The Chat Room: Social Media Workshop Event

Hi Everyone,

Please check out this great social media event being held in Melbourne this Wednesday October 24th hosted by THE CHAT ROOM. ‘The Social Media Workshop’ is the first event by Stepback Entertainment. A list of speakers is here.

“At this half-day event we will be bringing the online offline and allowing you to interact with young tastemakers leading the way in online relations. We also have some baby boomers to interpret our GeyY speak so don’t stress if you are not overly tech savvy. This event is ideal for business owners and anyone looking at building up their own online brands.

This  jam packed event will ensure you walk away with a comprehensive idea of:

• How the social media landscape works
• How to engage followers and create diagloues with your fans
• What to write about to build a large following and to create conversations with your followers
• What other successful social media marketers are doing to promote themselves and their businesses
• How not-for-profit’s are using social media to create conversations and evoke emotions
• How to include social media within your integrated marketing plan (combining offline and online)
• And how to use a variety of different social media platforms to contribute to your online success

You will come away from the day feeling empowered to create effective dialogues with your current and future customers.

Percentage of ticket sales all going to the ONE GIRL Organisation, for their October campaign ‘Do it in a Dress’.

For more information on the speakers please click HERE.

Order tickets now to reserve your place. (Early bird pricing finishes at the end of September)

Sponsored by RMIT University.

See you there!”

Feel free to follow creator of The Chatroom, Justine ‘JMAC’ on Twitter.

Career Change: Rebecca Douglas

Rebecca Douglas aka Becks and the City describes herself as a Computer Programmer/Lawyer. After many years of study in both fields, Rebecca decided to pitch articles to some of her favourite glossy magazines. Today Rebecca is sharing her experiences as a freelance writer and giving some helpful advice. 

We can do this the easy way or the hard way, as they say in the movies.

I seem to have chosen the hard way. You see, in the past two years I’ve become a freelance writer for magazines including Cosmo Bride and Women’s Health & Fitness, but the road here has been interrupted by twists, turns and plenty of potholes.

I wish I was one of those kids that always knew what they wanted to do. Sure, I adored writing in primary school and created choose-your-own-adventure stories, books with mazes and Where’s Wally-like visual puzzles and mysteries with the solution written in mirrored hand-writing to stop classmates from cheating and skipping to the end straight away. Embarrassingly, I even typed up a newsletter containing stories, recipes and puzzles, called All-round Fun Club in Year 4 and distributed it to friends. Yes, I was that sort of nerd.

The trouble was, I also had an affinity for maths and music, which meant that on my Student of the Week questionnaire under the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” section, I said “teacher, lawyer, writer, architect, ballerina, computer programmer, flautist, LEGO designer”. What can I say? I was always a chick of varied interests.

As it turns out, I’ve kind of become several of those professions! During high school, I narrowed my future professions down to wanting to be a maths and English teacher, so I did English, Music, Maths 1 and 2 and Physics in Year 12. I scored well and got into Maths and Computer Science at university, which allowed me to combine those nerdy subjects with humanities electives like English.

However, my plans for earning my “World’s Best Teacher” coffee mug derailed while I was at uni when I started my own business as a part-time high school tutor. I discovered a fatal flaw in my plan: I really hate kids. Well, not exactly hate them, but tutoring was tough. Students forgot what I taught them from session to session, had the attention span of fleas and several were, well, just plain thick. Of course, some were hard-working, helpful and sweet, but the damage was done. That’s one reason it can be so valuable to get work experience/interning early on in your chosen industry, because you have warning if you actually really hate the job or would suck at it harder than an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.

So I finished by Maths and Computer Science degree, did an honours year in English, and then completed a law degree. So I’m kind of a computer programmer/lawyer. I got my first “proper”, post-uni job in state government and a year later ended up in Consumer Affairs as a mediator.

Mediating is actually really cool. I get to do two of my favourite things: communicate and help people. It also uses some skills and knowledge from my law degree. The downside? You deal with angry people. A lot. It can wear you down. And so the siren song of a career as a writer became stronger and stronger until I could no longer ignore it.

I dipped my toe into writing by switching to part-time work at Consumer Affairs. I read everything I could about writing for magazines and snagged myself a copy of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace, then started emailing pitches to all sorts of glossies – health, bridal, fashion, travel etc.

Surprisingly, the first positive response wasn’t from some tiny, obscure publication – it was Cosmo Bride! Because I didn’t have a portfolio of previous articles I’d written for magazines, I’d emphasised my expertise in Consumer Affairs (ie shopping, negotiating contracts for large purchases, and not getting ripped off) in my pitch to them.

As I was an unknown quantity to Cosmo Bride, they asked me to write the article on spec (ie if after I wrote it, they hated it, they could just reject it without publishing it or paying me). Luckily, they liked it and I was unbelievably thrilled when I first saw it in print. I rushed down to the news agency to buy it and showed it off to the ladies behind the counter like a complete Wally!

I’ve kept on pitching and gradually built a portfolio of work, which I’ve put on my blog. I’ve got to say blogging has helped me in several ways, especially right at the beginning because even if I hadn’t yet been published I could (a) show magazines samples of my writing in the form of blog posts and (b) prove I was serious about writing because I’d been blogging about it for the past several months. It has also helped me keep track of my progress and network with established writers (by interviewing them, having them stumbling across my blog, etc). I’d highly recommend it.

My other advice would be to not get discouraged. I’ve had two on spec articles rejected so far and while I was devastated at the time, I’ve since heard from a very smart, talented fellow writer that her on spec article was also rejected by one of these editors. Sometimes rejection just comes down to personal preference or the way the magazine operates and it’s not necessarily an indictment on your writing skills. No matter, keep pitching and you’ll find editors who truly appreciate your work.

Anyway, that’s the story of how I’ve become a writer. Hopefully there’s a smidgen of useful info buried in all those words.

Good luck with finding your own words and getting paid for them. May the writing and career gods smile upon you.

Intern Position: Napoleon Perdis Sydney

Love makeup?

Napoleon Perdis are looking for PR Interns…email Ava with your resume and days available

e: ava.matthews@Napoleonperdis.com