Work From Home — Day 50

Terri Tiffany & The PR Roadmap

5:00AM PST

This morning’s Where We Are Now is from the laptop of Terri Tiffany.

Team –

I got the call in my car as I sped across the Golden Gate Bridge with an unmarked white shopping bag in my trunk carrying over a half million dollars of diamond jewelry. 

The jewelry was from Tiffany & Co. I’d taken it out of the vault to style a photo shoot with two fashion models on Rodeo Beach in Marin. As regional head of PR for Tiffany, I’d spend the day on sunny California beach. How does it get better than that?

Picking up that call, I was about to find out. 

An editor at Gentry magazine asked if I would take a meeting with some execs from an SF real estate brokerage opening an office on the Peninsula. The company was looking for PR. 

Real estate was far from my wheelhouse but out of loyalty to this editor, I met the team. That was the day that everything changed for me.

Sitting in a room full of boxes above a bank in Menlo Park, I listened to Shawna Borg, David Barca, Jessica Grimes, and Mark McLaughlin share their mission for Pacific Union International in the most passionate, compelling, and authentic narrative I’d ever heard.

Within days, I was laying out plans to support the launch of PUI into Silicon Valley with an opening event and press coverage. It was an experience of working with a team that far surpassed any I’d had before. Over the next months, I was all in — I’d traded diamonds for real estate!

Riding that PUI rocket with the team through the next seven years of expansion, mergers, acquisitions, wildfires, and now a pandemic has been exciting and rewarding. When I got my first “grown up” job out of college at Sesame Street in New York, I promised myself that I’d never take another job that wasn’t at least as much fun as that one. The job of a lifetime, I thought, until I moved to ABC where I hosted press tours for network stars like Tom Hanks, and then on to head up PR for the Hearst Corporation in SF at the Examiner, doing TV broadcasts from the newsroom and moving 100,000 runners from one side of San Francisco to the other in the annual Bay to Breakers Race. But doing PR for our agents and team at Compass California? Way better!

With the pandemic in full swing, now more than ever it’s important for real estate professionals to embrace PR along with every other marketing tool in our arsenal. With input from Brian Cooley and his brilliant SoCal PR team, here is the roadmap for you to help us create the PR you need to heighten awareness in the press about your listings and your business. We’re excited to work with you to see your listing and name in print and online now more than ever! 

Thanks!

This is Where We Are Now. 

– Terri Tiffany