Tips on how to develop a PR presence without a degree with Kate Yandoh Harris

Kate Yandoh Harris is a born storyteller who helps businesses realize results by creating compelling content. She an optimist, island lover, and “word person”.

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. How to get started in PR and marketing without a PR or marketing degree
2. Why hospitality might be a great starting point for marketing and PR professionals
3. How you can learn the most from less desired positions 
4. How to educate your audience instead of just selling them your product or service
5. How to pivot and be creative in your PR efforts 

Quotables

• “In order to connect with your audience, you have to quickly jump in and live in their world for a little bit.” -Kate Yandoh Harris
• “The experiences that I’ve had that helped me get better have been the jobs that nobody really wants.” -Kate Yandoh Harris

If you enjoyed this episode, would you please share it with others and leave us a review?

Guest’s contact info and resources:

• Kate Yandoh Harris on LinkedIn
• Stan’s website: https://stanphelps.com/

Sponsored by:

• On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
• On Top of PR is sponsored by ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews.
• Burrelles has a special offer for On Top of PR fans. Check it out at burrelles.com/ontopofpr.

About your host, Jason Mudd

On Top of PR host, Jason Mudd, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands and fastest-growing companies. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia Public Relations in July 2002. Forbes named Axia as one of America’s Best PR Agencies.

Transcript

- Hello and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host, Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations. And today I'm joined by my friend, Kate Harris and we're talking about adventures in public relations. Kate is a highly experienced public relations and marketing professional and she has made her career working at Coca-Cola doing international business as well as in the tourism, travel and hospitality industries. She's got some great tips. You'll be glad you tuned in today and here we go.

- [Announcer] Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd presented by ReviewMaxer.

- Hello and welcome to On Top of PR, I'm your host, Jason Mudd. And today I'm joined by my friend, Kate Harris. Kate has a significant career experience that we wanna share with you. Kate is a natural born storyteller who helps companies realize results by creating compelling content. She's an optimist, island lover and word person. Kate, welcome to the show, we're glad you're here.

- Thank you, Jason, it's exciting to be here.

- Yeah, it's really good to connect with you and bring you on to On Top of PR. I'm excited about our topic today, which sounds like we're gonna talk about adventures in public relations and marketing and you've had some great adventures, Kate. So why don't you give us a quick 15 second summary of your career path?

- Sure, absolutely, yes, I have. I have been lucky to have a lot of adventures and I think it stems back to growing up in a very small town, basically in the frozen Tundra of Upstate New York where you just naturally had to be very inventive and curious and easily entertained. So I started my career overseas. I taught English to executives in Europe, came back to the States where I worked for the Coca-Cola company. And I did everything from answering consumer complaints and comments to writing for the CEO. I have worked as an independent writer freelancer for many years and for the past about a little over 10 years, my focus has been on tourism and developing tourism for cool destination, sustainable tourism. I'm working close to where we live, which is Amelia Island and Jekyll Island. And yeah, it is certainly a job and a path that has taken me to a lot of different places. And that's one of the reasons that we love it.

- Wonderful Kate, yeah. Well, I'll tell you Amelia Island and Jekyll Island, there's gotta be worse places to work I imagine.

- Yes, yeah, got it. Any of the little part where I grew up is the Thousand Islands and I was spending time on Manhattan Island. So I'm like islands got to have a thing. They have a little bit of a vibe that I like.

- I heard a comedian say, "We can't even get a one island to come together in unity, how did we get a thousand islands to come together to make a dressing?" So I thought that was-

- It comes down to the dressing.

- Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny. So well good. Kate, so one of the things we wanted to talk about is how a lot of people who are successful in our field did not start out studying marketing or public relations or even journalism or communications. So talk us through kind of your experience. And I wanna both appeal to the audience member who is either maybe studying in college or maybe they're in a certain career path and they're considering pivoting and perhaps they desire to be in the PR and marketing profession.

- Yes, absolutely. So people ask me a lot when they meet me and they hear what I do, they say, "Well, you must have been an English major" or "Where did you study marketing?" And the answer is like no and nowhere in life. I actually was fortunate enough to go to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, which is a classic liberal arts college. And I actually, I had taken AP English so I wouldn't have to take a lot of English courses 'cause I wanted to do different things. So I came away from there with a degree in German, a lot of my classes, I didn't even speak English and European studies. And I feel that just the curiosity and knowing how to connect different dots from different disciplines in different worlds was very valuable to me because I think in our industry your audience, your clients are always different. And in order to connect with them and reach them, you have to be able to kind of quickly jump in and live in their world a little bit and understand it and then also make those creative connections. So I feel that a background that is more eclectic is really useful and I don't think it has to be anything in particular, it doesn't have to be college. I think a great training ground for what we do is actually working in, if I could give anybody a pointer, getting started as a side job or as a way to grow would be in hospitality.

- Right, right. So help us understand why hospitality? Why does that make sense for somebody to get started?

- Yeah, absolutely, 'cause I feel that it's kind of like a masterclass and a finishing school and a bootcamp for emotional intelligence, which is kind of the more fancy word for it. But it's like those people skills, that communication. When you do that and you are customer facing, you have to solve problems very quickly. You have to pay attention to what's going on with that person, you have to improvise and those of us we can be very familiar with this. I'm sure you you're taking questions from the press or you're trying to figure something out for a client. You have to be able to stay present and to kind of go out on a limb and try something. And then you also, I think with that, you do get comfortable with failure and comfortable with things like maybe being a little bit of surprise or not going the way you want it. I don't think there's anybody who's ever carried around a tray that hasn't tripped and fallen in front of a bunch of people or had something go horribly wrong and then say, "okay, now what?" And those are the things that I think you kind of carry over to any world that you go to. And I'm actually, it's interesting now I'm doing some help with a friend of mine who's just opened two new hotels. And so I've been pitching in helping her and helping her train some of the teenagers who are working there this summer. And it is fascinating, I just think, wow, if you can get it and do this, you are going to be set to do a lot of other things later on. And I think it's good 'cause it takes you outside of just yourself and for them, a lot of them they've been very isolated, they live on their phones, putting you out in front of people and working with people I think there's no way to duplicate that experience.

- I absolutely agree. As the father of two teenagers right now, the more they're out there and doing things that's not behind a device, the more they thrive and the more their confidence gets built up. And so I've actually seen them spend less time on devices when they have some, both of them just got jobs not just summer jobs but jobs and so it's forcing them to get outside their comfort zone and they're really thriving and just becoming better people and showing their personality and I think that's great. So you made me think of three things that I like to say, which is a good PR person in my opinion and experience is first a problem solver, two, able to improvise and three, able to communicate well. And so I think you kind of described a high, somewhat high pressure cooker type environment where you've got a lot of personalities you have to please, you learn a lot about people in business very quickly. And by that improvising, you can kind of pivot and adjust. So when you think about at least my line of work, being at a PR agency, you've got multiple clients, oftentimes in multiple industries or a handful of industries and you've got to not only be a trusted advisor but you've gotta be able to deliver results and you've gotta be able to speak candidly to those people and account for personalities and different levels of expectation.

- Hmm mm, yeah, absolutely. That kind of makes it fun, I think, right? 'Cause it's never, hospitality, PR, it's never the same day twice, that I find, maybe that's not for everybody but I've always, I think you also find that very energizing to say, "Okay, what's gonna happen now?"

- Yeah, totally agree. I tell people all the time, I've never had the same two days in my business that I can really think of, at least executively, so anyway, yeah. And I love that about it because every day is different and brings unique challenges. And you might think today's gonna be a slow day and on a dime, it can turn very quickly, right? So speaking of, why don't you share a few kinds of stories or adventures that you've had, either highlights from things you've been able to accomplish in your career, maybe behind the scenes or great destinations you've been to or maybe just some stories of how you were presented with a challenge and you're successfully overcoming them.

- Yeah, wow, that could be a very long podcast, perhaps we wanna get good ones that made me think, like one thread of the things that I think I have done when I look back in my career that have turned out well, are things where I learned something, that is it. If you can keep learning who was at the, I believe it was the hockey player, Martin St. Pierre from Tampa who said, "What I'm really good at, I'm good at getting better." And I think that the experiences that I've had that have gotten me to get better have been the ones where I've taken on kind of the job that other people don't really want. And it might seem counterintuitive but I've always found that in an organization when you get in there, I was always raised to say, "Okay, go in, make yourself indispensable, do what's required, figure it out." When you do take on something that might be tricky or difficult, first of all, a lot of times the bar is a little bit low 'cause it's already bad, you can only bring it up but you get kind of the freedom and the opportunity to see something and maybe operate a little more. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it works differently. So one example of that, I would say, and you might remember this on Amelia Island when I was working here is that we had this sports tournament, it's a sport called Petanque. And if you might've seen it, if you've been to France or they're like these, it's kind of like botchy with these silver balls, it's a lawn game, it's very kind of south of France, people play it. And oddly enough because of its our interesting population here, Amelia Island has a big Petanque community and they had traditionally hosted a huge tournament. Now in tourism, we love to support that tournament because it was in a weekend in November that was really literally one of the worst weeks of the year where we had no hotel occupancy, it was like a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, it was kind of like Florida's version of bad weather, it could rain, it could be gray. So it was thing that we really love to have. Well, the founder of it got sick and it was very close to, just a few months before the tournament and came to us and said, "Well, we have these people from New York City that wanna run it and we have some other islands, some other places that are kind of interested in it but I wanna keep it here, what can we do? And I was just like, "Oh my gosh, that thing is great, we can't lose it" and my boss was like, "Well, I mean, if you wanna do it, can you do it?" So I kind of took that on not having ever really produced an event before but working with those people, working with all the different constituencies and it was crazy and it was hard but it enabled me to not only kind of learn about that and get that going, I could bring the marketing, PR into it. So to promote it, we made a, we did, one of the gentlemen had introduced us to an iconic French film that everybody in France and in Europe knows, which is a scene of people playing Petanque and a street car comes and they fight and the street car goes away. Well, we reshot that with those people as a promo 'cause like, well, that's fun. And I always had an eye to like and I think it's like what you're doing when you do a podcast, you can use it as an article or a video. How can I cut and dice and repurpose this and use it? So this would be great for the other part of my job there was developing the international markets. And when I would go to trade shows, you say Petanque to people, they'd go, "Oh, that's where I planned the holiday. I can't believe there's a place in America, in Florida where they play this." So it was a nice little hook to get them talking. So I thought, "Great. I can use that to promote it. I can use it for trade shows." So we made this video, we got picked up by Parnoli Gerd and we actually got to screen it in Times Square at their Bastille Day party. And so we got all this exposure from it and we also kind of by the skin of our teeth, managed to pull off that tournament. We had people from all over the world and it ended up with about a million dollars of economic impact for that weekend. And it allowed it kind of to continue to not go away to keep that going.

- Right, right. Hopefully that was the shift that made it a permanent installation in the community. So that's fabulous. You're reminding me of, I used to work at a tech company and there's this guy named Tim that worked for me. And he was the only one willing to do this particular job in the company that allowed the company to be able to connect between the technicians at the company and the billing department. And nobody else wanted to do this role. And it was not a full-time job but it was a coordination role, if you will. And so he'd coordinate, when it came billing cycle he had to work with billing to make sure everything look correct. Nobody wanted that job and Tim just said, "Hey, I'll do it." And Tim did it like in one afternoon, once a month and he did it so well that billings were optimized. And so when the parent company came in and said, "Hey, we have to make some cuts" guess who still had a job, no matter what, the guy who was tied to helping the company stay profitable. And the people who didn't wanna do that were the ones who were vulnerable, right? And so Tim ended up taking that skillset on to go work at T-Mobile. And he was a quick riser in that organization because he had a unique set of not only experience but also very much so this drive and commitment. And I think from that experience, he realized the value of kind of volunteering to try something new that could help you pivot and transition into greater responsibility.

- Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also, if I remember bringing it back to where I went to college, the motto of the founder was go or no one else will go and do what no one else will do. Okay.

- I love that, that's great. So we want to talk a little bit about travel stories. So let's do that for a minute.

- Travel stories, well, I mean-

- Actually, Kate, I'm gonna interrupt you and let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and we'll talk travel stories.

- [Announcer] You listening to On Top of PR with your host, Jason Mudd. Jason is a trusted advisor to some of America's most admired and fastest growing brands. He is the Managing Partner at Axia Public Relations, a PR agency that guides news, social and web strategies for national companies and now back to the show.

- Welcome back to On Top of PR, I'm Jason Mudd, your host and our guest today is Kate Harris. We were just about to get into interesting travel stories. And I would just want to take a brief moment to say thank you to our sponsor ReviewMaxer for their support of On Top of PR. ReviewMaxer is a great tool, we use it here at Axia. We recommend it to our clients and we hope you'll check it out at reviewmaxer.com. Kate, welcome back to the show.

- Thank you.

- So Kate, we are gonna talk about some travel stories and how to find them, go beyond the obvious and tap into the current return to roaming or traveling. The timing is great, I just heard a flash briefing this morning that demand for travel is up to 2019 levels. As we just talked about, I'm about to do some traveling. So I think everybody's excited about this summer and doing some traveling. And this is a great opportunity for people who work in travel and tourism.

- Absolutely and we can't be happier honestly now considering where we were not so long ago when really this whole industry and segment just went to a halt. But I think no matter what, at the same time, even reading about travel, thinking about travel, planning travel, it all I think has so much value. I mean, when you talk about stories, that's where you'll get the best story. So I feel we did get some great journalism and PR of people talking about travel, even when a lot of people could not actively travel because it kind of that's a time where you really do wanna get outside yourself, even if you are only doing that in your mind. So I think that what is, we have so much opportunity now because of course we're ready to go but I feel that what I'm seeing is people are like, okay, but I want it to be really good, I want quality. I have been, I'm appreciating things now. I want an experience that is going to be, first of all, something that I feel safe doing, that I'm comfortable getting out there. And also that is going to be something that I'm gonna remember. I think people, I've seen this just being out where we live, which is an area that is full of visitors from everywhere. And people are like, "Oh my gosh," they're there with their families. You can really see that this is gonna be a setting for their memories. So I think with the travel stories, when you're looking for those, there is a lot of opportunity in looking at the places that are a little bit different, that are off the beaten path and looking at it, as I see people traveling now more as an itinerary rather than a single destination, "We're going to Universal Studios. Well, we might but then we might also, we're gonna take a week or two weeks 'cause we have the time and we wanna travel. And then I'm gonna go to some of these little places along the way, I'm going to go up the coast, I'm going to see some of this kind of like an old fashioned, stop at the gas station road trips." So being able to understand how to bring those quirky, unusual, unique destinations together in a narrative, I think can really help people set it apart from kind of the standard, it's beautiful and sunny here come getaway.

- Right, yeah, I love that. In fact, you're describing the vacation I'm about to take, right?

- Oh, really.

- We're going to a couple of different places versus just going to one, we're gonna kind of migrate if you will. And even though we're flying, we'll just have a few destinations to get to our ultimate plans. So that's kind of the way we approached it this year, so.

- How did you choose it if I could ask?

- Well, I'm trying to get to all 50 states. I was trying to do it before I turned 45 and the pandemic threw a wrench into that. So we're going to Mount Rushmore on our way to the Lake Cabin in Minnesota and then spending time with the in-laws in Kansas City. And so while we're in each of those locations, we'll do various kind of outings and road trips and go off the beaten path a little bit, if that makes sense, so.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- I love off the beaten path, the road less traveled just that we haven't seen before. And I think it's also fun for people. There's a little bit of one-upmanship in that, in our social media age too, like "Oh, you haven't heard of that place, I've already been there, here's my field." It's fun to kind of be the first or one of the first to get in and discover something unusual, even if it's in the shadow of Mount Rushmore and then be able to share that with people.

- Yeah, that's good. People are often just really amazed that I'm close to 50 states and so it's kind of an accidental thing. One day I just looked at a map and realized, "Gosh, there's not a lot of places that I haven't been yet. So how many more do I have to go?" And I think at that point it was eight to 12. And in my line of work, you do a lot of traveling and sometimes you can invent reasons to travel somewhere when your clients have multiple locations or multiple needs. And if you tell them, "Hey, I'm gonna go to this location and do this for one of your leaders or something like that." They get pretty excited and very cooperative to make that happen, so.

- Yeah, that's part of what makes us the best business-

- Yeah, absolutely, I agree. So we are quickly running out of time. So I just wanna kinda talk to you about I mean, your career, as you said earlier has span a lot of different places in ways, our locations and roles and you've been doing a lot of video production. And kind of tell us how you ended up landing yourself into I think just kind of by circumstances becoming kind of a little bit of TV personality with some of your work.

- Well, that was kind of coming back to doing what nobody else wants to do. This was when we were really seeing video takeoff on Facebook and we saw a place, there was a company that came, that did a little series and they said, "We'll do this for your destination." And it costs, what was for us, a giant amount of money so really wanted to do it. And we kind of said, "Well, what if we just kind of do it ourselves and see what happens?" That's the beauty of the internet will give you very fast feedback whether people like it. So we launched Love Amelia and it started out with just myself and Chris Yarbrough of Intercoastal Media as freelancer. We together were like, "We don't have anybody else, so you get in front of the camera and I'm gonna run the camera." And I think, and it certainly did take off. And I think one of the reasons was not because we were great at it from the beginning, we were not but we were out there and doing it. And because we were talking to people who we knew who liked us and trust us, like, "Oh, I've seen her. I've seen her at soccer" or, "Oh, I know you, your mom is whatever." When we were going out and our whole angle was like, there's so much that when people talk about this place, they just love it. Well, what they love or some of these unique experiences and the local characters and the friendliness that they experience when they're here. So the series would go and take you through all kinds of things, like here's where it's haunted, here's the best place for a picnic, here's what the downtown is like. If you wanna get, what's it like to be on a paddleboard? There is such a huge diversity of experiences that you could show here so that's how we developed that. And as we grew it, we got more resources. We got to make it better, but we really wanted to keep that spirit of open-minded traveler and for our audience it was kind of like, "Hey," you know when you ask the person at the hotel and you say, "No, no, no, no, no, but go, what's the real, what's your favorite? Well, where do the locals go?" So this showed them and it brought in local expertise from the lady who knows how to find shark's teeth, to 50 restaurants that cook shrimp and grits talking about how they do that. We wanted to give them something extra because our motto and our goal was always to be the program that people wanted to watch not the commercial that was gonna interrupt them, we wanted to be added to it, we wanted to give them something. And whether they hadn't been here or they lived here, to get that feeling of advocacy and pride and protection was also important to us or whether you did go here but you'd forgotten about it. And you're like, "You know what? That place, that's awesome, we should maybe put that on our trip." So that's, again, kind of how it organically grew from doing it, testing it, improving it and seeing what people like and giving them more.

- I think that's very encouraging. And I bet there's members of the audience who are listening to this or watching this and thinking, "I'm gonna send this to my colleague because we wanna do a video or video series and we haven't gotten started yet." And so I think you're encouraging people to the first step is to just start taking action and do something. You're also reminding me of what I constantly I'm advising companies, which is nobody tunes into a video or a newscast or a publication or website to see who's advertising, they look to find content, right? And they want to be informed, educated and entertained. And so if you can present your information in a way that's not selling them on something not advertising and promoting something but instead educating, informing and engaging then people are gonna be attracted to that and wanna learn more. So, all right, before we wrap up, I got to hear your Elvis story and how you creatively used, how you differentiated in the marketplace. So tell us about that.

- Yes, that was very fun. So we wanted to get Amelia Island in front of German tourists specifically and it was a little complicated because we were small. We went to a big trade show with Visit Florida as a partner and got the tiniest space. And I met people who were producing a beautiful magazine and they were able to do a little feature of us. And on the cover of the magazine was Elvis, 'cause the magazine always had someone who was iconic on it and it was bundled with National Geographic, Germany, which was of course a wonderful audience for us. So through that, we got invited to be a part of the European Elvis Festival. And that takes place in Budenheim, that is where, if you are a fan you know that Elvis, when he was in the US military, he was stationed there. That's where he met Priscilla, he has an album cover from there. And this town is also right next to Frankfurt and all of the places where all the key industry and journalists and the people live. And it happens in the summertime when they're all kind of on vacation relaxing. So we did over two years, we kind of came over and worked with the festival. We made a little beach there, we had Petanque, we had a beach chair, we had booths where tour operators were selling to the Southeast United States that included us on the itinerary. We worked with the, they had Darlene Love, the Oscar winner, and she had sung with Elvis, she performed, we got to kind of drop in on all of it. We worked with the street artist to do a mural. And it just was a way that we could really surprise people because it's hard to get these executives and tour operators and people to take your call when you're at some nowhere place. But when you said, "Hey, what are you doing this weekend? Would you like to be our guest and come see Elvis? And it's right here." And the people were like, "Wait a minute, I didn't know that was right there." And you see this amazing kind of festivals spectacular. And through that, you make the connection. And people are like, "Well, what does this have to do with you? What does that have to do with Amelia Island?" And it's like Elvis and music, that's the essence of America to a lot of people that is connective. And I did hear that Elvis after performing in Jacksonville, did stop at our iconic American beach one night for a little performance, very under the radar on his way out. So I like to believe it and I think that it's enough. People love to find something that they wouldn't have discovered otherwise. And that's part of what that did for us and who doesn't like Elvis.

- I'll tell you what you're describing is differentiating from everyone else by pivoting, improvising or just being distinctly different. And I think too many brands try to do what everyone else is doing instead of really taking some risk and the expression high risk high reward. So I encourage our audience to take some risks and have fun doing it at the same time. So Kate, this has been a great episode, thank you for joining. If our audience wants to connect with you, what's the best way to reach you and-

- Sure, look at me on LinkedIn, Kate Yandoh Harris on LinkedIn. And from there, I am happy to hear from you. And we'd love to hear about some of the cool things that you've done. And if I might just add one little nugget, everything that I've talked about was not anything that was big budget. It was not anything that was a huge, massive undertaking to begin with. And I feel I really wanna encourage people that are listening 'cause sometimes they say creativity requires constraints. And if your constraint is, I don't have a lot of money or I have to do it myself or I have to get Jason from accounts receivable to run the camera for me, well do it. You never know how it's going to unfold until you give it a shot.

- Yeah, I love that and I tell people all the time that creativity would be easy if you didn't have constraints of deadlines, budgets, compliance and legal and all those other hurdles but the best creatives can persevere through that. And people like to point to big companies for their innovation. And I'm like, it's even harder to be innovative in a big company 'cause you've got people who are trained or conditioned or safeguarded to just say no to everything. And so I've got colleagues at Disney, Google, Tesla, et cetera and they tell me all, Coca-Cola like you mentioned and they tell me it's so hard to do something innovative because we get so many nos along the way. And so if you're working in a more entrepreneurial organization or maybe you're self-employed, there's really no reason why you can't take some big risks. So Kate, thank you for being here. It's been a real pleasure and-

- No, my pleasure, thank you for having me.

- I look forward to staying in touch, be well.

- Yes, thank you, you too, bon voyage.

- Well, this has been another great episode of On Top of PR, as I mentioned earlier, as you've been watching this episode or listening to this episode on your device and you sense you've got a colleague or a friend in the business that you would like to share some of the things you heard here today with, please take a moment and do that now, they'll thank you for it, we thank you for it. And we wish you safe travels.

- [Announcer] This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And check out past shows at OnTopofPR.com.