Hi all,
The main reason I managed to get my placement with ERISJ is my previous experience with writing articles for newspapers and managing to get them published. Basically, I was taken on board based on good media liaison and my little Black Book.
One of my first tasks was to create a database with contacts. ERISJ had some but no media contacts at all so that is where my contacts where handy. I have also included contacts that Kate, my supervisor, had from her Green activist campaigns. I used excel spreadsheet to divide the type of contacts like: industry related, media contacts and general database - friends of ERISJ that are receiving the newsletters and information.
This was rather a boring and unchallenging task but it had to be done. It took me almost two full days as most of the contacts where in a hard copy and some even hand written. Having so many interruptions during the day didn’t help either but then again that is quite typical in the PR. I have lost my enthusiasm to complete this spreadsheet as I knew I was needed to do something more creative and PR related rather then boring data entry. Kate has acknowledged that and has decided to pass this duty to somebody else.
Oh NO…. if I just knew what a mistake that would be! And it’s my fault really. I should have NOT shown my loss of enthusiasm and just completed the task myself. What happened was…we ended up doubling some contacts and there were not arranged in such a way to be able to just ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ as a group when sending a group email. And the way I found this out was was…very embarrassing. I received a very arrogant email from one of the journalists I sent the information THREE TIMES!!! Once again, it was my mistake for not checking the spreadsheet. I was in a hurry…How typical but not a good excuse.
1 comment:
Media lists or any lists in fact are always very annoying to do but it has to be done as you said.
I was doing my internship with the International Students Committee at Curtin, Bentley and had to do the same. It was annoying because it as you said took so much time when you want to show them what your OTHER PR techniques are.
Yet, I also learnt that when you are knew to the group they usually make you do those type of duties just to know how reliable and so on you are. So yeah, it is I believe one of those things every PR person does once in his life. But then once you've done it, it's done and you now have a soft copy that is updated easily.
I also do not get why in a time of Information Technology, all the information is not on the computer. When I got my position as a PR Officer, the computer had NOTHING, no templates just a 1000000 spam emails.
Usually, when such a mistake happens, the best way of getting out of it is telling the journalist and your sup the truth and eventually telling them you will be much more careful next time and it will not happen.
Hope the rest of your placement went well,
Cheers!
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