Has anyone ever successfully used an elevator pitch?
I don’t know if I believe preparing a 15-second statement about myself in preparation for when a professional idol, mentor or potential employer-of-my-dream-job asks for it, perhaps in an elevator, is really anything more than HR lingo.
But I took three minutes to make one anyway. Why don’t you?
Continue reading My elevator pitch: what's yours?
Some folks in public relations relish the opportunity for their clients to respond to journalists in e-mail.
The message can be crafted, measured and direct. Really, it ought to be a great opportunity, but most times, in my experience, I see the difference between a wizard in media manipulation and some hack. The lessons are for reporters and PR reps alike.
If you are a budding journalist, or trying to break back into the game, if you’re a writer, a poet, an editor or aspiring movie star, if you want to be on TV or on radio, why aren’t you blogging?
If only just a bit.
Newspapers are trying to establish themselves by these online rules, and some are finding much better success blogging than others. All media are finding ways to make money and find stars online.
Assuming you want to be part of both of those, you need to do something about it.
Continue reading How, why and what should a young journalist start blogging
Mark this off the list of simple things I wanted to get done for this site.
I made the above banner, though I don’t have plans for using it as a header. Rather, it’ll serve its purpose as a focus when I need one, in places like on my blogging experience page. Something that no site in the world needs but will get action if it exists.
There are, I’m willing to bet, a lot of Jason Martins.
One particular Jason Martin is an online marketing manager in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He left a worthwhile comment on yesterday’s post about branidng your byline.
It prompts a conversation I’ve had here and read elsewhere, but it’s always worth returning to. With a common name how do you break through a crowded field of Web-search competition?
Last week I announced my intentions to give one of the hardest professional roads a try. I’m trying to be a freelance journalist – in Philadelphia, a city in a persistent media hiring freeze.
So if it’s always important to brand yourself, now is a particularly important juncture for this underemployed writer. For more than a year now though, leading up to and continuing beyond my college graduation, I have employed and developed a growing online community of methods to take control over my Web presence.
I am obsessively trying to find ways to market myself online like more and more multimedia journalists of all ages and experiences. So, what are you doing to promote your name?
Continue reading Marketing yourself online: your byline is your brand
Google Reader I am back.
Last month I returned from five weeks backpacking Europe and moved into a new home in Frankford, a neighborhood in lower Northeast Philadelphia.
Somehow, even though I was travel blogging and video podcasting at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com, my month-plus European tour was an Internet vacation (IV) for me.
It was a chance to look at what social networking devices are easiest to put on hold.
Continue reading Web presences, social networking that can be put on hold
As of last week, Chris Wink is on MySpace.
The first comment I got came from one of my oldest friends: “Wow, you are Sellout Central recently!” Surely noting my July foray into Facebook and other social networking experiences of late. I was a long hold out, interested in their function but critical of their effects and bored with their benefits.
Brian James Kirk, a journalist I know, has a MySpace page that ranks higher in Google searches than his Web site or other professional work. Such a frustration can cause “brain hemorrhaging.” That’s for sure, which is why many people hide or at least veil their identities, particularly on MySpace – the creepiest of all social networking for anyone over 16.
Continue reading Check me out on MySpace: why I am selling out
On July 3, I finally succumbed and joined the movement that is Facebook. Six weeks later, I have 400 “friends” – yeah I am that popular.
But, from when I first started thinking of giving into the social networking movement back in March, I took the decision way too seriously – wanting it to benefit me professionally, rather than become a waste of time. I wanted to improve my name searchability online – so employers, friends and stalkers can find the right Christopher Wink.
Continue reading I have 400 Facebook friends: What I've learned
Today, nearly four years after it launched, I have joined Facebook.
The site itself launched in September 2004, and during that summer, while I readied to begin what would be a transcendent tenure at Temple University in Philadelphia, founder Mark Zuckerberg was watching his baby explode. From its Harvard roots, through other Boston and Ivy League universities to Temple and much of the rest.
I can remember first hearing about it in late August 2004, on a porch of my college dormitory. From the very start I ignored it.
I can remember hearing it roll out to other, smaller universities and then excitement because friends from community colleges could join – with institution e-mail addresses. I continued to ignore it.
Continue reading The end is here: Christopher Wink joined Facebook