Account Supervisor, Kellen

My name is Stephanie Meyering. We are here at Kellen, which is a public relations and association management company. I work on the public relations side working to promote, protect, and defend my clients through a variety of communications tactics. Clients come to us for kind of two different reasons or sometimes for both. One is getting out in front of potential clients, or customers, for them. So they want to make sure that their audience knows the good things about them. And then on the defense side, or protect and defend we like to say, is that on occasion there will be negative articles or negative stories that come out about a client, a brand in industry. And they need someone to help them create communications messaging as to how to react to that, how to respond. Our first step is really getting to know the client and their goals, so we need to know what it is they want from us. We try to work as a partnership with our clients. That's how it works the best. It's not us doing one thing and they're doing something else. We need to help them to meet their goals. So that first meeting, the initial meeting, would be figuring out, really, in the long run where do they want to be? And then from there, we take it and create a plan to help them get there. We have someone that is always monitoring the news. So every day this person is looking at articles. If they see one that's negative, or erroneous, so it's wrong and we know that we can respond, they flag that and send it to me. Then we work on our response. So we say this message is incorrect because of this. We work on that messaging and we deliver it, either send it, call reporters or the media, so respond directly to media. We also have a response ready for social media to go out. We work with our digital team on possible paid advertisements to support the digital, so trying to get people to our website where our content lives as well. There are some days that are nine to five. There are some days that are six in the morning until eleven at night. It really depends on either an event, so we work a lot of different events, things like trade shows which are all hands on deck all day long, as well as when news breaks. You need to be there and you need to be talking to the people as it happens. So it's kind of an on-call, nine to seven-ish job (laughs).