NST's Young Influential Teresa Siles

She’s young. She’s influential. She’s NST’s very own Teresa Siles! Recently named a Young Influential by the San Diego Daily Transcript, Teresa was recognized for her knowledge in social media and her efforts to ensure our agency plays a leading role in the industry.

Teresa joined NST more than 10 years ago as an intern and worked her way up to become a vice president of the firm. In fact, she’s the youngest vice president in NST’s history! Through the years, Teresa has developed a well-deserved reputation of being a leader in public relations and social media. She is creative and is constantly pushing not only her clients, but also her colleagues, to try new things and stay on the edge of change.

In addition to managing client accounts, Teresa leads NST’s social media practice. In 2009, she created the San Diego Social Media Symposium, which is now an annual one-day conference that brings together leaders in public relations, marketing, academia and the business community from across Southern California to talk about social media and how it is impacting our respective industries. The most recent symposium was held March 1, 2012 and drew more than 200 attendees.

Teresa is also a two-time graduate of WOMM-U or “Word of Mouth Marketing University,” and received her bachelor’s degree from San Diego State University (SDSU).

In her spare time, Teresa also finds time to give back. She leads a monthly social media workshop for SCORE San Diego, and serves on the marketing committee for LEAD San Diego and the advisory committee for the Digital and Social Media Collaborative at SDSU. As if all this was not enough, Teresa has also recently returned to SDSU as a student in its Executive MBA Program.

Please join me in recognizing Teresa for all her hard work and dedication not only to the profession and her clients, but also to NST and her colleagues. She is a true influential leader.

AT&T Park, San Francisco

The return of baseball season is an exciting time at Nuffer, Smith, Tucker– it’s something to follow, discuss and tease each other about.  It represents hope (although Kerry has expressed “limited optimism” in the Padres management this year) and a renewed excitement in our downtown office, where we have a great view down the third-base line at Petco Park.

If you’ve walked by my desk, it’s not hard to tell I’m a San Francisco Giants fan (hint: you may’ve noticed the “Beard Yourself Like Brian Wilson” poster behind my computer or the Barry Bonds bobblehead on the file cabinet), but above all else, I’m a baseball fan.  I can watch a 0-0 tie going into the 9^th inning of any game and be perfectly happy.  I’m intrigued by matchups, left-handed pitching vs. right-handed hitting, fielders playing close against certain hitters, late inning switches… It’s all fascinating and predicated on the idea of playing to one’s strengths.  Sure, you can put a lineup out there and hope for the best, but good managers are active – they know their competition inside and out, they know who hits better against certain relievers, and they’re thinking several steps ahead for the good of the team.

Public relations done right is a lot like baseball.  It involves analyzing trends, assessing your competition, identifying your strengths and key differentiators, and putting together a solid game plan for success.  We’d be happy to help you think through some of those things for your business and how to best utilize that information to reach your strategic business goals through branding, media relations, online marketing, social media and/or graphic design.  And, if you want to talk baseball, we’d like that too.

“Hitting is fifty percent ‘above the shoulders.’” – Ted Williams  

At NST, setting goals is in the fabric of our company. We believe in strategy and in moving toward an objective that has clear benefits for our clients and their stakeholders. Sometimes setting and making goals comes easily. Sometimes you need a little extra motivation to get you to the finish line. Stickie notes serve as my motivation.

I was recently tasked with setting goals to grow a client’s social media following and website visits over the course of three months. Unfortunately, the “if you build it, they will come” saying doesn’t always ring true in the digital world. We had to do a little extra work to make sure that not only were the right eyeballs getting on our social media pages, but they were also clicking “like” and “follow,” ingesting our content and ultimately clicking through to our website. No small feat.

We identified monthly goals and outlined tactics that would lead us in the right direction. Then I grabbed a Sharpie and some Post-it notes, and made sure those objectives were staring me in the face every day. Ultimately, with a combination of Facebook advertising, special offers, engaging posts and blogger outreach, we not only met our goals, we exceeded them. The number of Facebook fans rose by 456 percent. Twitter impressions were up 410 percent. We created valuable conversations about our client online and increased website visits by 45 percent.

Yes, it’s quite possible we would have reached those goals without the adornment of stickie notes to my cubicle. But, for me, they served as a reminder to constantly be focused on the end results of our plan and push myself to guarantee we surpassed our client’s expectations. They helped motivate me every day. What do you use to motivate yourself?

LEAD San Diego Vice President Sherrie-Lyn Thompson started out the recent LEAD IMPACT session acknowledging something we all knew to be true: there is something sensational about going into a high-security detention center, which was on our day’s agenda. The purpose, she assured us, was not entertainment but something much more significant.  By the end of the day, I knew she was right.

It was a glimpse at a life that many people will never see. As we stood in the guard area looking out at the incarcerated men, I overheard someone from the LEAD cohort say he felt strange looking at them “like they are animals.” It was a no doubt an odd experience.

From the safety of the guard’s quarters, we received an explanation of the different colored wristbands worn by inmates. Men who committed among the most disturbing of crimes (sex crimes or crimes committed against children) wore yellow bands.

While many – myself included – may find it difficult to have compassion for the men behind bars, a more thoughtful look would reveal the situations that put many men there are complex and varied. Further, the solutions for what to do with them are far more complicated than what I’ve heard proposed many times: lock ‘em up and throw away the key.  It’s this thinking that has caused many to dub America the “incarceration nation.” And while many people prefer to think of the situation as “not my problem,” the reality is as taxpayers, it is our problem. For some, it’s a fiscal problem; for others, it’s a moral one.

“It’s a sad commentary on our society when people don’t care about what happens to inmates,” said San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore.

Even if you are among those who “don’t care,” Gore shared with the LEAD cohort a fact that may pique your interest. It’s also one that many people would prefer to ignore: more than 95 percent of inmates are released back into society. Then what? Many are lacking basic skills such as reading and writing.  Many others struggle with addiction. Unfortunately, California has among the highest recidivism rates in the nation, which are estimated by some to be as high as 80 percent in our state.  Without skills for integration with society, many return to their former lives that got them in trouble to begin with.

After touring two detention centers and the San Diego Regional Firearms Training Center, and hearing from several experts in rehabilitation, I left the day still a little unsure of what to think of it all. Later, I realized that in many ways, the people behind bars represented a culmination of societal problems and issues the LEAD cohort had been exposed to in earlier sessions.  The most obvious tie is to our discussion of behavioral health issues, including mental health and substance abuse disorders, which put people at greater risk of ending up behind bars. But ties can also be made to our education session and our discussion of developing 21^st century leadership skills.

The incarceration system has problems with no easy answer, and it’s critical we think beyond simple solutions.  While undoubtedly there are incarcerated men and women who should never be allowed to walk the streets again, there are others who – like it or not – will. These men and women are someone’s child, mother, father, sister, brother, aunt or uncle. As a society, we need to be more compassionate and not take the easy way out by sweeping it all under the rug.