Member Spotlight

MEET PRSA AUSTIN CHAPTER MEMBER: Mike Nicholson, APR

CURRENT LIVELIHOOD: I am an active duty U.S. Army Public Affairs Officer, currently assigned to USAA in San Antonio through the Army’s Training with Industry (TWI) program. The TWI program lets me spend 12 months working in Corporate Communications at a civilian company so that I can both share and bring back communication lessons learned to the Army. My next assignment is tentatively scheduled for Fort Hood next summer. With the close proximity to the post, I thought the Austin PRSA would be a good fit for me over the next several years.

CHILDHOOD AMBITION: I changed my mind all the time, but the common theme was that the jobs were all in communication-related fields. Then I joined the Army.

DRAW TO THE COMMUNICATIONS FIELD: When I originally joined the Army, I was assigned as a Field Artillery Officer and didn’t want to spend 20 years shooting the big guns. So after my Company-level command as a Captain, I transferred into the field of Public Affairs and have been working in it for about the last 10 years. I love the work that I do, but at some point my military career will come to an end and all the education and experience that I’ve had should transfer into the civilian sector. Artillery career not so much. There are not many corporations that I know of that have a department full of M198 howitzers.

HOMETOWN: I’m originally from Southern California but haven’t lived there since I graduated college in 1997. The Army has moved me about every 12 to 24 months, so in order and including combat tours I've lived in: Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Korea, Oklahoma, South Korea, Maryland, the Netherlands, Afghanistan, Virginia, Iraq, South Korea, Kansas, Afghanistan and now Texas.

MOST MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE AS A COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSIONAL: I've had a number of memorable experiences. I worked media operations during President Hamid Karzai’s first Presidential inauguration in Kabul in 2004. I was in the courtroom with Saddam Hussein about 6 weeks before he was killed. But the most recent memorable experience was as a Strategic Communication planner at ISAF Headquarters last year. In February 2012, we had members of the military improperly dispose of copies of the Quran at Bagram Airfield which led to protests and riots both within and outside the country, and about two weeks later Staff Sergeant Robert Bales went into a village near Kandahar and shot 16 civilians, including nine children. From a communication perspective, we were extremely busy with mass media interviews, social media, and key leader engagements.

PERSPECTIVE ON ETHICS (September is Ethics Month for PRSA): For internal communication on the topic of ethics, the most effective organizations are the ones where the leadership exhibit ethical behavior on a continual basis and expect the same from their subordinates. As far as ethical decision making in terms of PR practice, I suggest having a professional group of peers that you trust and can seek out whenever you have to work in those gray areas in order to get some additional perspectives.

RECOMMENDED READS: I’ll try and steer clear of the typical PR suggestions, and hopefully offer up some new ones. For organizational and communication planning, try Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline about learning organizations and systems theory, and Henry Mintzberg’s The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, which talks about different types of strategy to include intended, deliberate, realized, emergent and unrealized. If you’re into political/government communication, try Osgood’s Selling War in a Media Age or Christopher Simpson's Science of Coercion, which talks about the origins of the communication field of study in the U.S. and the government’s role in helping develop many of today’s mass communication theories and models. And just about anything on Design Thinking – I use it a lot when working communication plans with those who do not work in the typical communication fields.

FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT AUSTIN AND FAVORITE AUSTIN RESTAURANTS: We are still too new to the area, and trying to figure out all the places to visit and restaurants to eat at. If you have any suggestions, please let me know! I'm on Twitter @46alpha.