By Jennifer Lewis
Many working professionals lead double lives. They have their careers, their day-to-day job, for which they commute to an office, earn a salary, attend meetings, and manage projects.
And add to that, their passions.
Whether they lead a local cover band on the weekends or spend their nights learning another language, humans evolve by nature, fueled by unleashing their creativity to further expand into self-growth. For some, the clock starts promptly at 9 am and ends at 5 pm, but for those who choose to combine career and that something else they love, time is endless.
Seven years ago, I began my career in the music industry, the second love of mine, working full-time in marketing and PR for a global synthesizer and keyboard company. As I made my way from Long Island to live in the busy limelight of New York City, I began to take up a few side jobs. For me, writing as a side gig started easy, but it ended up being an outlet that also stimulated my creativity and helped me explore things I loved in life more deeply. Whether writing about art, voicing my opinion on certain social issues, or having fun with the horror genre, challenging myself to scare readers uniquely (as well as myself), I was grateful for the opportunity to write, write, write…
Writing became more than just a side gig. I found myself canceling plans on a Friday night to stay in so that I could think through a story that was swirling around in my head and then wake up early, to get a head start on it. I loved working in the music industry, but as time progressed, I realized, more and more, that while I was indeed a musician, I was much more a writer, and I owed it to myself to figure out a way to incorporate it into my everyday life.
I pondered how I could still work in marketing, curating campaigns, and leveraging the experiences I had already learned, while blending my newly found love for words. And then it hit me – Public Relations.
I had become the day-to-day PR manager, working with music journalists and placing product reviews, but I knew there was a bigger world of PR that I had not tapped into. PR is about storytelling; it’s about finding something distinctive and exciting in a brand or a product and showcasing that exceptional differentiator to the world. PR is the difference between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Nike and Adidas; everyone has their favorite, and for that, you can thank your local PR pro.
Writing is profoundly paramount to the evolution of a client’s image as everything a PR firm does stems from the story. Social media, pitching for coverage, advertising, arguably, almost every component of public relations centers around the vocabulary used for what we, as professionals, are trying to convey to the world through words.
As a writer and as a PR specialist, I wanted to do both. I wanted to write the story, and I wanted to tell it.
Now, when a client requests a press release or, I slyly recommend a thought-leadership article tied to the venture of creating a company blog, I get to work on my craft and push forward a story. It’s not often many people get to pair two things they love deeply, so I do my best to make every day count.
