Rolling out social media to a Mining Company...

Right now I am ten days into my placement and absolutely loving it.

I am at INPEX which is a worldwide oil and gas exploration and production with more than 70 active projects globally. I have been working within the External Affairs team which consists of 13 members all of whom are extremely passionate about the work they do and have been more than happy to lend me a hand or answer any questions I might have. Working within such a large and diverse company has certainly broadened my scope of the Public Relations world as to just how much time and effort goes into every event, every media release and every decision made behind closed doors. 

It is a very busy time at INPEX as they are in the construction phase of the Ichthy's LNG Project, a world class project implemented to develop the gas and condensate field in the Browse Basin, the biggest of its kind it is expected to produce LNG for the next 40 years and represents the largest discovery of hydrocarbon liquids in Australia in the last 40 years. 

Last week I attended a meeting regarding the new implementation of a social media outlet internally amongst employees at INPEX, this social media platform is called Yammer and is essentially a Facebook for the work place, I was more than intrigued as to how the company would get all employees on board in order to establish new and broader channels of communication within the company. Little did I know that it was me who would be developing a communication plan over the next few days as to how this implementation of a new social media platform would work. I was originally terrified at the thought of having to develop and present my plan to the highest levels of management but it turned out to be an extremely rewarding experience.

At University we are given weeks to produce communication plans for major assignments and we are generally in groups, I had three days to complete the plan and all I had was my own ideas and a doubt as to whether they would be good enough or not. You really don't understand how hard PR professionals work to produce such documents at such a high standard and in such a short amount of time. For the next three days I barely left my desk, not even to eat and at the end of it all I had produced something worthy of showing my supervisor and upper management, I was proud of the work I had done as were they.

For now I have a meeting scheduled with the manager in charge of social media at INPEX to present to him my plan and my ideas for getting all employees involved and onboard with the new social media platform, but I now feel confident enough to go into that meeting with my own ideas ready to present. 

I certainly hope in a future blog post I can let you know how that meeting went!

I am really excited about the challenges my placement holds for and I now understand why people say this unit is one of the most rewarding!

Until next time..

Hayley