famaPR: Reinventing PR But Preserving a Culture | BostInno

This is a sponsored post in a series featuring companies hiring in Boston. Check out Careers at fama PR.

When you?re selling people, not products, company culture couldn?t be more crucial. The team you?re building needs to be carefully cultivated from the very beginning?an area fama PR has continued to keep its focus on for the last 10 years.

?For us, the challenge is trying to get that right mix of people,? says Managing Partner Ed Harrison, who has watched the high-tech public relations firm grow from a team of six operating in the Cambridge Innovation Center to a team of 30-plus people. As Harrison points out, however, ?The biggest challenge is to maintain your culture while you?re doing that.?

When bringing on new employees, Harrison claims they look for one critical skill: common sense. ?If you can?t find a way to justify what you?re doing in order to fulfill a customer?s goal, you probably shouldn?t be doing it,? he says. Yet, because teams are working with multiple customers, they also need to have the agility to transfer between projects and the ability to realize that what they prescribed for one client isn?t what they should prescribe for another.

Each company has a unique story?one it?s fama PR?s job to flesh out. Years ago, when Harrison tried explaining his job to unfamiliar outsiders, he would say, ?Advertising is selling the story, PR is telling the story.? As media consumption continues to change, fama PR has been focused largely on content, whether that means writing op-eds for clients or creating company blogs. ?Writing has become more important than ever before to our business,? Harrison admits.

Too often, PR firms immediately dive into social media and put all their focus on that. fama PR has opted to step back, however, and develop a more measured approach, realizing social media isn?t the most critical aspect of telling a brand?s story. Harrison jokingly calls clients? craze for followers ?shiny object syndrome,? and sees social media more as a way to extend the shelf life of a story, rather than as the sole tool for promotion. ?We?ve always approached things a little differently than other industries,? he admits.

And that sentiment spreads beyond the normal day-to-day. Repeatedly ranked as one of the ?Best Places to Work? in Boston, fama PR has been known to host Baggo tournaments on their sun deck in the Innovation District or wellness challenges for their employees. Over the summer, a yoga instructor visited the office once a week, and the team competed against each other, striving to eat healthier and exercise more. Because the team is on email so much, Harrison sees this as a way to force people out of their seats and talking, saying, ?This helps build collaboration and camaraderie.?

On top of that, fama PR also offers incredible benefits, including 100 percent payment of health insurance, a 401K plan, free iPhones or BlackBerries, free valet parking or T-pass reimbursement, among other perks. ?We want to eliminate as many worries about coming to work as we can,? Harrison says, admitting they?re also focused on attracting and retaining the best talent they can.

To help do that, they?ve made sure to reward hard work. ?If you do good work, you?re going to get promoted for it,? Harrison claims. ?We?re not going to make you wait in line just because someone else is in front of you.?

The team takes their work seriously, and created a ?no junior account executives? policy early on that they?ve only recently started to ease up on. As a team of six, the policy made sense, because clients felt as though they were getting VP-level service from everyone on the entire team for the same price as fama PR?s early competitors. Although they?ve now dabbled in hiring entry-level people, Harrison admits they haven?t shifted their focus too much, ?because [they're]?winning more business because of that.?

Earlier this year, fama PR did expand their offices, however. And lucky for you, they have several open positions. ?We have some space that we want to fill out,? Harrison says. So, get to applying.

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Source: http://bostinno.com/all-series/at-fama-pr-reinventing-an-industry-but-preserving-a-culture/

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