It’s officially my last day in work, drinking my last coffee and writing my last ‘from work’ post. I feel quite odd (and incidentally, old).

The last few days have been spent explaining what I actually do to make headlines and boost bottom lines and handing over current and potential leads to our MD so he can monitor everything and respond to any enquiries.

It’s handing things over that feels the strangest. I’m a self-confessed control freak over external messaging and to hand everything over and know it’s going to be handled in a particularly lo-fi way is very strange.

This role and the exterior messages I’ve been building have been like my baby. I remember the first telephone interview (with the wonderful Nicola Woolcock!) and thinking ‘This is horrible’ and then my last telephone interview thinking ‘I cant wait to go for that drink!’. Being the lone PRO, I’ve been given the opportunities to dictate the whole image of the company, and now I’m worried that someone else might morph that image and lead it towards the bad end of town! It’s given me the skills and knowledge to know how to win friends and influence people… That was a joke, by the way!

Trying to hand things over has been difficult too. I’ve had to quantify daily tasks and write down my thought process when finding angles to make things newsworthy - apparently I have a very skewed sense of logic! It’s only really been these last few weeks that I’ve realised that I’ve begun to think in a PR way.

(This part is quite heavily influenced by Paull Young’s post!)

So much has changed in six months. I’ve never been the child (or adult) who knew what job they wanted to do. I’ve just always loved writing and making friends.

I never meant to become a PRO, it just happened!

I’m done now.

Excuse my awkward emotion, I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to feel.

I’ll have to update my bloody ‘About Me‘ page now too…

Before I began my job the phrase ‘In-house’ conjured up images of an antiquated old flack who was edging closer to retirement and this was a sentiment echoed in a conversation that I leapt into on twitter yesterday with Simon Collister, Dom Whitehurst, @stedavies, @bmcmichael and @lewiswebb.

I think it’s generally thought that in-house PROs are much less dangerous and outgoing than their agency counterparts. That they’re less likely to blog, involve themselves with community, network with other PROs and generally thrust themselves into the limelight. But some of us do all of those things! Which got me to thinking about the differences in the two types of PRO…

I think I’ve cleverly (gag) summarised the differences with two cute (gag, again) analogies;

Galactico Agency Staff
Agency staff need to be stars and each PRO in an agency should be a brand. The best analogy I can think of is football clubs. A football club is made up of players, each bringing their own strengths into the team, and helping to boost the teams’ results. If a football team signs a ‘Galactico’ then they bring with them a wealth of attention and more fans go to watch the teams’ games, but along with the increase in gate receipts, the new great player will also improve things on the pitch…

For an agency, this is (surely) no different. They might have to pay more to capture high-profile signings, or they may be a feeder club nurturing young talent. When you’re on the field, the world is your stage.

It just so happens that ‘the stage’ is increasing. It used to be the newspapers and industry WOM, but now it’s blogs and social networks. A talented junior PRO can talk to CEOs on IM or tweet at them, these days of access and transparency are not only great for our clients and corporations, but they are great for our careers - as long as we want the exposure and can climb up onto the stage.

Olympian In-house Staff
Agency staff spend all day with other PROs whereas an in-house PRO may only work with one other, or may even be alone (sometimes, I get so lonely…!). But in-house staff are part of a wider, more generic team.

If an agency can be analogised as a football team, then the in-house comparison would be Olympians. Olympians are all fighting for the same cause, gunning for victory for their country, but in different sports. Therefore because they all compete for the company/country, they share a team ethos, but on the contrary they don’t all compete in the same sport so they never really achieve the unity that comes from competing in the same sport.

Ramble
Wow, this post began as a challenge to stereotypes but it’s now turned into a call to arms for all PROs… Sorry to deviate, I hope it kept you entertained anyway.

Do you think that these analogies stand up?