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From cover letters and resumes to reference checks and writing tests, looking for a new job is no easy task. For many people, interviews are the hardest part of the process. We obsess over what to wear, how to prepare, when we should follow-up, how much to laugh, even what kind of paper to print our resumes on! Here are some ‘do’s and don’t’s’ to keep in mind when preparing for the big interview.

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Do your homework.

As an interviewer, I can always tell when someone’s taken the time to study up on my firm and our work. You don’t need to know everything about a company, of course, but be prepared to talk about what aspects of their mission or their past work interest you. Is there a specific campaign that resonates with you? A social post about their culture that you enjoyed? Invest some time and energy in researching the company beforehand and you’re sure to stand out from the crowd.

Don’t start off on the wrong foot.

Always bring a copy of your resume. In fact, bring several copies—just in case! Nowadays, most interviewers are likely to have printed, reviewed, and annotated your resume before you arrive. However, on the off chance your interviewer doesn’t, it’s good to show initiative and preparedness by having some ready to go.

Dress to impress. Research the industry standards for professional attire in your chosen field, and dress accordingly. Employers want to know that, if hired, you can be relied upon to represent the company well.

Timeliness is also key. While we all know accidents can happen, do your best to arrive on time so you’re starting things off on the right note. Interviewers are taking time out of their workday to meet with you, and you want to be respectful of their schedule and workload. Ideally, you’ll aim to get to the area 15 minutes early, just in case you get stuck on a delayed subway, get lost finding the office, or need some time to collect yourself before heading in. Plan to head in the actual office five to ten minutes early, at most, to avoid inconveniencing your interviewer—you never know what else someone might have planned in their schedule!

Do be prepared to discuss your experience and the industry.

While resumes are useful for getting a sense of your background and skillset, nothing is as valuable as face time with a candidate. This is your time to shine! Tell me about your accomplishments at previous jobs/internships (or with student groups/teams, if you’re still in school). Did you save the company money? Hit a fundraising milestone? I want to know what you achieved, how you did it, and what you learned. I’m looking for people who are excited to join my team and positively contribute—show me that that’s you.

It’s also helpful to read up on the latest news in your industry. For example, if you’re looking for roles in marketing/PR, brush up on campaigns that have made waves recently. We’re looking for folks who care about what we work on, so if you’re already passionate and informed, you’ll stick out from the pack.

Don’t spend the whole time talking.

I know, I know, I just said an interview is about sharing your experience, but it should also be a discussion. You want to learn more about the company and the team you’ll be joining, and to do that you should be prepared to ask questions and engage with the interviewer’s responses. Plus, nobody wants to work with someone that monologues or speaks over them, so don’t do it in the interview.

This is your opportunity to get an insider’s perspective on the company—you can only learn so much from the careers page or Glassdoor reviews, after all! Before the interview, spend some time thinking through what you’d like to know about the culture, the team, and the company’s future plans. That way, you can make the most of your time with the interviewer and figure out whether the company and role are a fit for you.

Do be professional.

Aside from learning more about you and your background, interviewers are also interested in gauging your sense of professionalism. We want to know you’ll be able to conduct yourself well with any clients, vendors, prospects, or other external parties that we work with. Err towards the side of caution if you don’t know whether an anecdote or topic is safe for discussion. A good rule of thumb is stick to what you’d feel comfortable discussing with your grandparents at tea—so avoid politics, partying, religion, and your love life.
Don’t forget to send a thoughtful thank you note.

It might seem obvious but sending a thank you note to everyone you interviewed with is the best way to follow-up and ensure you’ve left a positive impression. If you don’t have all the contact details, ask your recruiter if they can pass them along, or politely ask those interviewers whose details you do have to send along your thanks. Some interviewers might even axe your application completely if you neglect to send one, and if you’re in close running with another candidate it could bump them into the lead. Don’t leave the easy brownie points on the table—send the note!

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Be confident in what you bring to the table for a prospective employer and show them that through your conversation and demeanor. Invest some time in preparing beforehand and remember to follow-up afterward, and you’ll set yourself up for success – and maybe even clinch that dream job offer. Good luck!

It seemed like a good idea at the time: Relocate my primary residence from New York to Florida in 2005, bounce between Fort Lauderdale and Manhattan and enjoy the benefits of both cities.The plan was for me to “super commute” for a year. Almost two million miles and 15 years later, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. I’ve spent countless hours navigating flight delays and cancellations, and commuting to and from airports, to say nothing of the approximately 3,500 hours (or 146 days) I’ve spent in the air. By the numbers, my round-trips are the equivalent distance of the earth to the moon just shy of four times. Numbers aside, my time in the air has been nothing if not instructive. Herewith are the five most valuable lessons I’ve learned while winging it up and down the East Coast. Read the full piece at PR Daily.

5 career lessons learned on the fly

To think, that when Scott and Andrew sat at that bar one fortuitous evening eight years ago that they’d actually have the courage to go through the business proposition that was discussed. The initial plan was scratched onto a bar napkin for goodness sake!

Nevertheless, in 2012, Water & Wall was founded on a limited budget with unlimited potential. Since then, the agency has accomplished more than what could have been imagined at that bar near the corner of Water & Wall streets in New York City’s Financial District. Fast forward to today, it was time for another change and so we’ve launched the new Water & Wall brand experience with an eye on 2020 and beyond.

In this months-long process, we took our own medicine and put into practice some of the advice we regularly dispense to clients. Here’s what we learned:

1. Don’t be afraid to rethink everything.

   On a fundamental level, we’re the same smart, growth-minded, business advocate that our clients and prospects need. Everything we’ve done on their behalf, to this point, we can call a success. Sure, there have been course corrections along the way, but at our core, the agency’s approach to the game got us to where we are today. For that we’re proud! While we’re always evaluating the best path to success, it was time for us to reconsider, or rethink, how we might get there.Among the questions we asked – the answers to which we can’t share because, well, secret sauce and all: What capability do we want to own in the market in the next five years that we might not already? In other words, we want the agency’s work to be synonymous with what exactly? What is the one thing we’ve done that we don’t want to repeat? How do we keep our people happy, with consideration toward what the next generation will want?

2. Reinvent only when and if it makes sense.

   There are books – we know because we’ve read them – that talk about reinvention as if it’s a radical often necessary exercise to evolve in any business environment. Yes, we agree with the “necessary” part and, sure, we’re learning with the frequency we drink coffee, but unless you make a concerted effort to plan how you want to apply that knowledge and change the way you do something, there isn’t a chance you will. Let us be clear in that change isn’t so much doing everything different. There’s plenty that will remain the same about us and in fact it’s from the old ways that we’ve come up with new ideas.Author and retirement scholar Marc Freedman once wrote in Harvard Business Review that some of the most successful entrepreneurs, “weave together accumulated knowledge with creativity, while balancing continuity with change, in crafting a new idea that’s almost always deeply rooted in earlier chapters and activities.”

   Yes!

3. Reengage stakeholders in a meaningful way.

   We had become so focused on our clients and moving their brands forward that we forgot about our own. Our industry peers know full well what this is like. In this brand recharge as we’ve called it, we’ve forced ourselves to reengage with the people who matter most to the future of this business in a way we’ve yet to do so. We’re marketers who had to market. For starters, we’re better as of right now at broadcasting what we do at headquarters and on the road for our colleagues and our clients. That means timely and topical social media dispatches, among other things. You should follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.Second, our employees are being equipped with the resources to truly serve as brand ambassadors for and brain power of the agency. Whether it’s us financing their involvement in professional networking groups or investing the time in their continued education, we’ve learned that by broadening their horizons we’ve broadened our own.

   Ultimately, the future of this agency comes down to one simple concept and that’s humility. Now, while he meant it in the context of man versus machine, author Edward D. Hess once wrote, “To stay relevant, we human beings need to excel at doing those skills that technology won’t be able to do well: higher order critical thinking, creativity, innovation and high emotional engagement with other humans.”

   You’d think he was describing the best things about Water & Wall.

We’ve reached a point where a large portion of our every day may incorporate a social media component to enhance and complement our activities. As such, the collective whole of communications and marketing professionals have spent countless hours and written thousands of words on how to engage target audiences through the social fad du jour.

While many have rushed to embrace the myriad channels and the social media obsessed culture pushing them, not every company has adopted a comprehensive plan to managing and growing these channels in the long term. In fact, the CMO Council found 45% of marketers feel they lack the necessary talent, technology, and processes to master omni-channel brand marketing. Those marketers need to push their budget holders to move the dial on those strategies – brands with strong omnichannel customer engagement have an 89 percent customer retention rating, compared to 33 percent for brand rated at weak engagement, according to research by Aberdeen Group. It’s clear a dedicated and clever omni-channel strategy pays off.

Those who are successful will find a way to pick the channels appropriate to their brand and remain cohesive between them, without regurgitating the same information give or take the allowed character limit. Unless your company only uses one social platform, you need to have more than one social strategy – You need individual plans and campaigns created independently for Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Though overarching themes will permeate all channels, you shouldn’t be regurgitating the exact same copy on each platform.

So how do we as marketing and communications professionals avoid this “social regurgitation?”

First, define what the overarching goals are for your marketing strategy and how they may differ between each channel, and then make sure you have defined the type of content best suited for each channel based on those parameters. If you’re a retail company, you’re likely using Instagram to gain awareness, as an active shopping destination and for consumer research, while your LinkedIn page would be telling the corporate story and offering related news, job postings, etc.

Second, harness the power of each of those channels and their features to keep your followers interested, but not overwhelmed (or underwhelmed) by the amount of content. Rather than explain a new product via multiple posts or too-long captions, explore the engagement you receive with the ephemeral content provided through Instagram Stories. Take care to keep those fresh and your followers will eventually come to expect a new installment from you at a set pace: whether it be a series of quick educational bites, demos, or behind the scenes looks into your greater product campaign.

Brands are also now aware it is becoming harder and harder to get their feed posts across to consumers thanks to Instagram’s updated algorithm. Advertising can help reach through those algorithms and bring your content directly to the intended consumer and brands are catching on to the opportunity: Sprout Social reports social media advertising spend in the US is expected to reach $18.4 billion in 2019.

While the impact of these trends on the consumer world is obvious, other industries, such as Financial Services, should take note of the efficacy of these channels for their strategy as the millennials using them grow their wealth. An excellent example is Robinhood’s sponsorship of YouTube videos from the Funhaus channel, which primarily produces video-game focused content, from gameplay to industry news reporting. In one video, Robinhood offered listeners a ‘FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help you build your portfolio’ alongside a dedicated sign-up link, allowing Robinhood to track the referrals from this advertising effort. I’d expect these are dollars well spent for the diverse range of Funhaus viewers – falling into the ever-muddied waters of social media, advertising and influencer marketing.

Until we reach a point where one social media platform trumps them all, give your audience a clear path to engagement with your brand in various channels, in the way that best suits them. With fresh content applied in new ways across each, followers won’t find you stale, and you’ll see the positive feedback reflected in engagement, followers, and ultimately revenue.

My fascination with the life and times of Fred McFeely Rogers, or “Mister Rogers” as he’s known, is rivaled only by my fanaticism with Bob Ross. Nonetheless, we relaunched our brand this month and discussion of Mr. Rogers, these days, is apt, which is why it makes complete sense that I tell my neighbors what cardigans, Make Believe and whimsy have to do with our business. This is what Mr. Rogers teaches us about branding.

1. “Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.”

   Our co-founders Scott and Andrew, who are enmeshed as influential executives in the operations and growth of our business since they first opened the doors in 2012, represent who we are, but also what we want to become. As the parents of this company, you might say, they recognize the importance of change and adaptation to get ahead of and react to challenges in the business environs in which our clients work. To do that we have to have the people who represent traditional services as well as those who are familiar with more progressive offerings. The people who started Water & Wall are make their mark across both.

2. “The story that we bring to the screen, whatever we happen to be watching, we bring our own story and consequently it’s like a dialogue.” … “What we see and hear on the screen is part of who we become.”

   He’s talking about the most popular medium of his day and that’s TV, of course. In the undercurrent of his point are the waves of influence. We are all impressionable and the right message finds us all via the right medium, or channel, at the right time. We understand that interacting with our intended audience will vary – from talent recruitment to new client partnerships – but we also understand that we have that power to influence a decision with each interaction.

3. “The best teachers in the world love what they do and just love it in front of you.”

   This is not about loving your day job above all things. The whole love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life? Yeah, not this. This is about enthusiasm and passion and care factor that extends into everything that you do because people want to be around people who are smart and nice. It’s often that simple. Some of the best teachers taught the driest and most sophisticated topics like they were binge worthy. In an age of excess – particularly as it pertains to content since we’re marketers – the measure of good content is a willingness to take in an entire Netflix season in a weekend. It’s like good ideas. We’ve got those.

4. “Deep but simple.”

   This notion of keeping a message and its components simple has shown itself in marketing circles often of late. People who share this wisdom, caution against “dumb” or “stupid,” which one supposes that this is peoples’ association with simple these days. It’s as if you can’t be smart in the process. This is where depth factors. You should be able to say in so many words who you are and what you do. This gets us to the why rather quickly. For us, the depth is in the people at our seven-years-young agency and the experiences they create for our clients. If not for the people, there wouldn’t be a Water & Wall. I think Mr. Rogers said something about that, too.

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Hello,

I’m Casey, Account Director at Water & Wall, and newly appointed editor of our new blog! I’ll be working with my all-star colleagues to dispatch their brilliance into this forum. I’m excited for all that we have planned for this space and with that it’s my pleasure to introduce you to ‘Writing on the Wall.’

As we settle in to a reinvented Water & Wall (read more on our evolution in a note from our partners), we’ve made a promise to bring the same attention to detail, penchant for innovation and promotional chops to our own brand. Before we get the chance to work together, this blog should give a good idea of who we are.

Sure, we’re a tenacious team of communicators and marketers with depth well beyond our professional bios, but we’re also writers, photographers, designers, cinephiles, dancers, swimmers, and gamers. This motley mix of minds and hearts lends itself to sparkling creative genius and of course, no shortage of laughter.

Here you’ll find our ruminations on everything from big picture brand strategy to the nuances of journalist engagement, advice for new industry talent, and how we help clients think differently as we solve for “X” together. There’s plenty that you would and wouldn’t expect. Ever wonder what starting teaching English in Malaysia has to do with US business leadership? Have you considered what careers lessons can be learned from The Avengers? No matter the topic, we hope you enjoy the Writing on the Wall.

What do you think? Keep up with us on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Cheers,

Casey