From Kenyon to Online PR

I graduated from Kenyon in 2012. At that time I had started the job search but hadn’t pinned anything down, so I started my post-graduate life as a starving art major that had to move back in with their dad. The first few months out of college I got to do really exciting things, like volunteer with the charity Dress for Success, which provides interview clothing to women who can’t afford it, and meet up with a bunch of Kenyon friends in New York City. But I also spent a lot of time applying to jobs that I wasn’t even that excited about, and then being frustrated that many of them never even got back to me.

However, I was really excited when I discovered WebpageFX, a rapidly-growing tech company based right in my hometown of Carlisle, PA. I had always wanted to have a career doing something on the internet, ever since making my first website at the tender age of 11. As it turns out, online PR is a really great field for someone like me. I get to work with a great team of really talented people as well as working towards individual goals. I exchange emails with interesting people all over the world in the course of the typical workday, including journalists, authors, and important bloggers. It also suits the side of me that loves writing, the side that brought me to Kenyon in the first place!

What is Online PR?

Online PR is a growing field encompassing all kinds of online marketing: social media marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), search engine marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and others. It also employs a variety of different people – internet marketers, salespeople, outreachers, and social media gurus are included, but so are all kinds of creatives: designers, web developers, animators, musicians, voiceover artists, freelance writers, and copyeditors are all a part of the picture.

The universe of online PR exists to help companies grow their business in an increasingly internet-reliant world. When you search for something on Google, a third of the time you will click the first result, and 92% of the time you’ll click something on the first page. A large part of the goal of online PR is to make it so that your client is more likely to be on that first page, or even better, be the first result. The higher up in the results they are, the more likely people will be to buy products or services from that company.

When I was applying for my job, I was a little nervous about how I could possibly compete for the position. Aside from a one-week externship during my sophomore year at a Columbus advertising agency, I had little direct experience in the advertising field. Plus, I was an art major – talk about an impractical major!

What Prepared Me for a Career in Online PR

Or so I thought. It turns out my background made me really unique as an applicant, and I got the job. Here are a few pieces of my work experience and coursework that I think helped:

Work study: During my time at Kenyon, I held a variety of on-campus jobs. Since I needed an income, I never really saw work study as not an option! I worked for the Career Development Office all four years, during which time I organized the redesign the CDO website (of course, it’s gone through another redesign since!), produced some videos, and helped launch the CDO’s social media presence. (Exciting times!) In addition, I spent a semester working for the Online Writing Lab as well as a semester as an art lab TA. I also worked for the Office of Public Affairs for a few months during my senior year, which is obviously pretty related. This is really valuable experience to have and gave me a pretty full work history by graduation, so I think it’s worth taking a little time away from your studies each week.

Internships: Don’t discredit the value of an internship! I tried out two very different internships during my time at Kenyon. The summer after my freshman year I interned at a small web design company near my hometown. Though it was an unpaid position, I learned a ton about HTML, PHP, CSS, and the fundamentals of structuring a website. I also used Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop quite heavily. My second internship was while I was studying abroad in France. I helped a photographer catalog her entire collection of photographic prints from the 70s to today. Overall, pretty mindless work, but I got to do a bunch of organization!

Coursework: I think it would be hard for me to find a class that I couldn’t somehow apply to my work, but a few made more of a difference. First of all, my higher-level art classes prepared me to take and receive criticism well in all sorts of situations. (I imagine writing classes and many senior seminars probably encourage similar qualities.) Secondly, my quantitative reasoning requirement was a huge help – I took programming and loved it, and I’d encourage anyone who is interested in any kind of tech job to take at least one programming class! (I took the second level as an independent study.) Finally, even my three years of French helped me, because I write to some of my contacts en français!

How Can You Pursue a Job in Online PR?

Yeah yeah yeah, you saw what I did to get here, but what can you do if you’re interested in this field?

Use the CDO: You have a great resource right on campus! The CDO can hook you up with a sweet externship if you want to just try out a field without committing to an internship, and they have great resources for finding on-campus jobs, summer internships, and starting your career after college. Use them!

Use the internet as much as possible: Tumble, tweet, and like away my friends. Familiarity with social networks is only going to help you where online PR is concerned! Try out all the new networks as they spring up. Read blogs, use forums, and engage yourself in commenting wars. More power to you if you can become a power user on Reddit or StumbleUpon, or grow your followers on Twitter to a respectable ratio. Next time your professors complain about you not studying enough because you were busy on Facebook, just tell them you were studying for your career. (Just kidding. Please don’t do that.)

Build a website: At the minimum, why not purchase a domain name for [yourfullname].com and throw up a portfolio? That’s what I did with my website, adriennewolter.com, and you can do the same on yours! Having your own website gives you great firsthand experience designing and coding for the web, makes your own stuff show up when you search “your full name” on Google, and gives you something cool to put on business cards. Have a common name? Try doing a clever twist on your name, or buy the domain name for a screen name you use frequently. Just try to keep it professional if its purpose is to be a portfolio of your work.

Start blogging: Blogging is like the cornerstone of the new content being distributed on the web. Starting a blog is a great way to learn about promoting a website (your own!), not to mention that it’s great practice writing. I recommend buying a domain name and hosting and setting up WordPress on it, but you can also set up free blogs through services like Tumblr and WordPress.com. As a blogger, you get to interact with your audience and help it grow, which is really fun. Even if you don’t have your own blog, you can get started now through some of the great blogs at Kenyon, such as The Kenyon Thrill.

Most importantly, if you want to succeed in this field you need to be interested in the internet and the technology that it’s composed of. Become a bit of a ninja when you see stuff you like online. How did you find it? What are they doing to promote it? What campaigns are working, and what is flopping? Soak up this information and try applying it, when possible, to your own website. The WebpageFX Blog has a great guide for “studying” SEO in college that you should check out. And if you’re looking for an internet marketing job in Pennsylvania, you should check out our employment page. Good luck!

Written by: Adrienne Wolter K’12