Hi everyone!
This is my second blog post on my internship with GolinHarris in Singapore. Today I'll be talking a little bit about my first media conference and media event for a local brewery.
I really had to invest a lot of hours into doing media follow up on invites sent out and checking to see who would come and who wouldn't and how we could persuade them to come. In the end, we managed to get a turn out of about 40+ people total, 20+ from the media and the rest were from agencies or marketing departments from the various media. It was fun for me to see how the whole process played out. Arriving at the venue, we got everything set up and ready. I found myself having to be on my toes the entire time because it was the first time I was meeting the client face to face because I don't attend their meetings with my other colleagues. Also, getting to meet journalists in a work setting is slightly different from what I'm used to because I have friends who are journalists or writers for magazines.
My take away from the media conference came after the main presentation was over and I got to observe how a PR practitioner is kind of the middleman in facilitating interviews between journalists and the client. I realised how important relations between PR practitioners and media are so crucial in such situations because it becomes so much easier to communicate key messages or conduct an interview when you have a professional working relationship with them. I managed to build a couple of my own with a few journalists as well as marketing people from Singapore Press Holdings (SPH).
The media event! Technically, the event wasn't organised by my firm but my account manager and I were there to attend and help the photographers and videographers get good shots of what we needed to get for the client. Since, it was a Lunar New Year campaign the event was decked out in pretty festive colours and there was a good turnout for the event. I got to speak a little more with some of the corporate communications people from the client side which was interesting for me to listen to how they run things from their end.
In case you guys have noticed, I don't mention client names because my firm requested that we don't mention their clients in our personal/non-official communications. But if you guys in Singapore are reading the papers you'll soon figure out what I'm working on. So yea, it might get a little hard to follow at times but i'll do my best to describe as much as I can.
Happy New Year to all!
Cheers,
Aaron Wilfred
14375051
Curtin Singapore
2 comments:
compliments of the new year, its so ironic that i was just going through the same thing after the holidays, such things as following up on clients and sending invitations.But overall i guess this really ensures one that in the public relations industry there are so many things we are going to encounter and some of the task seem quite easy to complete at first glance but as you start on preparing for events, attending them,meeting up with media people you realize that there is quite a lot to learn about that we did not know.i hope you keep on doing the best that you are doing for the organisation.
Thanks Olerato!
Yes, the process of preparing for events may be the same but the issues you face each time never are. Which makes it that much more interesting to overcome!
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