About Me

I am a twenty-year PR pro turned online publicist. My virtual PR firm offers online promotion, online-related programming services, graphic design, copywriting, and yes, off-line publicity. That's the short of it.

My Early Life

I'm telling you about my life because if you talk to me on the phone, you'll probably pick up on my accent. People usually ask. My growing up can seem exotic--as exotic as the far away world of the United States was to me. Also, I am a real person, not just a website, so I want you to know who you are working with.

My early life involved playing aggressively in Ringette, winning most music competitions, working at my mum's landscaping company, and working at a gas station. I did go to school too.

But that was when we moved to the south to a border town, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.

My childhood was in a village, then called Lansdowne House, located a little inland of Hudson Bay, just south of Churchill (of polar bear fame). I grew up on the tree line between forest and tundra back in a time when my friends and I spoke Ojibwe and English and French were for school.

It was an idyllic place for a kid to grow up and I do have wonderful stories to tell.

My Early Career

I moved up north again, but this time to Thompson, Manitoba and there I managed a restaurant. Again, I was close to Churchill, but from the other direction and the languages there were English, French, and Cree.

Some time let me tell you about what cold and snow really are. I can tell you what the Aurora Borealis look like while swimming on my back in a glass-clear lake. I remember that star shows amazed me and, I know the feeling of the peaceful long hours of an Arctic sunset. Us northerners also joked that mosquitoes and black flies are the provincial birds.

While in Thompson, I took university correspondence courses before moving to the Winnipeg metro to go to the University of Manitoba. Then, I got my first PR job at the second largest theatre in Winnipeg.

Afterwards, I moved to Thunder Bay to take a job as the Director of Communications for an AIDS service organization serving Northwestern Ontario. What a challenge it was to educate the media and communicate with the public about HIV and AIDS in the 80s! Well, there was nothing like jumping in to one of the most difficult PR campaigns of my career.

Moving "Stateside"

Minneapolis, Minnesota became home. I'm now an American and in the 17 years I've been here I have acquired the Midwestern drawl mixed with a bit of "eh."

As soon as I landed, I was off to the races starting my own PR firm with no contacts, actually I didn't know anyone at first. I decided I'd meet people by doing advertising sales.

I landed a plum Midwestern PR account, which gave me the credibility to land other accounts. I met a lot of nice people and settled in building my new life and my new PR firm.

With new babies, I closed shop and became a PR firm of one. I was a part-time public relations consultant. I enjoyed the work and enjoyed my children.

Later, my children became more interested in their friends, so I was back at work in earnest. I was a personal publicist.

Now, my daughter is in college and my son is in high school. I am so proud of my kids; they are doing great and, they are good people. Dad takes my son to football practice and such and my daughter is studying or out with her friends, so I am free to rock 'n roll with my business even more.

I changed into an online publicist.

Public Relations Computer Nerd

Yes, there is such a thing as a PR computer nerd...me.

At my first PR job, the marketing director had a computer. I had never touched one, but I took to it like a northern kid to snowshoes. We had a word processing program; I think it was WordPerfect. And I loved D-base and the basic graphic design, really drawing, program.

At my next job, I had a hard time explaining to my boss why we needed a computer and a fax machine--both pricey propositions at the time. The bookkeeper and fundraising coordinator convinced the boss and soon I was designing newsletters and setting up a media database. I taught computer classes to the volunteers so they could help with data entry and such. Teaching was fun.

Once I got connected to the internet in the early days, I was in love with the online world. I was list-serving and chatting and creating websites with relish. That's why I have the domain name eileenparker.com; I registered it a long time ago, when Internic charged $145 a year and I had to register by mail--seems funny now.

We know how the internet has changed since. For me, public relations and the online world have gradually converged to the point that the bulk of my work is online.

I loved it so it wasn't a leap to move to exclusively online PR.

Virtual PR Firm With No Employees

Virtual PR is the new and old combining to be the brave new frontier repeated.

Among the many things the new online technology has given me is the ability to work with anyone anywhere, so I do. Each of my partners has his or her specialty and we work with each other as our clients need.

I have a roster of specialists, but these are the people I work with most often:

An off-line publicist--a media specialist; she's got me sold!
A top-notch, versatile graphic designer.
A web programmer.
A quirky, talented web designer.
Numerous niche copywriters.