My first day...My first step in the PR World

Hello...I'm Izni, a PR major student at Limkokwing University Cyberjaya Campus.
I started my one month and a half internship at a claimed-to-be one of the top PR agency in Malaysia which is Alpha Platform PR & Public Affairs in Ampang, Kuala Lumpur. You are able to view the website at http://www.alphaplatform.com/ to know more about the agency. Basically, the PR agency specializes in public affairs, investor & government relations, media relations & crisis communications. We are not a PR agency that do a lot of "marcomm" or "marketing communications" and "events management" . The only events we handle are official press conferences and organizing media tour on behalf of our clients which complement the PR campaign that we are handling for them.

During my first day at the agency, I was introduced to the staffs including the chance to meet with the managing director and all the senior consultants. Well, it is only a small local PR agency and not an MNC agency so they only have 20 workers in whole. The working hours are fixed from 9am to 5.30pm, however if there's a need to stay for meetings and etc, in order to finish our work to catch a project dateline, then the staffs will have to stay longer including myself. Anyway, the working environment are very relaxing although everyone takes their works seriously in order to catch datelines. This is because although some staffs are in higher ranking that the junior staffs and the interns, we worked in one place except for the managing director and two senior consultants, whom have offices of their own yet, they don't always sat in the offices but came out to mingle and seek opinions from the other staffs. They worked that way in order to prevent any birocracy and rankings to interfere in the contribution of ideas and flow of information around the office. They thought that by not having office walls among the employees will avoid a sense of inferiority among the junior staffs to voice out their opinions and ideas out loud. So everyone works on side-by-side desks no matter who you are because for them, everyone has the right to contribute ideas in order to get the best outcome.

Right after they introduced me to everyone, I was brought to the meeting room where one of the staffs gave me a briefing about the past and current clients of the agency and everything I need to know for my internship including giving me the chance ask any questions that I had in mind in order to avoid any misscommunication breakdowns. After that, they invited me to join them to browse through newspapers with everyone else to find writings in the press concerning their client. The newspaper clippings will be filed and kept later in the office archive for future needs. I was told that this is a daily routine for all PR agency including ours and usually one hour every morning will be allocated for this task, which will be done first before continuing to other works.

After I'm done with monitoring the newspaper, I was introduced to the MediaBank, an expensive software application that my agency had rented with a certain amount of monthly fees from the provider, where all the news that had appeared on all the local televisions and radios the day before or much previously are listed. Although the software is a costly one, it is an important tool for a PR agency so that we will be able to keep up with the news about our clients that appeared in all the broadcasting media available out there. I had to check whether any news regarding our clients had appeared and if yes, I had to liase with my superior so she can find the specific news recordings that we had made with our video recorder to be kept in the client's archive. I also had to call our clients and asked them whether they would want to buy a copy of news concerning them. If they requested for a copy, we will sent them one for a certain amount of fee charged for the videotape and our service.

Besides that, I was also taught on how to do blog monitoring in order to see what people are saying online and in the alternative media about our clients. Iwas introduced to the Malaysian parliament website where I had to check the parliament hansards to see what are discussed in the parliament on a daily basis and to see whether issues that might concern and affect our clients arises in the parliament or not. If there are any, I need to make a copy of it in Word document and forward it to my superiors for future attentions.

Well, the others are the normal office routine. Lunchtime of one hour are allowed at noon and time passes by quickly to reach 5.30pm. I am finally able to go home with a day of precious eye-opening experiences as a new PR intern/future aspiring PR practitioner. Looking forward for the second day...and the coming weeks ;).