Early in my career, when I first had the responsibility of hiring an employee, I spoke with a colleague who was a longtime HR director. His advice? Look for attitude above all else. Skills are important, he said, but can be acquired or enhanced on the job to some extent. Attitude, on the other hand, is tough to change.

In today’s economic climate, folks are either struggling to maintain their businesses, grateful for the job they have or anxiously looking for work or clients. It’s not an easy environment for a great attitude, I know.

Having a positive outlook is like jet fuel – it provides you with lift and can take those around you up a level as well. A good attitude inspires energy and enthusiasm on the job on the good days, and it keeps you moving toward higher ground when times are tough.

Think back to your first week at a desirable new job – you were excited to be there and eager to contribute and learn, remember? That’s the attitude that we should strive to keep. This is the backbone of working toward a common good with colleagues and clients alike.

What creates a good attitude?

• Enjoy what you do. If you need to revitalize your career, find something new to learn, whether it’s through a book, a webinar or a colleague. If you need a change, look into other options – action steps will improve your view of the current situation.
• Keep the team going. Work diligently and creatively. Be liberal with praise when it’s due. And if someone drops a ball, help them toss it back in the air.
• Find the silver lining. Even the worst situation will bring something positive, even if it’s only a lesson or new insight.
• Maintain a sense of humor. Laughter is a universal bond, and it keeps good energy flowing through the day.
• Balance confidence with humility. It’s important to believe in yourself and your skills, as long you don’t ram your accomplishments down everyone’s throat! Be aware for opportunities to assist the common good.

In the world of marketing, advertising and PR, a good attitude is essential since it transmits to a much wider audience. It eases collaboration in the creative process and keeps you flexible and patient through each round of edits or press pitches. And it’s absolutely mandatory in social media conversations. Remember that your words may be floating on the Web for years! Your thoughts and opinions are important but use diplomacy when sharing them.

So what’s the big deal about attitude? Everything. It’s something you carry with you, from day to day, job to job, person to person.

What do you think makes a good attitude on the job?

Donna had a great post last week about understanding the media’s perspective in order to be a better PR person. I loved her post and it got me thinking that her philosophy can be applied to far more than just media relations.

One of the reasons why CCA is able to be so successful is that we don’t just “talk the talk.”

Working in marketing, communications and social media without having real-life experience consuming the media that you are creating is a disaster waiting to happen. Imagine a reporter for the Boston Globe admitting that they just weren’t “a news person” and could go weeks without picking up a paper or going to the local news Web site. It would be pretty hard to trust their reporting credentials.

To that same point, wouldn’t you have doubts about taking advice on how to manage your company’s presence online from an agency that doesn’t blog, has one Twitter follower, can’t be found anywhere on Google and couldn’t find their way around an RSS feed?

Here at CCA, we are fortunate enough to be in the position where we get to learn on a daily basis from other marketing pros. Not because we are simply sharing war stories from the trenches through various discussion boards or LinkedIn groups, but because they reach out to US on behalf of THEIR clients to tell their stories for them. Trust me, getting a phone call from another PR agency trying to convince you to blog or tweet about their client while you are doing the same for your own client is an out of body experience, and one that isn’t all that rare around these parts.

We blog,  manage Twitter followers by the thousands, build communities on LinkedIn, Ning and share videos to our YouTube subscribers not just for the sake of creation, but as a gigantic and constantly evolving social media experiment. Read all the books you want on effective social media marketing. While you are curled up on the couch reading the latest insights from 2009, we’ll be in the “lab” testing our latest experiments created to help us understand anything from Twitter trending topics to blog syndication strategies. Then we get to turn that all around and bring back all those lessons to the client with the freshest understanding of online behavioral trends.

Now how do YOU experiment and test your ideas online?

From the October 5th, 2009 New York Times:

“On Monday, the F.T.C. said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares.”

So the jig is up. Advertising claims and the people who love them are once again under the microscope.

While I’ve used some pretty bodacious adjectives and gussied up a few product shots to bring out the best in my clients’ offerings, I’ve always tried to live by the slogan of one of my previous employers: truth well told.

Truth well told was originated by McCann-Erickson at a time when many products were making some pretty questionable claims. Even big companies were guilty: a 1914 ad for Ford’s Model T featured the headline “Buy it because it’s a better car” and suggested the reader get the particulars from a Ford dealer. Um…okaaaay….

Fast forward about a century. Laws and guidelines are in place to protect the public from misleading advertising claims and fuzzy endorsements. And generally speaking, I think the ad world does a pretty good job of policing itself as well. But, thanks to the anonymous nature of the internet, we’ve taken a few steps back.

I think the general public will always be wary of advertising but let’s get back on track. Let’s put our clients’ wares out there in the most honest, best possible creative light we can.

Let’s try the truth well blogged.

Recently, I was invited to participate in webinar presentation on social media to a group of solution engineers at SAP. While we love each and every one of our clients (both paying and pro-bono) but it was really exciting to share some of our knowledge with such a large and established company for the afternoon.

As happy as I was with how the presentation went, I love waiting for all the followup questions to come rolling through my inbox once attendees have a while to marinate on their newly found social media enlightenment even more.

One of the most common questions that I get after presentations like this, no matter the audience, is “All these new tools are great, but how the heck am I supposed to make time for all this stuff?!”

My answer is, and always has been, to focus on value. Look at the value that any particular newsletter or magazine subscription, professional association membership, twitter follower, RSS feed, podcast, LinkedIn group or forum discussion offers.

In any single day, you have a finite amount of time that you can designate to media consumption (or production if you have graduated to that point). Rather than struggling to get through five email newsletters, 20 blog feeds, two LinkedIn groups and the rest of that other stuff that pays the bills, look at the value that each one contributes and how efficiently each medium addresses its purpose.

Whether it is a webcast series, email newsletter, local networking event or anything else, many people are too information hungry to realize how much overlap and wasted time is spent trying to pull in the most valuable information from as many places in order to do their job to the best of their abilities.

Take inventory of everything that you consume (intellectually) every day. Did you already read that story about the exploding iPod on twitter yesterday, only to find it again in an email newsletter this morning? Cut the fat. Don’t fear that “unsubscribe” button. Your time is valuable. Treat it that way.

If you are honest with yourself about the time investment and ultimate return in value that each provides, you’ll likely find that many social media tools will replace the traditional tools that you have been using all along to do your job, and much more effectively.

For example, Twitter has been a godsend for cutting down on the mess of email newsletter subscriptions and getting and sharing information fast, but it will never completely replace the value of face-to-face networking with other marketing and PR pros.

Rather than treating social media as another time suck on top of an already busy workload, give it a chance with a level playing field among the rest of your other traditional information troughs.  You may be surprised.

“Unified Marketing” was a term that had been stuck somewhere in the “theorosphere” for quite sometime. It was a concept and a practice we had been testing at CCA but I had never expressed it publicly until October 15, 2008.

I was a guest speaker on a panel discussion for Boston’s Social Media Club. The event was held in one of the luxury suites at Gillette Stadium with a terrific view of the field below. The topic for the evening was, “Corporate Responsibility in the Digital Age”. My colleagues on the panel included Peter Prodromou, Executive Vice President of Racepoint Group and Jay Welz, Assistant Director, Online Marketing, Jimmy Fund / Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

I must say that speaking to a SoMe savvy audience like the Social Media Club is a very different experience than presenting to any other audiences because everyone is so busy tweeting and writing blog posts on their laptops while you are talking. I soon realized that if people were looking at me, it is likely that I was not doing very well. If, however, I touched on something that was interesting to them, they would immediately look down at their mobile devices or the computer balancing on their laps and begin pecking a message to the world.

The first few times people stopped looking at me while I was saying something and suddenly started typing, I felt inclined to stop speaking and the sound of clicking keyboards filled the room. Realizing that I did not understand the protocol of this crowd, the moderator stepped in to ask me a follow up question, which let me know that it is okay for me to continue even if I was speaking to the top of everyone’s head.

One question posed to the panel was pertaining to the marketing mix and how should someone integrate social media together with traditional marketing tactics. As part of my answer, I spoke a little about the long standing need for measurement and a marketer’s tendency to put different tactics or channels into silos. This is often because marketers do not always know how to integrate their marketing effectively.

That’s when the tangent happened… and I said, “If you think about the word ‘integration’, regardless of what you are trying to integrate – whether it be people of differing persuasion, animals of varying size and appetite or, in this case, marketing tactics – ‘integrated marketing’ is quite difficult to execute successfully and nearly impossible to measure.” I continued saying, “At CCA, we are a web-centric marketing and advertising firm and rather than employ the ‘integrated marketing’ approach of yesteryear, we prefer to call it, ‘unified marketing’.”

At that moment, everyone started tweeting again and I realized that while we were still building our first case study for these principles at CCA, I had just introduced an important new philosophy which is now at the very center of every engagement with our clients.

Editors and reporters have less and less time to listen to press pitches and a few precious moments to scan news releases. They’re wearing multiple hats, working on unforgiving deadlines – especially as news organizations continue to lay off employees.

Every second counts when pitching the press these days, which is why at CCA we’ve developed an e-media kit.

Our e-media kit is an innovative way to open doors to newsrooms. It presents an easy and fast way for an editor to get a comprehensive snapshot of a news opportunity, providing everything from a client’s current news release, to FAQs and company history, to recent news clips, to management bios and head shots, and the company logo. In short, everything you would put in a traditional printed media kit, plus video clips and sound bites! All of it ready to download in seconds.

I was on the phone with a producer for a national broadcast news program last week. She initially said she didn’t have time to talk to me, but I asked her to log on to our client’s e-media kit, and we were soon in conversation. Our new approach converted “no time” to “tell me more.”

We’ve designed our e-media kit along the line of a web site’s home page, displaying branding and links to top line information and resources, and news releases and fact sheets, and video clips in an attractive design that fills the screen without the need to scroll. Reporters instantly see everything they might need, right at their finger tips.

This innovation has proved so useful that we expect it quickly to become the norm. And it’s no coincidence that we developed the first one for an alternative energy client—-eliminating the need for paper and printing required for a traditional press kit.

No folders. No stuffing. No postage. No sealing yucky tasting envelopes. No rushing to the post office. No reprinting to fix typos or to update information. Send it out 24/7, anywhere in the world. An unlimited supply. The digital media kit is here it’s all good.