P.R Rocks!

Hello Everyone,

Now, firstly a brief introduction is in place

My name is Murugan Silvam, or you can call me Muru as all my other Australian friends and work colleagues do. I am Malaysian, having lived in this beautiful part of Australia for the past 4 years, I have to say enjoy every bit of it. This will be my final semester for my Bachelors of Arts (Mass Communication) degree. So now that we got that brief introduction out of the way lets jump straight into blogging.

Now let me be honest, when I did my first P.R unit, I thought to myself, is this really that important of a unit to do, I thought why do I need to do this when I am going to major in Film and Television, I mean I wanted to be a director, calling the shots, editing the movie, and receiving an Oscar, but being the audacious person I am, I said let’s give Public Relations a go, let’s see how exciting this can get, and like many times in my life, I proved myself right. PUBLIC RELATIONS is simply put- GREAT, it has thought me not only the importance of communication in an organisation but also to use the same tactics and strategy commonly used in P.R which I have applied to promoting myself, hence the successful interview at Minter Ellison and getting my placement.

For many semesters of uni I have seen previous students visit and speak about how different the working world is from uni. After one week of working at Minter Ellison, I’ve determined all those alumni were telling the truth. Three weeks in and I’m already wondering when is this going to end, now don’t get me wrong, the internship is actually the only thing I look forward to every week, it’s just that to balance university and another part time job kind of gets to you after a while, but I have to give myself a pat on the back for sure, because I have managed really well so far.

My first week into Minter Ellison was quite an adventure. On the first day, I went to work promptly at 8.30am, and to my surprise there were a lot of boxes lying around and seemed like we were moving house, and true to my guess, we were, moving from Minter Ellison Lawyers to Squire Sanders Global Legal. So from the 1^st of Oct 2011 we will be known as Squire Sanders (SS), now I had nothing to do with that, in fact 14 out of the 18 partners at Minter Ellison voted to leave for Squire Sanders, now I don’t have the complete details of the merger, but from the P.R point of view, it’s called Major Re-Branding is in need. So, for the past few weeks the whole team at Minter Ellison has been working towards this re-branding dateline, most of our events carry the Squire Sanders banners, and we remind all our lawyers the importance of rebranding this image of the firm from Minter Ellison to Squire Sanders, we have re-branded from the littlest thing such as pens and brochures, to the bigger more important aspects of promoting the new image that we have taken, such as informing the clients and partners of every small rebranding step that has been taken so they are up to date.

Since my first week, it’s been a huge learning process. So here are the top three things I’ve learned after my first week in the law firm:

1. You’re no longer individual – Since where I went to school is Malaysia, it was easy to make a name for yourself. But as much as people say that every individual is unique, I believe in the working class there is no such thing as individual.” Of course your mother would tell you differently, as she would me. However, in the city there are at least 100 other people on any given street just like you, dressed like you, with jobs just like you, carrying take-away coffee just like you. And they probably even make more money than you.

2. Remember your fundamentals- Getting acclimated to university was easy. The assimilation process was very slow and step-laden. However, in the professional world everyone expects you to be caught up, competent and willing to produce. And fast. Though it’s nice for people to explain to you what you need to write, pitch, read or understand in vague, quickly defined terms, it’s also very hard to retain and understand every directive given. You need to be on your toes at all times and not forget the fundamentals like editing, clean writing, etc.

3. PR is NOT dead- Though many would probably disagree with me, those people are most likely talking about small start-ups or ventures that have not yet received mainstream attention. In the large economy, companies still need PR help, and journalists don’t mind working with PR. No my friends, PR is alive and well. Of course the scope of the industry is changing completely, but the business is still there.

I’ll have a lot more to tell everyone in my next blog, Next time we’ll talk about how I think Events is a huge P.R tool that can be used in so many different ways.

But for now, I’m just trying to keep up.