Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Why me...one of the questions you'll be asked

If you’ve been thinking about applying to Hill & Knowlton’s graduate scheme but not sure where to start or what we’re looking for, here are some top tips from our current crop of H&K grads, Chris, Daisy and Becca on what makes a successful grad applicant:

1. Read widely and understand your industry

PR is a broad discipline and spans many sectors, including consumer packaged goods, technology, healthcare, retail & leisure, financial & professional services just to name a few. It’s important like any other job to familiarise yourself with the industry and the sectors involved. A good starting point is to pick up with a copy of PR Week and read about the latest news and campaigns and increase your media consumption to see how brands and companies are being talked about in the press.

2. Digital ‘do’

There’s no denying that digital is important these days. Most campaigns have some form of digital element involved so it’s important to have an understanding of how Facebook, Twitter and blogger campaigns work. Research around successful digital campaigns and come armed with examples of digital work you’ve seen and liked. Even better, try and think about why they’ve worked (or haven’t) and what you would do to differently.

Also, if you’re not on Twitter already, it’s always worth opening an account and try to understand how it works.

3. Be prepared

Take a look at H&K’s website to see our recent campaigns, the brands we look after and community manage to familiarise yourself with the work we do. You can also find us on Twitter, HANK and vimeo to give you a better idea of what it’s like working at H&K towers.

4. Be a team player

We work in a collaborative environment, be it cross-sector or across different markets. If you do get invited to the assessment day, remember to pace yourself, listen to others contributions and don’t try and dominate with your own. It is difficult to ignore the fact that you are essentially competing against all other people on the day, but those who take that attitude into the team task are doomed to failure. Be prepared to work together to shine as a team.

Remember no idea is a bad idea during a brainstorm. Look to build upon or take inspiration from other ideas rather than dismissing them, and make sure all feedback is constructive rather than critical.

5. And finally…

Don’t be afraid to eat as many sandwiches as you want at lunch on the day of the assessment. Your lack of fear in taking the last egg and cress could give you a competitive edge due to increased energy levels in the second half of the day.

Good luck!

Follow the grads on:

@chrissssmith

@daisysheps

@juange18

@liyywln

“Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness; close bosom friend of the maturing sun…” – or that’s what Keats said. Personally speaking, I think Keats can do one, as can September and Autumn in general. Everything smells of wet dog and regret, it’s cold and miserable and it’s now just the long, slow trudge towards another season of crass mass-consumerism and endless, interminable, incomprehensible perfume adverts (NB – anyone who works in advertising who reads this, please feel free to explain to me why perfume advertising is so oblique, as I have literally no idea).

Think, then, of this edition of Web Curios as the lightbox to your SAD, the plaster to your axewound (for future reference, an unpleasant conjunction of words to Google), the United Nations to your genocide. I’m here to help. To that end, here are some recommendations for awesome stuff you can do in London over the next few months (NB – that last link is one of the best things I’ve seen in years, very much recommended. Oh, and for an interesting take on Libya, you could do worse than read this). In the real world! NOT ON THE INTERNET! Crazy but true.

But for now it’s still all about the internet. Well, on this particular blog it is, anyway. If you don’t like it, you know what you can do (though I’d prefer it if you didn’t; I’m needy, and low-to-moderate traffic figures are all that’s standing between me and a P45).

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Just got out of a seminar where John Battelle was the guy on stage saying the smartest things. The rest of our team is over at the Google Sandbox or maybe looking for the Twitter Beach Lounge. Tomorrow, I scored a ticket to the Facebook reception but our client Say Media is putting on a bigger party with the hot electro dance punk band Friendly Fires.

SXSW? No. Welcome to Cannes Lions 2011 where there are as many people attending from the lands known as Silicon Valley (or Tech City) as from some actual countries.

Invasion of the Attention Snatchers

Of course, this has been going on for a while. As consumers have transformed into users, marketers must follow. As the audience’s attention has wandered far from the telly ad and deep into their iPad, agencies have added talent that know what heat mapping and usability testing mean.

Our own H&K seminar tomorrow features a creative powerhouse with an addiction factor all brands would die for. By bringing Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle of Rovio Mobile, to the Debussy Theatre, we hope to share a little of the pixel dust that make Angry Birds such a magically success story. Please join us on 21 Tuesday at 5:30pm in Cannes or via Twitter everywhere.

I had an opening riff all worked out for this week, webmongs, but that was before I saw this amazing news story. Poor the confused,  sweaty-palmed masturbators! That aside, though, it’s been a relatively uneventful 4-day week, apart from the British press redeeming itself slightly for Gareth Barry John Terry Ryan Giggs-gate by actually doing some proper investigative journalism – which, inevitably, led to literally nothing changing whatsoever in the no-way-at-all-corrupt HQ of world football; and perhaps from the best story likely to appear in print anywhere in the world in 2011. Oh, and if you were traumatised by goats as a child (and let’s be honest, which of us hasn’t been) then THIS IS YOUR MONTH.

The rest of you, though, for whom it is NOT your month, will simply have to content yourselves with the following collection of webthings. Apart from The Man – for it is always his month.

Alice Was A Lot Less Innocent Than Is Often Presumed

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HELLO! This Friday marks what, as far as I’m concerned, is the end of the last working week in April. Next weekend we have death, resurrection and ceremonial chocolate sweats; the weekend afterwards we have a nation descending into drunken, vomitous chaos in the name of a patriotic spirit long-forgotten (oh, and there’s a wedding happening too). As a result of people indulging in this sort of behaviour, it’s unlikely any of us will have got over the jaundice before May at the earliest (NB – Web Curios does not condone excessive drinking unless it’s as an expression of royalist fervour, in which case go for your lives webmongs).

But that is all before us. Here, we look back – back at the week that was on the internet, a week in which people got very upset about a 17 year-old London woman’s *ahem* full and frank discussion of her personal life on a rap freestyle (NB – it really is full and frank and very NSFW); in which, through listening to this man’s voice, I learnt that I occasionally get this; in which I totally failed to get on a plane to Amsterdam to deliver a presentation at a conference (thus incurring a debt to The Man unto the bargain); in which it was proven that £50million does not always guarantee quality;  that it’s entirely possible to make clothes from blow-up dolls; and in which a former boss of mine was bathed, naked, by a strange, bearded man in the name of art. It’s been interesting.

As a result of the imminent HOLIDAY, this week’s Curios is going to be relatively light on work-related stuff. Obviously, though, it’s all still GOLD. ENJOY, DAMN YOU.

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Contrary to what you may have feared, I AM NOT DEAD! Put away your wreaths, unveil your faces and break out the bunting, for Web Curios is BACK (I just tried doing a Google Image search for Web Curios – beautifully, several of the initial results are pictures of The Man. Hello, The Man!). Admittedly it’s only back for a week, as I am on HOLIDAY next Friday, but frankly you should be grateful for whatever you’re given at this stage.

In my absence, webmongs, I have seen things of which you can only dream. I have seen Slough and a Tesco’s so large that approaching it is like that opening bit in the first Star Wars film with the massive spaceship that goes on and on and on and (Slough FACT: there’s a pun in Slough town centre called the Wernham Hogg, named after the fictional company in The Office (which was of course set in Slough); I can’t work out whether this is a brilliant piece of self-satirisation or actually one of the saddest things ever, though I know which way I intuitively lean). I have been to Barcelona on a stag party, accompanied (amongst others) by a charming man known as ‘Big Sam’ who was recently cleared of common assault after breaking a man’s jaw on the fotball pitch (needless to say Big Sam and I didn’t really have much in common), where I danced to techno like a teenager and was thrown out of a nightclub (I came back in again 5 minutes later though).  Oh, and I’ve done work as well, some of it actually not that bad.

Obviously, though, this is all utterly immaterial in the face of the world’s continued descent into what appears to be total chaos. Better people than me have written at length about everything that’s been going on over the past month (and worse people – check out this spectacular piece of ad placement from last week’s Metro), but can I suggest that you perhaps donate some money to the relief effort in Japan? Or if you prefer music, maybe buy tickets for this? Oh, and if you’re interested in the geopolitical upheaval sweeping the Middle East and its potential implications for China you could do worse than read this piece by Francis Fukuyama in the Wall Street Journal this week (don’t get smug, though, Franky – you were still totally wrong about the END OF HISTORY thing). Or, if you prefer your commentary a little more raw, there are few people more on the money about conflict than The War Nerd.

Oh, and one last thing before I wang on about the internet and cats and stuff. I was reminded this week about the way in which Facebook is used as a tribute site when people die, particularly in the case of the young. This is, of course, perfectly fine. As someone who relatively recently had to administer the page of someone young who died, though, can I please point out that WHAT YOU WRITE MATTERS. I don’t mean to come across as stuffy (HEAVEN FORFEND) but I’m not entirely convinced that the term ‘RIP’ benefits from an exclamation mark (hey, kids, punctuation changes emphasis. You idiots) or indeed that a sad smiley is an adequate response to death. Just saying, like.

Ahem. Oh, and one last thing – Web Curios this week contains no Rebecca Black whatsoever. You can thank me in the comments.

One of a series of posters designed to commemorate the Fukushima earthquake. Click for more.

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It has been a week of RAGE on the internet. Rage and hate, webmongs. Not, though, coming from me (well, no more than is usual) – this time it’s been everyone else getting all unnecessary about things. And then, and is the wont of the internet, behaving like a toddler with ADHD and completetely forgetting about the thing that made them so angry in the first place and moving on to the next shiny new toy. I don’t necessarily agree with the whole ‘the internet is making you stupid’ movement – you know what? we were doing just fine at being stupid before this stuff turned up – but it’s certainly helping us regress, behaviourally, like few other things.

Anyway, so Tuesday saw everyone (well, every single media tool in London, at least) getting REALLY REALLY IRATE at a video made by PHD Worldwide in what would appear to be an attempt at self-promotion. If you’re reading this then you are probably one of the London media tools who’s already seen said video, but on the offchance you haven’t, you can watch it here. It’s undeniably cringey – stage-school kids spouting a whole load of mediaguff about THE FUTURE and how brands will need to market to them in NEW and EXCITING and DYNAMIC ways if they are to capture the attention of the POWER CONSUMERS of the future – and certainly deserves a bit of ribbing. It probably didn’t, though, merit the frightening level of vitriol directed at it online.  Just a thought – was some of the anger directed at PHD (who, it must be said, dealt with the whole thing very graciously and with a sense of humour) possibly borne of self-recognition? Ask yourselves, media tools of London, have you never used terms like that when trying to shill your services? Was the reason that so many people were moved to such staggering levels of bile that they saw themselves in it? It’s one thing to come the big social media guru in a client meeting when you’re met by the blank-eyed, slack-jawed stares of incomprehension that immediately precede the opening of chequebooks by the terminally confused; it’s quite another to be confronted by the horror of the words you regularly use when they’re coming from the mouths of children. Just saying, like.

BUT! We all swiftly forgot about that on Wednesday, when we met Binkie. The original Telegraph article’s been removed, presumably to spare the poor girl any further humiliation, but the damage has been done. By Wednesday afternoon she was trending in London, people were full of IRE at her privilege and background and nickname and wealth, and kind-hearted people on Twitter had dug out her Facebook profile, found out where the wedding was happening and were talking about how ‘fun’ it would be to gatecrash it with White Lightning (an aside: I have just discovered they no longer make White Lightning. Teenage Matt is saddened by this) and how they wanted various calamities to befall her.

Look, I know this is all ‘harmless fun & games‘, and heaven forfend that I be puritanical and preachy about this sort of thing, but it does make me sort-of-agree with Milo Yiannopoulos and this article he wrote in the very same Telegraph earlier this week (aside from the ‘lefty’ rubbish). Remember the Two Laws of the Internet? Well this is all about the second one. Never forget Wheaton’s Law. It should be easy; if it’s not, perhaps you might want to consider sterilising yourself.

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I’m not as angry as I was last week. This is all relative, of course; I am still full of (entirely justified) rage at the industry in which I work; the sort of impotent rage that will achieve nothing other than slightly raised blood pressure and the heightened probability of an aneurysm before the age of 50. This week the rage has been mostly caused by people’s seemingly unthinking insistence on using the words ‘influencer’ (NB – note to readers: If you are ever being presented to and someone uses that image in a presentation, you have EVERY RIGHT to spit in their face and call them a clueless shyster. No really, you do) and ‘engagement’ in completely arbitrary fashion. CAN YOU DEFINE THE TERMS YOU ARE USING? OH NO, THAT’S RIGHT, YOU CAN’T, BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST THROWING THEM INTO YOUR SENTENCES LIKE THE BUZZWORDS DU JOUR THAT THEY FUNDAMENTALLY ARE.

*Ahem*

Look, I know that there’s nothing wrong with the words ‘influencer’ and ‘engagement’ per se; I just get really, really upset when they are used so casually. If you can’t define what an ‘influencer’ is with any degree of credibility (and here’s the rub – in terms of the online world people really struggle, which is why Klout and Tweetlevel are ultimately pointless, masturbatory exercises (at the moment, at least)), then don’t use the term; if by ‘engagement’ you mean ‘talking to people’ then just say ‘talking to people’ and bask in the knowledge that people won’t think you’re anywhere near as much of a social media tool.

Christ alive, I was calm before I started writing this and now I am all het up and unnecessary. I am going to take a moment to attain the state of zenlike calm that I normally bask in when writing Web Curios – join me in contemplation of this beautiful image, and we’ll continue after the jump.

Fill in the blanks yourself. It doesn't get any less disturbing.

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I’m not in a good mood today. This blog might reflect this. Apologies in advance and all that. Oh, and to the three people who read this who aren’t somehow involved in advertising / marketing / PR / etc, feel free to skip down to where the first picture is, as the next few paragraphs will probably mean very little to you. I mean, feel free to read them if you want – my prose, after all, is captivating – but don’t expect to get too much out of it other than a feeling of slightly grubby disappointment.

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Happy New Year! (I was going to accompany that with an image, but you’d be suprised how NSFW the first Google Image result for that apparently innocent phrase is. Dear God, it’s all just filth on the internet, isn’t it?).

It’s been over a month, webmongs, and, if I’m honest, I’ve not missed you in the slightest. Doubtless, though, you have all been desperately pining for me, and staring blank-eyed into the middle-distance every Friday afternoon, wondering exactly how you are going to be able to fritter away the remaining hours separating you from your regular appointment with a bottle of meths and a cold, lonely evening alone in your bedsit in front of the glowing flicker of a cathode-ray tube.

I, though, have been leading the glamorous life of a jetsetter. Apart from on Christmas Day, where I found myself eating a mediocre lunch, alone, at the soulless Gordon Ramsey franchise at Heathrow Terminal 5. I have been to Rome and Berlin and (unexpectedly, due to being ‘confused’ on new year’s day) Dusseldorf and Amsterdam and San Francisco. I didn’t look at the internet AT ALL for over a fortnight. It was AMAZING.

Now, though, my nose is once again being deprived of multiple epidermal layers as a result of prolonged exposure to the grindstone. I am back ON IT. As such, take a deep breath, make yourselves comfortable, and let me guide you with the assured touch of a skilled lover through this week’s selection of things off the internet. After a picture, to break the monotony:

My vision was a bit like this on New Year's day, hence the Dusseldorf incident

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