Alexandra Jonker

Kudos to Eleanor Hawkins and the Axios Communicators team for their "1 big thing" visual of the day. Yes, it's reductive guidance on when to speak out and when not to, and yes, you should think through it with more nuance and specificity to a situation at hand, but these are great questions to start with when you're wondering how to communicate through murky or uncomfortable events. Some other questions to consider: ▶ Do we know enough about this situation? If not, do we have a sense of timing for more information to come through? ▶ Can we meaningfully influence the situation by speaking out? ▶ If we are communicating about this, who is the right person to serve as our voice?

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📣 Big career update! This week, I officially joined Figma to lead Corporate Communications 🎉 I love this work because I get to uncover, shape, and share the stories that help turn a company into a brand you want to follow, a place you want to work, a changemaker you want to root for, and a maybe even a name that your parents know. “But SaaS? Why would I ever want to do Comms at a software company? That seems... boring,” said Past Me. (I'll admit I may have even said this in an interview or two!) But I quickly started to realize how unusual it is to mention a software product to a friend/acquaintance/person you meet at a wedding and repeatedly hear, “WAIT, I LOVE [said software product].” This seemed… 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵. Now that I’ve walked through the virtual doors, I can confirm: Figma is different. The energy I’ve felt in week 1 has been off the charts. It’s energy from the huge opportunity ahead of the business, all the stories we can tell, and the blank canvas ahead to shape our corporate narrative. But it’s *also* the energy from the unparalleled amount of creativity and playfulness that guides every meeting. You can feel the collective force of every 𝘍𝘪𝘨𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 👯‍♀️ working together to build something great. It’s the shared vision to create something that empowers designers and product builders and makers of all kinds –– something that can bring imagination to life, and something that people around the world are truly obsessed with using. And wow, do people here have fun while they’re building it. I want to say a huge thanks to Michael Amodeo, Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian, Praveer Melwani, Emma Esrock, Shannon Toliver, Kate DeLeo-Joglekar, Anna Kohnen, Elena Woodside, and everyone who I spoke with (and got converted by) during the interview process. And to everyone who made it this far: stay tuned for more stories about the business, culture, and all the things that make Figma… Figma. I’m looking forward to figuring out what they are, and sharing them with the world. 🎨✨✍️

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🚀 PR & Comms Recruiters/Hiring Managers – Let’s Talk! 🚀 I’ve been reaching out about hybrid roles, asking if they can be fully remote due to my use of a wheelchair. I’m curious if this is a good approach or if it might be seen as overstepping. I’d love to hear your thoughts and get a conversation going. What are your thoughts? #PRJobs #RemoteWork #Accessibility

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Just like there isn’t one type of media professional, there isn’t just one type of PR pitch or approach to pitching. If you're feeling overwhelmed, we've created a handy list of different PR pitch types and how to nail each one.

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Some of the best PR material comes from random comments people make during meetings or in Slack channels. Your Comms team can’t pick up on those things if they’re not there. Don’t just bring them in at the end. Make sure they’re part of the entire conversation.

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CEOs are at their best when leading from the front "Going direct" is one of the hottest tech comms trends today I'm not a maximalist on it - although some smart folks in PR are - but there can be benefits What "going direct" isn't - a carte blanche pass to ignore traditional and emerging digital media. Most companies (or specific divisions of the world's largest brands) need to actively compete to garner legitimacy from the mainstream press You can post politics but it has to be authentic / on-brand and you have to carefully weigh if that brings in more detractors than it is worth Now what "going direct" can do: -Bring your audience immediately closer to you, whether they are consumers / clients / LPs -Position the executive as the "main character" of a brand, fusing their personality and values into a coherent identity - one that you want your audience to subscribe to -Make your executive more appealing for high-end conference speaking and podcast opportunities - both of these forums want to draw new participants / listeners and an executive with their own, real audience is POWERFUL "Going direct" is easier when you have an experienced digital team behind you, one that has bolstered the online reputations of many a CEO. Now who could that be? 🤔 Tweet credit: Andrew Yeung

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It's prediction time! I'll be putting up a series of LinkedIn posts asking for predictions on specific topics. Please do not email me responses -- posting on LinkedIn lets me keep everything in one place. Answers may be used in PR Daily articles. First up: What are your predictions for AI in communications in 2025?

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My non-paid side gig is to help people who are seeking communications roles build their "candidate narrative." These could be folks that have been laid off, moving into communications from a different role, or just making a change. It's not recruiting support or writing resumes. It's helping someone best tell their story to stand out, because there are too many great people in need of roles. And for me it's good karma and building new relationships -- it's giving back to the community that has given me so much. Here are a few tips that continually rise to the top when we've built successful candidate narratives: 1) Take all the best practices in communications and apply them to yourself: Build key messages that have an agenda (what you want them to believe, know, feel, do), identify stories that bring your most important successes/lessons to life, and use media training tips to stay focused and tight. 2) Always focus on S-A-R: Every example of success should be a tight situation-action-result. Otherwise, you'll end up wandering for five minutes talking about the great initiative you led. Everyone has a great initiative, and interviewer is now checked out. Not everyone can succinctly hit the S-A-R. Doing this right helps you be sticky in recruiters'/hiring managers' minds. Data, results and transformations are sticky - if you're tight with them. 3) It's hard to read the label from inside of the jar: get a trusted friend, colleague or acquaintance to review your materials, hear what makes you unique, or do practice interviews. Sometimes what makes you special and what people will remember of you is hidden in a lot of words on paper or in conversation. And sometimes it takes someone else to unearth the right expertise or points to make. 4) Speak to cheerleaders/advocates. The one thing that seems to help the most, and what I've found I've delivered to others (if not unintentionally): confidence. Sometimes you need others to remind you of your awesomeness, or see the forest from the trees on what amazing things you've done (then, got back to #1 and #2 to get those messages, stories and results right). 5) What did you look for in candidates? How soon we forget sitting on the other side. If you have some experience, you likely conducted interviews and hired people. Who stood out as the best? Why? What did they do? Can you learn from that and apply? I'm grateful to have helped some folks - it fills my cup. Hopefully this helps some others out there.

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Hot Take of the Day | A Shocker From This Year's PRWeek Salary Survey! More Comms Pros Moved from "In-house to Agency" roles than "Agency to In-House." This year's survey shows that "12% of the people who changed jobs, went from in-house to agency gigs, versus 10.9% who went the other way." That's a shocking turnabout not only from PRWeek's 2023 survey which showed twice as many people went from agency to in-house, but from what we've witnessed as recruiters at PR Talent for the last 25 years. My guess is that it comes down to two possible factors: 1) Corey duBrowa brought sexy back to the agency world. Corey's high profile move from Google's top comms role to head up BCW Global (soon to be Burson) got a lot of people re-thinking the reflexive in-house move and considering a cool agency gig. We've seen other suprising, high-profile reverse migrations throughout the year, so this very well may be a trend. Or... this could just be a statistical anomaly driven by a year where there were fewer plum in-house roles available and agencies wisely took the opportunity to recruit top talent from the client side. (Note to all talent hunters: leveraging market conditions to recruit top talent is always a smart hiring strategy.) We'll be following this hot trend to see if it holds for 2024. Stay tuned! Next Hot 🔥 Take: AI Hiring Trends in Comms for 2024

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I keep seeing PR agencies make the mistake of hiring prompt engineers with no experience actually doing PR work. Whyyy? 1) Prompt engineers are no longer relevant - LLMs can write their own prompts better than any human can. 2) Unless you deeply understand the use-case, what is the point of someone who knows how to prompt AI to get a broad range of results. It's AI + a narrow focus that delivers value not AI + general use case humans. 3) Just hire smart, capable, problem solvers that are also PR consultants.

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UPDATE: The answer is yes. LinkedIn has been rolling out this change to how images display, and it's going to hurt engagement for #communications pros out there. https://lnkd.in/eF-UbAaN ORIGINAL: Does anybody else's LinkedIn feed look like the screenshot below where graphics/images are no longer expanding to full size when paired with hyperlinks? Big implications for comms folks if so... Images may no longer be both viewable *and* clickable.

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I recently had an interesting—and candid—conversation with a hiring manager while interviewing for a director-level PR role. They mentioned that while my resume is strong, they believe I might have more success finding a remote position if I consider applying for less senior roles. Their rationale was that many senior positions require in-person leadership, which isn’t an option for me as I’m wheelchair-bound and need a fully remote role. This feedback left me with mixed feelings. What are your thoughts on this advice? I'm sharing the resume they reviewed during this conversation for context. #CareerAdvice #PublicRelations #RemoteWork #Commsprofessionals #PRRecruiters

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There's so much talk about using AI to generate content, especially now that tools like ChatGPT make it look so easy. But is that coming at a cost to the reader experience? I'm a huge fan of (properly using) AI. It's been great at summarizing meetings. I use it sometimes to generate headline ideas or to generate a first draft of social media copy. I'm legitimately amazed at how fast this technology is developing. But as someone who has been "generating content" for newspapers, websites, blogs and social media since MySpace was the dominant social platform, I see far too many companies rushing to adopt AI for content generation without question. It seems so easy — because it is. Upload some reputable, trustworthy data sources (at least, please tell me you're doing this), click a couple buttons and you've got a story ready to go! Unfortunately, going this route ignores a lot of success factors. - Is it going to rank on Google? (No — the algorithm wants human experience and expertise that AI can't magically generate.) - Is it something that will add value for your customers? (People don't really want to read awkward AI copy, and will just bounce.) - Is it going to read well? (Unless you're also a robot ... no.) Instead, use AI to *assist* human writers. It's great at summarizing interviews, gathering key data points and helping you brainstorm. It can generate a first draft that gives you a structure to work with, if you're stuck. AI is a wonderful tool as an assistant, but it's not a long-term content strategy. While the technology changes over time, one thing doesn't — people want to trust that the article they're reading will help them out. Seeing how often people add "Reddit" on the end of their Google searches just confirms this. If you really want to stand out among your competitors and get long-lasting results, don't use AI as a content generator. Use it to help your human writers and editors do their job better.

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To communications pros that are interviewing for roles: Don't bury the lead (or, lede, if you like the old school journalism version). Communications people are great at storytelling and packaging messaging for companies and leaders. But when it comes to the interview, I've heard many winding tales where the main message is often stated as the answer is wrapping up. Through 30 candidate narrative coaching calls, I've found the lead is hidden because: ❌ You set up too much context on what you're going to tell the person ❌ You use all the communications buzzwords ❌ You're trying to prove your expertise ❌ You unintentionally get into the linear resume review ❌ You're nervous How to not bury your lead: ✅ Think of your three best results and transformations: what is the common thread there? Is it that you've led organizations through some of their most challenging issues? That you defy odds with ongoing media coverage that elevates brands? That you pave paths for leaders to become thought leaders? That you create conversations for brands where none existed before? That you help employees connect to an organization through a shared purpose? Etc, etc. That's a message thread that you can weave into perspectives, stories and results -- and also the lead. Then use the results as examples. ✅ Like we often teach others in communications: think of the audience and what you want them to believe, know and do. And, how do they want to feel? Is there a thread there? Is it about your people leadership? You're industry expertise? Something that only you can say -- and thus makes you distinct -- as it relates to the companies and results you've had? ✅ Ask a trusted mentor or colleague how they would describe your expertise. Get three or four of those threads, and then use those as the lead to your answer, be it the "tell me about yourself question" or for relevant questions tied to successes, learnings, why you, etc. Note: I've opened up the calendar for one-time 1:1 coaching calls as well as 3-call workshops. Link to calendar in comments if you'd like to take 20-30 minutes to learn more and see if me serving as your Chief Communications Officer for your career would be helpful.

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"Can we chat about internal communications?" When Shareen Pathak asked me if I could chat with her about internal comms, I jumped at the opportunity. Internal communications—or, employee communications, as I prefer to call it— is the underappreciated backbone of the comms and marketing team. I'm so glad to see more attention paid to this topic and this vital role. Employee communications can't be an afterthought. It's not a "nice to have" (though it's almost always treated as such, especially in smaller organizations), and it's incredibly strategic. Shout out to my internal communicators! I see you, I know your importance, and I will keep singing your praises as long as I have breath in my lungs. Check out this Toolkits.com article for more.👇 ## Does your company have a dedicated employee comms team, or is it part of another role (aka an afterthought)?

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Fellow Chicago communicators! I'll be speaking at the upcoming ALI Conferences later this month. If you haven't already secured your spot, make sure to do so. You won't want to miss it 💡 My panel will be focused on #changemanagement and fostering adoption with your internal audience. They say change is the only constant in life.... so join us for examples and tips on how to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, build trust, belief and excitement with your employees, and how to plan for the unexpected. ⚡ #ALIcomms #internalcommunications #digitalcommunications #corporateculture #corporatecommunications

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This guide is gonna make a lot of people better writers -- and not because I am one of the contributors. "Everybody Needs an Editor" draws on the decades of journalism and marketing experience of its authors -- including many of my former Chicago Tribune co-workers -- and contributors, yours truly among them. It's not your usual writing guide. Sure, it covers the basics, but you’ll also learn to create must-open newsletters, give memorable presentations, write thank-you letters, and use AI without being gross. If you follow me for copywriting and copy editing tips, I promise you'll enjoy it and learn a lot from it. I'm proud to have contributed a couple of lessons among its pages. To preorder, find the link in the comments. "Everybody Needs an Editor" comes out in September. For a really special experience, order more than 100 books for your organization or business. If you do, co-authors Melissa Harris and Jenn Bane will run a free virtual 90-minute writing workshop for your team. Email Melissa at [email protected] to place a bulk order. Share far and wide, folks. A lot writers are about to get better.

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