Tag: Raleigh Public Relations Agency

Clairemont Interns: Introducing Natalie Baker

Margot HorganBlog, The Clairemont Team, , , 2 Comments on Clairemont Interns: Introducing Natalie Baker

Last but not least, meet Natalie Baker, Clairemont’s third member of the spring intern team!


Screen Shot 2013-03-05 at 9.14.34 AMA North Carolina native, Natalie was born and raised in the small town of Valdese – located in between Charlotte and Asheville. She loves sports, dogs, music and all things chocolate! After traveling Europe and studying abroad in Florence, Italy, this past summer, she considers traveling one of her favorite hobbies.

Natalie is a senior at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is a public relations major in the journalism school. Her previous experience with a local PR firm made her fall in love with the industry and the agency environment. She hopes to use her agency background to build and diversify her writing skills while here at Clairemont.

Other interesting facts about Natalie?

  • She loves coffee!
  • Her favorite TV show is Revenge on ABC.
  • Her iPod contains a plethora of classic rock music.
  • The last book she read was My Cross to Bear by Gregg Allman.
  • Even though she bleeds Carolina blue, her 12-year-old Weimaraner is named Durham.
  • She loves the mountains.
  • Her weird quirk? Her friends tell her she has a lot of facial expressions.

After completing undergrad in the spring, Natalie hopes to land a job with a public relations or marketing firm in North Carolina – preferably in the Triangle area.

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Clairemont Interns: Introducing Sydney McKinney

Margot HorganBlog, The Clairemont Team, , , 1 Comment on Clairemont Interns: Introducing Sydney McKinney

Say hello to the next member of our Clairemont intern team – Sydney McKinney. Erin recently sat down with Sydney to learn a little more about her. Here are the highlights…

Screen Shot 2013-02-04 at 12.09.39 PMThis January, Sydney McKinney brought her talents and skills to Clairemont’s spring internship team. Sydney, a Greensboro native who considers herself a “chocoholic” and loves pastel colors, is currently a senior advertising major in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC Chapel Hill.

However, she wasn’t always on the Ad path. Sydney tested the waters with several different majors before finding her passion for creativity and landing an internship with Seventeen Magazine last summer. As a marketing intern for Seventeen, she spent two months in New York City learning the inside track of the magazine industry. While her favorite part about Clairemont so far is the people, Sydney is excited about the transition and challenge this internship will bring to her current skill set.

Get to know Sydney by checking out these fun facts:

  • Sydney’s favorite snack to sneak into the movies is Raisinets and Diet Coke, however, the best meal she has ever had was lobster at Mama’s Fish House in Maui. According to her, it was not only the best but was also the biggest, juiciest lobster she has ever eaten.
  • Her ideal pet? Definitely a dog. She is currently thinking about a Goldendoodle, not to be confused with the “not-as-cute Labradoodle.”
  • Her weird quirk? She likes to speak in a variety of voices. Just today she demonstrated how by talking in the back of her throat she can sound like the animated movie character Stitch.
  • If you checked Sydney’s browser for most visited websites you would be sure to find FABSUGAR and Pinterest at the top of the list. But, these are not just hobbies. She hopes to use her Pinterest collection to fully decorate a house one day.
  • While she is afraid of bugs, she has no problem with heights. In fact a dream of hers is to go skydiving one day.

After graduation this spring, Sydney hopes to land a position in a public relations or advertising agency. Her advice for other college students looking for internships or jobs? Network, network, network! She credits networking as the most valuable channel for landing an internship. Thanks for the advice Sydney, and good luck with your future endeavors!

 

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Clairemont Interns: Introducing Erin Owenby

Margot HorganBlog, The Clairemont Team, , , 2 Comments on Clairemont Interns: Introducing Erin Owenby

This semester, we have three wonderful interns working with us at Clairemont and we can’t wait to introduce them to you. In a bit of a team building exercise, we asked our interns – Erin Owenby, Sydney McKinney and Natalie Baker – to interview each other and share some background information (and some fun facts!) with you, our blog readers. Sydney recently sat down with Erin and learned some pretty interesting facts…

erinBorn and raised in Asheville, this North Carolina native bleeds Tar Heel blue.  She loves going to sports games and is into country music, sweet tea and all things Josh Lucas (remember the hunk from Sweet Home Alabama?). But, those are just the quirks—this PR junkie also has a diverse background in the industry.

A public relations major at UNC Chapel Hill, Erin has done it all! She’s organized events for several nonprofits, coordinated logistics for a wedding planning agency and has somehow managed to work two part time jobs in the meantime.

Want to know more about Erin? Here are some of the details:

  • She loves cheese. Parmesan’s her favorite food—she eats it daily.
  • She is currently reading Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen for her third time. Why? Because she’s a die-hard classics fanatic.
  • In her spare time, she likes to paint furniture. Most recently, she painted a shelf for her room in coral and cream.
  • This girl loves to exercise! She goes to spin class every week at 6:30 in the morning, has run a marathon and is training for another half marathon in February.
  • She claims to be a tomboy. BUT she wears purple dresses and bows in her hair to Clairemont.
  • More fun facts? She’s a dog person; loves Mexican food; dreams of going to Europe; drives a stick shift; would choose the mountains over the beach any day; enjoys salty food more than sweet; and has a slight obsession with Snapchat.

So where does Erin see herself in the next year? Working in an agency setting and living in a large city—preferably New York or Washington D.C. But that’s not all. Erin’s wants to remain involved with Building Tomorrow, a nonprofit that raises money to help build primary schools for underprivileged children in Uganda. In fact, she’s going there this summer to visit schools that she helped raise support for over the past three years.

As for her time at Clairemont, Erin is interested in learning more about the client-agency relationship, applications of public relations in real world scenarios and the ins and outs of what it takes to be a successful agency. So, cheers to Erin and our adventure here at Clairemont! I can’t wait to see what this semester has in store for both of us!

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10th Annual Gingerbread Benefit Secures Regional Coverage

Margot HorganBlog, Clairemont Client News, In Our Community, Public Relations, Raleigh PR Agency, The Clairemont Team, , , , , , , , 1 Comment on 10th Annual Gingerbread Benefit Secures Regional Coverage

For the past three years, Clairemont has had the honor of promoting and participating in one of the Triangle’s most anticipated holiday events of the season – Triangle Family Services’ Annual Gingerbread Benefit, the premier, vital fundraising event for the longstanding local nonprofit.

This year, marked not only the tenth anniversary of the Benefit, but also the 75th anniversary of Triangle Family Services, which provides programs to families in need in the Raleigh-Durham area in three key areas – financial stability, family safety and mental health services.

With 2012 marking prominent milestones for both the Benefit and Triangle Family Services, we knew that we wanted to make this year’s Annual Gingerbread Benefit bigger and better than any other.

Our plan? A detailed and strategic media relations campaign that would target news coverage in both regional and local publications. With gingerbread-themed media kits in tow, our work started this summer with our “Christmas in July” push to long-lead news outlets. Diligent pitching and coordination with our media contacts continued through the year and throughout the day of the actual event.

The result? Substantial coverage promoting the 10th Annual Gingerbread Benefit in leading publications like Southern Living Magazine, Our State Magazine, Carolina Parent Magazine and Philanthropy Journal, just to name a few.

Southern Living Magazine, Nov. 2012
Our State Magazine, Dec. 2012
Carolina Parent Magazine, Nov. 2012

Interested in hearing more? Check out some of the other coverage in the links included below:

Gingerbread houses and more for a good cause

The News & Observer

>>View Story

Entertainment Briefs

The Durham Herald Sun

>>View Story

Triangle Family Services Gingerbread Benefit

Cary Citizen

>>View Story

Gingerbread Benefit Feature

NBC 17 – My Carolina Today

>>View Clip

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Have You Heard the Buzz About the Fuzz?

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Marketing, Social Media + Influencer Engagement, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment on Have You Heard the Buzz About the Fuzz?

Social media has forever changed the way brands interact and communicate with consumers. Today, Clairemont intern Callie Henson tells us how she has embraced the power of new media in her PR courses, internships and class project –  The Fuzz. 

I’ve always been the kind of person who loves social media. At first, it was more for my personal use – but now, I am fascinated with the power and influence new media can bring to a brand.

Over the past few years, I have been able to get a strong grasp on how to be a successful PR professional through my different internships and classes specializing in public relations. For the past month, I have lead a campus-wide new media campaign at UNC called The Fuzz. And with this project, everything I have learned through my college career has come together – my PR skills and social media skills have worked together  to help create one strong creative branding campaign.

In the New Media Technology and It’s Impact on the Future of Advertising, Marketing & PR class I am taking at UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, I have learned all about new media, it’s impact on audiences and the prevalence new media will have in this industry in the future. Gary Kayye, my professor and founder of rAVe Publications, has challenged us to create a new media campaign on campus to truly show what new media can do for a marketing campaign.

The Fuzz is my team’s campaign – and from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Pinterest, my team has created a strong brand and personality on campus in the past three weeks. Everyone knows, or wants to know, all about The Fuzz. Our campaign uses creative marketing to the max – we have figured out how to put on an entire campaign without spending any money. We have reached out to local businesses, and by supporting them and their social media, the businesses have provided us with donations and prizes.

UNC student Julia Shearer shows off her winnings from The Fuzz local business partner, Caribou Coffee

“Five years ago, the idea that students would able to take mostly free new media technologies to organically create a marketing project of this scope and with this level of community involvement would have been unimaginable,” Kayye said.

This marketing campaign has opened my eyes to all the possibilities of new media technologies and what it can do for any business. Social media has brought the power of voice back to the brand. No longer do you need to rely on a reporter to get your news and your story out there.

We got our story out there on our own through different social media channels and self-publishing news websites. For example, I was even approached by Susanna Gebauer, the founder of the exploreb2b.com social platform, to write a story about The Fuzz for the global communications news source based in Berlin. And, from my time at Clairemont, I’ve learned about different self-publishing news websites like The Third Report, All Voices and Pitch Engine. We even have a Huffington Post story in the works…

The Fuzz has allowed me to put my PR skills and lessons-learned to the test. And, so far, I think I’ve passed. As for today, our YouTube page has nearly 2,000 views total. Our followers on Twitter and likes on Facebook grow everyday. And most importantly, the Fuzz is truly buzzing around campus. Everyone wants to know the buzz about The Fuzz. Have you heard the buzz about The Fuzz?

http://youtu.be/NbxNa9nGhV0

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