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After young PR pros have landed the agency job they tirelessly hunted for, immersed themselves in the entry-level support role and officially launched their PR career, the next phase is something I like to call the support to strategy switch. While we were first brought on board to aid account managers in the tactical elements of the communications campaigns for their clients, we have now proved ourselves enough to take on the role as account lead.

Just like any transition, there are growing pains. Similar to the journey from college to career is the process of getting accustomed to managing client accounts. It’s time to take it up a notch. So what can you do to make the move to management as efficient and accelerated as possible? Here are a few things I’ve learned through my experience:

Every holiday season, the Identity team looks forward to coming up with a new way to tell our clients, partners, friends and family how much we appreciate them.

Be prepared in order to avoid mistakes… and be prepared to manage when you make them anyway.

Politics, paparazzi princesses, professional athletes…anyone who is a position to present themselves to their communities needs to be prepared to manage their perception like any company manages a brand.

During last week’s republican debate, Texas Governor Rick Perry initiated a media frenzy with an embarrassing flub of forgetting a major portion of his political platform—an agency he would choose to remove from government.

At trick-or-treating time when costumes aren’t easily identified, you commonly hear “What are you exactly?” At many points where I share with others for the first time that I have a Public Relations degree, I commonly hear “What are you exactly?” I am happy to say that although I decided to graduate in the crux of this uncertain economic climate, I picked a profession that dressed me for success.

In honor of Halloween, I started thinking about the many masks of PR pros—masks that enable us to be anything we want to be. We can carve our craft any way we want it to face.

September 11th: Messages this year surrounding the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks flooded communications online, in print and on air, as to be expected. But with my observation of topics trending this weekend, I saw something more prevalent than ever before — an increasingly heated debate over the use of major events, such as the Twin Towers tragedy, to promote brands.

As public relations professionals, we are responsible for managing what our clients are saying about their brands and who is hearing what they say. Strategies for building buzz span across the PR pro spectrum, but how far can companies push the piggybacking off of a current event or hot topic?