Class of 2016 Visits Maverick

On November 11th, Maverick, a public relations agency, welcomed Mohawk College's public relations students, for an informational tour. As one of these students, I had personally never considered working for an agency. However, after visiting Maverick, I definitely think I need to reconsider that original thought.

Maverick is located on 37 Madison Avenue in Toronto, Ontario. Their headquarters are quite unique, to that of any other public relations agency. Maverick is operated out of an old heritage house. It was one of the first houses built in the area, so it set the design for the neighborhood. The house was built back in the year 1891. However, Maverick has only been in that house since 2003.

Maverick deals with various types of clients, some including: Clearasil, Veet, American Standard, PetSafe and Little Caesars. They pride themselves on their credibility and creativity. As a public relations agency, their major roles are :

• stakeholders relations
• media training
• media relations
• crisis communications management
• web development
• social media training
• blogger/influencer relations
• social media marketing strategy
• content strategy and development
• media planning
• speechwriting and presentation training
• brand strategy and management
• annual report productions
• executive profiling
• message development
• investor relations
• experimental event management
• C.S.R. (Corporate Social Responsibility) and sustainability
• creative services
• video productions.    .

While visiting, Maverick emphasized to the Mohawk students that in public relations, there is a transition occurring. Public relations is moving away from traditional forms of communicating, there is a shift from print to digital content. Therefore, as public relations professionals there is a need to keep up with the ever changing digital advances effecting the business world. Public relations professionals must always be open to learning the new methods used for communicating to remain successful in the field.

Maverick's Digital Team stood out to me during our visit. Their presentation really reignited with me and the professionals seemed to really enjoy their job. As part of the Maverick digital team, they told us that their responsibilities include developing social media strategies, researching how to reach audiences, analytics, planning and execution of social media plans and posting sponsorship posts. To aid in their daily duties, the digital team utilizes many organizational platforms. They emphasized their usage of Sprout Social for social media post scheduling and Crowd Booster to monitor hashtags, as well as, times to post particular content to reach a particular audience.

The team at Maverick was very welcoming and taught us a lot about what it is like to work in an agency environment. We are very thankful for their time and knowledge that they shared with us. It is amazing that Mohawk College allows for these types of opportunities weekly, to really teach its students that their skills being taught are truly valuable in the working world.

Thank you for reading.

Katelyn Gray