The following is a guest post from Austin Everett Gaither, created after he interviewed Lab3’s David Boutin about being a social media professional and was originally published at https://aelearnspr.wordpress.com/. Austin is a Public Relations major with a minor in Communication at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas. You can follow Austin on Twitter at @everett_gaither.

Interviewing a Professional

The idea of public relations as a career is very new to me, and I still have trouble understanding every aspect  of what a public relations professional has to do.

Through my digital PR class I have discovered the world and importance of social media to companies. Social media has actually become one of my most favorite aspects of PR so far.

I still have yet to experience what public relations is like in the real world, but I did recently interview a social media professional and got to learn from him about what life is like with a career in social media.

His name is David Boutin and he works for Lab3 Marketing which is a marketing firm stationed in Florida that focuses on developing and implementing marketing strategies for smaller businesses.

I met David during a #SproutChat by Sprout Social about using videos on social media and when my professor assigned my class with the task of interviewing a professional social media manager I figured I would reach out to David since we had already been introduced. Thankfully he responded very quickly and said that he would love to have some questions thrown at him.

There have been many aspects of digital PR that I have grown to love through my class, and when I asked David about what his work day looks like he said “Last week, I handled all of my clients’ social media accounts, put out two HTML-based email campaigns, wrote a blog for our company website, promoted our company website through social and a across the internet, among a handful of other, smaller tasks”.

There have been many aspects of digital PR that I have grown to love through my class, and when I asked David about what his work day looks like he said “Last week, I handled all of my clients’ social media accounts, put out two HTML-based email campaigns, wrote a blog for our company website, promoted our company website through social and a across the internet, among a handful of other, smaller tasks”.

When I asked David how he keeps up with this ever changing field he said that he spends about an hour in the morning just looking through social media and various blogs in order to see what others are talking about and catch up on what has already happened.

This blew my mind that David has so much on his plate that he goes through all of these things regularly. The best thing about this, however, is that from my experience with this long list of tasks I have thoroughly enjoyed the assignments in class that have focused on this. I was even reassured about this kind of work when I asked David what he wished he knew before starting this career he said “Honestly, I wish I knew how much I’d love it. I would have started down this path much sooner in life”.

It is clear that David enjoys his career and that despite what the workload may look like it gives me confidence that I can enjoy this career path when I see people like David who do a great job of maintaining a good social presence online and have  a great time doing it.

Being a digital media manager can be a very satisfying job in many aspects and David even mentioned that one of the projects that he is proud of is Lab3 Marketing’s blog. And after all the effort to develop quality content and promote it he said that “The fact that we’re driving more traffic than ever before and starting to rank on Google is just the creamy, delicious icing on the cake”.

There is so much more that David said that has really got me thinking and planning for in my future career, but I will end this with just a few tips that he gave to me about careers in social media.

• Writing is important in social media, and David made it a point to emphasize that. Being able to communicate clearly and concisely is something that cannot be overlooked in this line of work.
• Social Media is important to businesses and yourself and needs to be taken seriously and given the time and effort to develop a strong fan base. And along with this comes the task of keeping up with major changes that will happen.
• Social media is about building and nurturing relationships not just as a way to blast innocent bystanders with your latest deals and products.
• When it comes to hiring for this job it is essential that you have your finger on the pulse of pop culture and be able to work will with your team in order to reach people effectively.
• Find an internship and get real experience. The class can only teach you so much so you need to find some real experience (which I hope to get very soon).
• Stay informed on what is going on in the world in regards to your area of interest. There are always people who are talking about things that relate to your potential career, so sift for those golden nuggets of information to better yourself.
• And lastly, find a mentor. Someone who you can trust to give you sound advice and guide you as you are developing as a professional.

I thank you so much David for giving me so much great information, and I seriously appreciate the advice. If you are interested in some more tasty tidbits from my digital PR class you can look up #prls4316 on Twitter, and if you have any questions about my experience leave them in the comments below.