped on the bandwagon. After a video lecture from Aussie PR Pro and blogger Paull Young my classmates and I soon began following him on twitter and interacting with him.

Twitter became a great tool for us PR wanna-bees to ask questions and gain insightful feedback from the insiders. Soon other PR students from across the country were friending me and we were reading each others blog posts ( I even found my good luck charm Michael Allison) and we began friendly banter. I found that Twitter was a great way to have ongoing conversations and build relationships with PR students, Pros and get quick answers to questions and get pointers to useful links.

But Twitter can be used for more than just an update on what I just ate. You can:

Promote your Blog Post: Reach out and grasp an new audience. Not all of your followers have read your blog. So invite them through a tiny URL link that twitter provides for you.

Get updated on Breaking News: There are multiple twitter clients such as twhirl , which allow you to access twitter from your desktop. You have the ability to upload via mobile device, which means someone on the East coast could inform me of the latest secrets of LOST before I view it!

Interact with Professionals: Many of the bloggers that I had on my feed reader before I began blogging and tweeting are on Twitter. Now I have access to them and have the ability to pick their brain. It’s also been a great way to get a hold of my PR instructor!

Conduct Research: you can pose a question and get a response in an instant!

List job Opportunities: There have been multiple PR pros that have posted job opportunities through their own firm or company, as well as passing along the openings they stumble across themselves.

Pass along resources: Among my new twitter friends and my classmates, we’ve shared application deadlines, and good blog posts on how to make a podcast. The passing along of helpful hints from one PR lover to the next is the way we will make this profession a step above.

I’ve found myself as a Facebook-stalking college student to be checking twitter more than I have been checking Facebook. But it has also been a helpful educational tool. My first real interaction with twitter was on Super-Bowl Sunday. I was only following about four PR pros, but it was more interesting to sit and watch what they were saying about the advertisements, than actually watching the advertisements.

There are many great ways to use Twitter other than finding out what you ate for breakfast. Come see what all the tweeting is about!

An email can make or break your credibility. If you’re a small business or a large business, without proper email etiquette no one will trust your product or service. With email being the main form of communication many have yet to be educated with the proper way to write emails.

I personally have been victim to reading a long painful email with poor grammar. Many peoples thoughts are in their heads and not in their fingers. This doesn’t mean you must be a good writer to be a good email writer, it means you may need to put some more effort into your daily emailing activity. Try to put the main point of your email in the first few sentences because many people are in a rush when reading and don’t have the time to shuffle through a bunch of 5 paragraph emails. Keep it short and to the point.

Brian Zafron gives some great tips on how to write a quality email. Many people find email an impersonal form of communication, which it may be, but it’s becoming the most common form of communication, so one cannot ignore the etiquette of a well-written email.

One thing to remember when writing an email is that your reader can’t hear you. So be aware of the tone of voice you are using, it may come off differently to your reader than it does to you.  Zafron says, “the quality of email correspondences has influenced the quality of relationships,”and I couldn’t agree more. Your laziness with writing says a lot about how how you could potentially act with a client in a relationship.

If you’re looking to do anything in our techno-world you must pay more attention to your emails, they aren’t just something something you can squeeze into your free 5 minutes. Take your time and draft and quality email.

Each Tuesday at 7 pm I find myself dressed in business casual sitting with 20-25 other PR students discussing our clients and ways to improve our relationships. Each time our student run firm meets I’m so thankful I decided to apply and have had this opportunity to work with local non-profits and experience a small firm with account teams.

Freshman through junior year I always heard about the firm, but never thought I was ready or qualified at all. Little did I know I just needed an interest in PR and I would learn most of it along the way. There are many things I’m slowly learning I wish I knew when I first came to school. I wish there was a future version of me sitting on my shoulder directing me where to go and what to do. So here are a few tips for the incoming class of 2012 who are interested in public relations.

-         Take non-J classes. By taking courses that have to do with topics related to Journalism but are not in the school of Journalism or Communication will expand your knowledge of Journalism from the viewpoint of other careers.

-         Get involved in organizations. PRSSA is a great example. Your college campus should have its own chapter, but there are other ways to get involved such as in clubs and student government. These organizations always need help when it comes to public relations.

-         Apply for student-run firm. If your university has one, apply. And apply your sophomore year. The student-run firm always intimidated me, because I didn’t feel I knew enough. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t taken any PR courses you will learn through the experience of being a part of the firm.

-         Get an internship during summer vacation. The more experience you have the more you will learn. Learning the ropes of a firm will set you ahead of the rest of crowd.

-         Start experiencing with social media. There are many forms of social media out there (beyond Facebook). Try blogging, podcasting, twitter or ooVoo. These are tools PR pros are using on a daily basis. By reading blogs and listening to podcasts will help you to understand how to use these tools once you are our in the real world.

-         Begin interacting with PR Pros. This can happen through experiencing social media. PR pros are out there to help you succeed. Use them as a tool and as a networking connection.

These are six tips I’ve found useful during my senior year. I wish someone had told me these things freshman year because they would have helped me be ahead of the game come senior year. So I hope these tips help!

After spending three weeks on the topic of social media, I’m sure you could ask any student in the public relations track at the University of Oregon “what’s a great way to get your small business brand out there and spread the word?” Their reply, “Start blogging.” Now this could be good or this could be bad. Bad? really how could this be bad?!?!

Todd Defren PR Squared blogger talks about how the plight of minor bad buzz for small business bloggers can throw them off the charts, out on the streets, and their product in the trash. The big news online the past week has been Targets response to a bloggers concern regarding an inappropriate advertisement. Targets response was that they simply didn’t interact with non-traditional media such as blogging and did not answer this blogger and faithful consumer’s question.

I don’t know where those PR people went to school, but it sure wasn’t Oregon. Obviously this was not the way to handle the situation and the blogger wrote about it, which is great if the blogger has a large readership.

Now imagine you’re a new business. You barley have a Web site up, and you begin joining the conversation and blogging. Now lets say the product you sell has a flaw. One of your consumers blogs about the flaw. With not much media surrounding your product when someone goes to google to search for your product, within the first few posts there is this negative blog. Though, this isn’t the case for Target. When you go to google the store, the negative blog will be hiding deep within the pages of google because there are more relative site than you tiny little blog complaining about the way you were treated by the PR people.

So can blogs hurt or help small businesses? It’s a ‘double edge sword’ as Defren says. It is definently something you want to bring up to your small business clients and write down the pros (benefits) and the cons of having a blog for your small business. It may just be that risk you have to take to get into the world of social media.

 photo: netream