Planning an event, any event, can be a nerve-wracking, spine-tingling adventure. What if nobody comes? Terror that the sound and lights won’t work. Perhaps fear of a food flop (more alcohol is generally the fix for this one). Will the celebrity be in a happy — and co-operative — mood? This is the stuff of nightmares but it is only a small part of the lives of most PR people I know. Of course, there are some who are gluttons for punishment and do this all day, everyday. It all comes down to a plan and paying absolute and undivided attention to details.

Why do I care about this today? I am hoping, desperately, that the individual(s) who organized the maiden voyage of Toronto’s newest ferry is ok. Personally, I would still be at home in my flannel jammies, under the duvet right now. A few planning errors perhaps but the obvious to me would be…do not have a four-piece band playing a Titanic theme song even if this was only a 90 second voyage across a channel (yes, 90 seconds). This tops, for me, holding a news conference where nobody came.

It’s good to know we all laugh about these things later, much later. As for this little incident, in true Canadian fashion we will all feel the urge to be embarassed and then laugh at ourselves.

Any other great moments to report, reflect on or commiserate over?

One of the questions I get most about my job, after “what is PR?,” is “how did you get into that?” Well, here’s how. When I was in my third year at U of T, a friend mentioned that she was making decent money doing promotions and suggested I try it out. I started working for a marketing company promoting movies at bars and clubs around Toronto. As far as part-time jobs went, it was pretty good. I worked a couple weekends a month from 9pm-2am. We were a team of 3-5, plus our fearless leader who drove to 4 or 5 bars a night promoting the newest film from Warner Brothers. I got to know the bar scene in Toronto (which helped me bypass the line on more than one occasion when I was out with friends), met some fun people, made use of the fact that I’m a major night owl and made some decent cash. From there, I got into a larger marketing company who promoted more than movies and I did many, many programs with them. That’s how I discovered PR. Some of the programs were fantastic, a lot of fun and very successful. The ones that were bad, were really really bad. So I wondered who came up with these inane ways to push a product? Wouldn’t it be more effective to promote it this way? Or this way? Or that way? I told my ideas to my manager who laughed and said I should work in PR, that’s essentially what I was doing: thinking of creative and efficient ways to push a product. So I did. I went to Humber, did my internship and got a job. And here I am.

And last week, I found my way back to my roots. We decided to take advantage of the throngs in town for The Film Festival and took one of our clients’ mascots down to enjoy the festivities; we went up to people in the street and in line for movies and took pictures of people with the mascot. It was a huge success and I had a lot of fun doing it. At first it was hard to get back into the ‘promotion mindset’- it’s not as easy as one might think to walk up to perfect strangers and ask them to pose for a picture. I have friends who say they are way too self-conscious to do the job. You have to remind yourself that you don’t know these people and will likely never see them again. So why not be outgoing and silly and make them smile? They’re likely to remember it as a result, which is really the whole point of the exercise in the first place.

So there I was two years later and doing the job that got me into PR in the first place. I thought I had come a long way, but in reality, we don’t really get all that far from where we started, do we?

What about you? Come a long way? How did you get started in PR? I’d love to hear your stories!

Being a browser of many news sources is a hazard in the communications business. It also means we get exposed, often from several different perspectives, to odd and unusual news stories. Or sometimes stories that are news and really shouldn’t be.