Hello! My name is Laura, and I am the newest addition to the Dittoe PR team. Originally from Evansville, Ind., I moved to Indianapolis to pursue a degree in advertising and public relations at Butler University.

After earning my undergraduate degree, I moved to Lansing, Mich., to attend Michigan State University for the Masters in Public Relations program. While attending MSU, I worked at at full-service marketing and media agency.

I moved back to Indianapolis in early 2008, to be closer to friends and family.  I was thrilled when I landed a position at Dittoe, of which I'd heard so many great things back in my BU days.

I now spend my days doing media relations, editorial and public relations strategy for the greatest clients at the best Indianapolis PR firm. When I'm not at Dittoe, I like to run, watch anything on ESPN, be the biggest Denver Broncos fan in the entire planet, and verbalize my incredibly random thoughts ... many of which I will share with you on my blog. I hope you'll follow along!

A few months ago, I went to a PRSA luncheon on social media. Being a Millennial, I thought I would be head and shoulders above the rest of the (Boomer) crowd. Afterall, I knew what YouTube was. I had a Facebook account. I’d connected through LinkedIn. The rest of the crowd would be impressed and amazed at my Web 2.0 prowess. They would ask me cute questions like, “What’s a wall post?” Glory would be mine.

 

I think it was about three minutes into the presentation when I realized how wrong I was. The moderator began by asking who was on Facebook. I proudly shot my hand in the air and looked around. So had everybody else. He then asked who knew of YouTube. Everybody. RSS? SecondLife? Wikis? Technorati? Flickr? Digg? Twitter? The Boomers kept their hands raised, while I sat there: face red, eyes wide and hand down.

 

I left that luncheon scared, embarrassed and motivated to get my behind in gear. If I was going to succeed in PR, I’d need to know about this stuff, whether I wanted to or not, and use it to my advantage.

 

The thing about Web 2.0 sites/applications is that they’re all easy to learn. The trick is learning why the heck people use them, and there’s not always a clear-cut answer. Probably the biggest mystery to me was Twitter. If you aren’t familiar, Twitter is a micro-blogging site. You set up a profile and update it with 140 character snippets that answer, “What are you doing?”

 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a super cool girl. People to see, places to go, whatnot. But honestly, I don’t even care what I ate for breakfast. Why would anyone else? But I was confident I would get the hang of this thing, I mean, the old people had, why couldn’t I? So, I set up a profile, uploaded a picture, and made my background all pretty.

 

Though I’m not particularly sure what I posted first. It was probably something to the effect of, “I’m not sure what the heck I’m doing here, but hi?” I “followed” some co-workers, a few social media types, Ron Paul (I know, right?) and hoped for the best.

“Failure is not an option.” Feels like I've lived my whole life by those words. But lately, I’ve begun to feel like it’s a flawed M.O., and I don’t think I’m alone.

 

I've mentioned before that I attended Butler University. It was my dream school. Busted my rear to get in there. Busted my rear, and sacrificed my physical well-being*, while there. When I graduated from Butler in May of 2006, our convocation speaker was James McBride. He’s the author of The Color of Water, a book that spent two years on the NY Times Bestseller list. Seems a guy that wouldn't know much about the topic of failure, eh? But that was exactly his point. McBride believed that fearing failure was, in itself, the ultimate failure, for if you feared what you didn’t know, you’d never push yourself to try the "impossible."

 

After graduation, my father came up to me, visibly irritated. “Who the hell encourages a room full of new graduates, and their parents who’ve scraped and sacraficed to educate them, to fail?!”

 

While my father may have** missed McBride's point, he articulates mine beautifully. Our whole lives we're taught that failing is bad. We play it safe because we're too afraid of what will happen if we step outside the lines to try what’s never been done before. But how are we rewarded? It seems that those people who do the “impossible” are the ones that reach their true potential, while the rule followers end up carrying out the dreams of others.

 

But as inspiring as pushing the envelope and risking everything is, sometimes we do fail. And it doesn't feel good. The inspiration for this post actually came from a blog post I recently read by Julie Wainwright. Wainwright was the CEO of Pets.com, the infamous company that suffered irreversibly after the dotcom bust. What's more, the very week Pets.com went belly-up, Wainwright's marriage of seven years did the same. She's had people laugh in her face upon introduction. She’s been called a loser and one of the biggest failures ever. On national media.

 

That's a hard burden to bear. But what her recent post and subsequent new venture smartnow.com, a Web site and community for women around 40, have taught me is that people can and do overcome mistakes and are often the better for it. Sure, feeling like a failure sucks. Failing sucks. But you know what sucks even worse than failing? The feeling of regret or what might have been. I can't say that I've been through something like Wainwright. I haven't even failed that much in my meager 24 years, but hearing the adversity that she overcame to become the woman she is today gives me the courage to say "Why not?"

 

There are of course times when failure is not an option*** but honestly, those times are few and far between. So I challenge you today to do something that scares the bejesus out of you, not with reckless abandon, but with a fearlessness and confidence that people will be given no choice but to respect. Chances are, you will learn something great, and if you fail, well, just remember, the opinions expressed (and advice given) by Laura Kassenbrock do not necessarily reflect those of Dittoe Public Relations.

 

* My average hours of sleep in college averaged five; the same as my average cups of coffee/day. And on many occasions, I swear I felt an ulcer coming on. I know, I know.  "Cry me a river, private school girl."

** OK, definitely. Love you, dad.
*** Bungee jumping, drug testing, defusing bombs (who are you, MacGyver?)

Do you remember the difference between an adjective and an adverb? Yea, I don't either. I decided to get myself in check. So today, along with fellow Dittoe PR employee Meghan Howard, I thought I would brush up on some middle school grammar with one of my all-time favorite activities: Mad Libs. And if you haven't done a Mad Lib with a friend in a while, try one. It's a really great brainstorming activity*, which is something most of us need at 4 p.m. on a Friday. So here we go:

Well, it’s a HOT Friday here at the Dittoe PR office, and all of us are feeling a little crazy. Don’t you find it exciting to work when it is so annoying outside? I know we do. But alas, we must skip forward and get the word out on our fantastic** clients. Afterall, when your clients are as cool as ours, it’s really not that happy.***

It’s been a smelly day so far. Intern’s sunshine ran out of gas this morning, so he was tardy getting in. To make up for his joyousness he brought us McDonald’s breakfast flower pots. Who can be mad at a dog after he brings you America’s favorite ponytail? I know we couldn’t.

So now, we’re all coughing away: researching media opportunities and calling reporters, which is a little violent today, as most reporters are out of the office. They must be (****) on their shoe or sliding on their cat.

Over lunch, we all went to  Intern’s house (he has a fun 72 inch river) to watch our newest client's documentary.

Side note: Did you know that today is Summer Solstice? Yep, that’s right, it’s the blondest day of the year! So quietly head out of the office early today, and think of your Dittoe friends, shouting away at work on all of our AMAZING** clients. Ugly Friday to all!

* Riiiiiiiiight
** I wasn’t about to leave that adjective up to Howard and the hands of fate; I like our clients too much
*** Yea, should have picked that one myself
**** Content edited for absolute ridiculousness

The first time I began to think about my personal brand, you know, how you want people to perceive you, was a few months ago. I was graduating from Michigan State (GO SPARTANS), eye-deep in student loans and in serious need of a job.

 

My job search was probably the toughest thing I’ve ever been through. First, you’ve got to have an amazing resume. Then if you get to meet your future employer in person, you have to look, think and speak the part. Any misstep, however minute (a speaker once told me she discarded resumes for fonts she didn’t like … a little hasty, no?), and its ramen and PB&J for another month.

 

So, I began to take a good hard look at my current image and what I needed to do to build it into a brand that employers couldn’t resist. The more I thought about my brand, the more I began to see it not as a professional facade, but as a real life change for myself. I didn’t know what my brand was, but I knew what I wanted it to be and I had a good idea of how to get there.

 

As I dove deeper into my search, I found that personal branding was a professional strategy used by many. I started following The Personal Branding Blog (great, by the way), talking to mentors and role models, and being more self-aware, and within a few months, landed my current position at Dittoe PR.

 

I’ve come to realize that one well-branded person makes a great company addition, but a team full of those people is pretty unstoppable. What’s more, those people drive one another to dig deeper, try harder, and be better. Here at Dittoe, I’m finding myself still building upon that personal brand day-by-day and working with wonderful people who are doing the same. And wouldn’t you know (voila!) building great client brands flows so much more naturally from people who are cognizant of their own.

 

So, if you haven’t thought about your personal brand, maybe today’s the day to start. And Lindsay, girl, give me a call. We’ll see what we can do about yours.

Newbie. Novice. Greenie. Rookie. Call it what you will. If you’ve ever been new somewhere, and we all have, you know that it’s not easy. And it seems, to me anyway, that the older I get, the harder being The New Girl becomes. Maybe it’s because the older we are, the faster we feel we should acclimate to people and surroundings. Maybe the older I get, the more awkward I become. Yea, I’m going with Option B.

 

Anyway, a month ago, I started at Dittoe PR, and once again, I became The New Girl. If you aren’t familiar with Dittoe PR and what they do, the team specializes in media relations, and they’re damn good at it. In the months before I came, the Dittoe team had placed clients in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and on Good Morning America. I’d only ever pitched local and regional media, so during my second week here, when I had to pitch New York and national media, I felt … nauseous.

 

But the thing about Dittoe is that the team here cares for one another and their clients, and we all want to see each other succeed. So, before I made my first call or sent my first email, I got a lesson in media relations that rivaled any I’d received in my collegiate (and post collegiate for that matter) experience. You see, Dittoe isn’t your run-of-the-mill PR agency; they are the best. And they know that pitching the media doesn’t mean pitching every media outlet. It’s about pitching the right outlets, giving them the right information, and developing mutually beneficial relationships. It’s what Dittoe does, and it’s what works.

 

Now in my second month here, I’m proud to say that I’m getting the hang of this whole thing. I’m no longer petrified of big name editors, and in fact, I’ve found myself even joking around with some. Best of all, I’m happy to say that I’m at a place that is fostering me into the best, most efficient PR person I can be (in record time). So, I think I’m over being The New Girl. Now, if I could only find the paperclips…