We've always been judged by the company we keep. We'll always be judged by our actions. This doesn't change, but there's never been more information publicly available to allow others to judge us on our words, our deeds and the company we keep.

I gained my first job in public relations in 1988 and though I'd been writing about technology for a living, I had not even heard of Tim Berners-Lee. Nor did his invention of the World Wide Web soon after that come to most people's attention until the middle of the next decade.

Back in 1988, wanting to leave publishing and thinking that I knew about the fledgling technology PR sector, I approached a specialist recruitment consultancy. They agreed to speak to the public relations consultancy I said most interested me – Aeberhard and Partners, better known as A Plus – and I secured an interview through this route. An interview with the consultancy founder John Aeberhard (it was then named after him, though it's since been absorbed into one of the global giants) was all it took to secure my break.

Presumably the company followed up with one or more of my referees. But what else could they do to check my credentials? I was not applying for an entry-level position, so a writing test was not appropriate. I'd met some of my new colleagues through my previous role so they knew that I'd been following the sector from the “other side”. It was a simple process, mixing luck on my side, and judgement on John Aeberhard's. There was little science to it.

This is a narrative of what's changed in the past 25 years from the perspective of those wanting to make progress in a public relations career.

Some things haven't changed: employers want candidates with experience and expertise, and to choose people they consider the right fit for their organizations.

They may still ask for a CV, though these are fast becoming redundant in the age of LinkedIn and online portfolios, or even ask you to fill out their application form, particularly if they are a large, bureaucratic organization. You will still be interviewed for a job, typically face-to-face.

So what's changed?

You can no longer approach an interview expecting to build a first impression based on a clean slate. Even as you try to impress on a first date, your prospective partner will already have formed an opinion of you based on your online footprint.

It's expected in public relations that you'll be some or all of the following:

A low profile online will prevent you from gaining the first job, while an impressive online presence will recommend you to employers. There's one exception to this: if you've mastered the art of operating undercover like a secret agent, leaving no traces behind you, you'll be even more sought after for your expertise in managing online reputational risk.

We are all negotiating the boundaries between privacy and publicness – but for public relations practitioners it's more than an interesting question. It goes to the heart of what we do. We advise clients and companies on the what, when, how and who of information disclosure – based on our assessment of their own interests, the likely reputational impact and the wider question of public interest.

The biblical saying “physician, heal thyself” could apply to the public relations consultant. The would-be reputation expert should first attend to their own reputation before advising others.

Lies and league tables

Let's put another saying to the test: “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword”.

There were 24 contributors to the first version of Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals published in 2012. The authors can be assumed to be experts in social media and figures of some standing in the industry, but let's not take this on trust. Let's use some freely available (and free) tools to rank them all objectively.

It took just a few minutes to find the Twitter handles of these experts and to add them to a PeerIndex group. PeerIndex²¹³ is one of several services that analyzes online influence and calculates an individual score. This gives us a league table ranking of these authors – from one to 24.

So, who tops the premier league, or rather, our Champions League? The energetic Mark Pack is the superstar (on 70/100), followed by our impressive editor Stephen Waddington (66).

If there were no surprises there, then how about third place for Rachel Miller (60)? Her expertise is in internal communication – not typically an area for the technology early adopter – and she's one of only two women in the top ten (league tables and statistics perhaps appealing more to the geeky, competitive male brain).

The scores are dynamic, so these numbers and the relative positions in the rankings will have changed by the time you read this – but you can check out the real-time ranking here.²¹⁴

We can debate the validity of these statistics.

We should challenge the notion that the complexities of influence can be summarized by a single number (I recommend Share This contributor Philip Sheldrake's The Business of Influence if you want to explore this subject further).

And yet at university, we assess students out of 100 for most of their work (and I confess we apply a lot of subjectivity in reaching this apparently hard, objective judgement). There's something appealingly quick and easy about numbers and rankings.

It took me just a few minutes. It's not beyond clients to rank potential consultants in such a way, or employers to assess competing job candidates like this. A high score won't be enough in itself to secure you a job or gain you a client, but a low score might mean you don't make it to the shortlist. High or low, you will be expected to know something about metrics if you present yourself as a social media expert.

I used PeerIndex for this table, but Klout scores are more widely known and are becoming something of an industry standard. Like them or loathe them, you will struggle to avoid these numbers.

Welcome to the era of measurement by metrics.

What do I know?

I've already told you that I'm a product of the dark ages. So what do I know of career planning in the age of social media?

Well, when I started a self-coded blog about public relations in 2001, I think that made me the second in the world after Phil Gomes from the US (Ireland's Tom Murphy came third²¹⁵). I changed to a new publishing platform in 2003 and my PR Studies blog then ran for nine years before I retired it in 2012.

I'd not stopped blogging, but blogging had changed. I wanted to put more energy into an online magazine, published using WordPress (www.behindthespin.com). And I, like most others, had stopped leaving comments on blogs because most of our interactions were taking place elsewhere (primarily on Twitter).

As I've been in the same job for the past ten years, I can't claim that blogging has transformed my career. But it has made me much more widely known than I deserve to be and brought me various invitations to speak and to contribute to books such as this one.

Blogging – a personal website – is still the best way to manage your reputation online, since you control what you say and what others see about you. The discipline of writing with an audience in mind is a valuable one, especially as fewer people go into public relations with a journalism background today, since that avenue has been rapidly closing.

But it's not a quick fix: it will appeal more to the marathon runners than the sprinters among you.

And there are many hazards:

• It's very easy to start a blog, but very hard to keep it going. Think what it says about you if your last blog post was four, or six, or eight weeks ago or more.
  It's very easy to write and publish; it's very hard to edit your own writing. Careless words can cost careers: many of those interviewing you for PR jobs will have journalism backgrounds and for them the technicalities of writing (that's spelling and grammar) matter.

It's a thankless task. You may not gain many visitors, but you will certainly achieve far fewer comments. The only instant gratification to be achieved is in the satisfaction of having communicated your ideas well. Do as I say.

In the past ten years that I've been a university lecturer, I've seen many students making a name for themselves and kick-starting their careers through blogging and other forms of social media. Our industry welcomes innovation (and thrives on novelty), so there's an advantage to being first.

Here are some pioneering examples:

I'm pleased to have included students from other universities and other courses in this selection (one lesson of social media is that you can know many more people than those you have met), but I'm embarrassed to have listed only one woman, since female PR students massively outnumber males.

It's the same problem I identified earlier with the PeerIndex ranking of Share This contributors, where eight of the top 10 were men. I can name many talented and successful female PR graduates, but I can't ascribe their success to being early adopters of social media, so they don't appear here.

That said, at the time of writing, two-thirds of the top-ranked PR students on the Behind the Spin #socialstudent ranking were female.²²⁰

Recruitment as matchmaking

Speaking at a guest lecture at Leeds Metropolitan University in December 2012, PR consultant Helen Standing described the shift from recruitment based on advertising of vacancies to a more discreet “matchmaking” service today.

The implications of this are profound. You can't wait for a vacancy to come along; instead, you have to seize opportunities to build your personal profile. If you do this well, then opportunities (jobs, clients, internships or projects) will find you, just as Edelman found out about Ben Cotton before he'd even applied to them.

The best PR consultants gain business based on recommendation (and attract enquiries based on their reputation). Similarly, the best job seekers will come to the attention of employers through their online (and offline) profiles.

Here are some guidelines on to how to develop a strong online profile:

• Be interesting: Weber Shandwick's Colin Byrne tells graduates “it's better to know everything about something than something about everything”. Your web presence is your opportunity to share your passion for shoes, for Formula One, or for anything else that excites you and a group of like-minded people.
• Be well-connected: We're all judged by the company we keep. What do your friends and followers say about you? If you only use Twitter to chat to a close circle of friends, then you're missing out on the potential of an open network.
• Be easy to find: Your name is unlikely to be unique, and you may be unlucky enough to share it with a celebrity. But you can still strive to make your name among the first searches within the field of PR. I'm not first among search results for “Richard Bailey”, but I dominate search results for “Richard Bailey PR”.
• Tell a consistent story: We all have multiple identities (we're viewed differently by friends, by family, at work and in public). Can you manage these multiple identities (some use different Twitter accounts and use different social networks for different social purposes)? Or does one aspect of our identity strengthen another? Mark Pack,²²¹ the social media superstar identified earlier, is a digital PR consultant and a Liberal Democrat activist. Expertise in one field brings him credibility in the other, so he feels no need to separate them.
• Be useful: In a world in which everyone has access to the media (blogs, Twitter etc), it can be very difficult to stand out by being consistently interesting. So another way to create a distinctive online identity is to be useful to others. It's one thing to create great content, but great content has little value until it comes to the attention of others. So there's an emerging role known as “curation”. Just as museum curators select and present archaeological finds for others to appreciate, you can become a trusted curator of information in your chosen field. In an early and long-running example, PR academic Karen Russell has been presenting her selection of “The Week's Best for PR students” since March 2007.²²²

Finally, the following sources are highly recommended for those wanting to learn more about the concepts covered in this brief chapter, and for those wanting to know more about how to develop a presence on various social media sites.

• Chris Brogan and Julien Smith (2009) Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, John Wiley & Sons.
• Louis Halpern and Roy Murphy (2009) Personal Reputation Management: Making the internet work for you, Halpern Cowan.
• Antony Mayfield (2010) Me and My Web Shadow: How to Manage Your Reputation Online, A & C Black.
• Mark Schaefer (2012) Return on Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring and Influence Marketing, McGraw-Hill.
• Victoria Tomlinson (2012) From Student to Salary with Social Media, Kindle.

Biography

Richard Bailey MCIPR (@behindthespin) is a public relations educator. He is a senior lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University where he is course leader for CIPR professional courses, and he also leads executive level courses in traditional and digital media. He edits PR student magazine Behind the Spin and has helped guide many graduates into PR careers.