Liza and I had lunch with someone who has owned a very successful PR firm in town for 20 years. We asked him the secret to success.

His reply? Good people.

He’s right. Good people make great team members and great teams can do anything they set their minds to! Now we’re looking for an account manager for our team. Let us know if you have a bright, shining star in mind!

So last night I could barely go to sleep. I had one of the best experiences right in my own backyard and was pumped up full of adrenalin. I met strangers at the beginning of the day, and at the end we were friends who were laughing, smiling and connecting together on an entirely different level. I guess this is all in a day’s work at the BMW Performance Driving School – or BMW PDS as the insiders call it.

BMW PDS has all sorts of driving classes for a number of different reasons – teenage driving lessons, corporate events, team building activities – but the thing that strikes me is how every BMW representative I met believed and lived the brand. They were knowledgeable about the engineering, how to handle different cars and really know how to give attendees the time of their life.

Even though I got to drive a total of nine sweet BMWs and do some fun things (time trials anyone?!), the thing that I took away from this experience is that if you don’t believe in your brand, no one will. But if you do, amazing things happen. I know Liza and I believe in our brand – and amazing things are starting to happen for us and our company.

I am just so thankful that I got to see a class-act company carry out these qualities, as well.  It was a great learning lesson.

THANK YOU BMW PDS!!!

Wow, time flies fast. We all know it.  Just when you are done celebrating the holidays and ringing the New Year, it’s spring already.

I think the capabilities that blogs give us are enormous – not only can we talk about what is going on in our world here at Full Circle, we have the opportunity to connect with people who share a passion for – or benefit from – all that falls under that glorious marketing umbrella.

But when days blur together and back-to-back meetings are common, I have let my commitment to blogging fall by the way side.

We like to advise our clients that the key to social media activities is consistency and engagement.  I’d like to think that I do this relatively well through Twitter and Facebook, but I want to dedicate more to blogging.

Everyone’s busy these days – but how do you keep up with updating your blog on a regular basis?  I would love to hear any best practices out there.

In the mean time, I’ll step it up.  Look forward to hearing from you.

Since I consider myself a new public relations professional, I really enjoy finding articles and blog posts that speak to young minds in the business. Bad Pitch Blog’s post Get Real About Media Relations recently caught my attention.

I knew before I jumped into PR that the industry tends to have a bad reputation. As this post explains, this negative view is often a result of professionals having faulty or no instruction in media relations.

Luckily, I’m learning media relations from a few reliable sources, and the practice is coming rather naturally for me. It’s frustrating to think that PR has such a bad connotation when media relations – as this post puts it – is not an art or a science, but just plain and simple organized follow-up.

This explanation goes hand-in-hand with the answer I often give when someone asks me if PR is a difficult profession – it’s not difficult, it just requires time and common sense.

I’d love for PR to develop a better reputation over the next few decades that I plan on spending in the industry, and I think more effective use of media relations by practitioners could be a big first step.