PR professionals juggle many responsibilities: building relationships with journalists, managing client expectations, identifying and targeting audiences, keeping up with trends and much more. These varying responsibilities require PR professionals to be well-rounded people with diverse skills that cannot necessarily be learned in school.
Knowing how to communicate well is obviously essential, but what other, less apparent skills do PR people need to survive and thrive in the "real world"?
On Tuesday, April 24, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. EDT, PR expert Susan Tellem from Tellem Grody Public Relations will provide insight on non-PR skills that all PR professionals need.
To join the chat, just follow the #ConnectChat hashtag to view all updates from @TellemGrodyPR, @ProfNet and the rest of the chat participants. We'll start off the chat with a few questions for Susan to get the conversation going, but feel free to ask questions or add comments at any time.
If you do not have a Twitter account, or will not be able to participate in the chat, you can find a recap on ProfNet Connect the following day (April 25).
About Susan Tellem
Susan Tellem, APR, is a partner at Tellem Grody Public Relations, Inc., a PR and social media marketing agency.
After selling her previous agency to Saatchi & Saatchi, Tellem served as the chairman of the Los Angeles and San Francisco offices of The Rowland Company. Tellem grew the health care division to the largest on the West Coast and headed the agency's crisis management task force. Following her tenure at Rowland, Tellem joined Burson-Marsteller, serving as senior vice president/managing director of the West Coast's crisis, health care and corporate practices. She launched her current agency in 1994.
Tellem provided crisis communications counsel to the Santa Barbara district attorney prosecuting the Michael Jackson molestation case, billed as one of the highest profile cases of the century. She is also credited with orchestrating the worldwide announcement of the first baby born in the world as a result of in-vivo technology; a highly successful crisis management effort surrounding the first federal indictment and conviction of a U.S. hospital chain; a highly publicized sexual harassment lawsuit against one of the world's largest entertainment companies; and a variety of high-profile union-related crises. Tellem also served on the media advance team during Pope John Paul's visit to Los Angeles and was responsible for credentialing more than 3,000 media representatives.
An accredited 30-year member of Public Relations Society of America, Tellem was honored with the Los Angeles Chapter's Joseph Roos Community Service Award. Tellem served as an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University after an 11-year stint as a member of UCLA's extension faculty. An accomplished public speaker and frequent lecturer, she was the sole PR practitioner on a panel of 11 media representatives sponsored by the prestigious Poynter Institute and USC Annenberg on "The Ethics of Reporting on Celebrities." Tellem was recognized by the Century City Chamber of Commerce as a "2007 Woman of Achievement" and has written a chapter in several books for the "Inside the Minds…" series about public relations, as well as served as book editor for "Sports Medicine for the 80s."
Tellem is a voting member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; a Los Angeles Police Department Reserve Officer Specialist (retired); and a member of the FBI’s Infragard team and LA Medical Corp. In 2008, she was named a Malibu Public Safety Commissioner for a four-year term and has trained as a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) volunteer and serves as a member of CERT's management team. She is a member of the Malibu Chamber of Commerce where she serves on the communications committee.
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