Ken Fairchild

Corporate Communication legend Ken Fairchild offered SMU students’ key points critical for success post-graduation. Throughout the presentation he stressed the importance of confidence when presenting information to a potential employer, client or audience.

“You can have confidence… you will go out and get a good job in communication,” stated Fairchild.  Fairchild included General Public Relations, Media Relations, Crisis Communication, Political and Witness Preparation. According to Fairchild, each subfield will all tie into a public relations career in some way.

Fairchild continued in his presentation discussing and emphasizing the key component of successful communication, confidence. Unfortunately, the field of public relations has attracted the term "spin doctor". According to Fairchild, "A "spin doctor" takes the truth and changes it."He encouraged all of those that enter any type of communication to always be true and forth coming when providing information, especially since information access has increased substantially in recent years to to technological advances.

With this day and age, information is given to us, as receivers, in large quantities and we process it daily. Another point of Fairchild's was to take advantage of the different types of mediums. "Medium changes the way we reach people, " he said, "use the medium, do not let the medium use you." I feel that this advice is something applicable to not only public relations specialists, but to everyone. We should all use the medium to reach people for the better and to make change. We should all use new mediums to our benefit.

Overall, Fairchild provided inspiration to have confidence, use new mediums and effectively communicate. We can use sites like change.org to stimulate social change and create an influx of humanitarian efforts throughout the world.