Understanding and appreciating Wines!

For the past week or so, I was tasked with a new event/project that deals with wine! In a nutshell, a client that deals with wine is holding several media events and media lunch/dinner in China and Singapore. The purpose of the event was to publicize their new series of wine, and to introduce their award-winning winemaker, who was the man behind the brand. The client wanted to reach out to the China market, gaining several coverage (print/online) and media interviews for the winemaker.

I was tasked to only handle the China events, in which they were visiting six cities in total. Initially, when I was briefed with regards to this account, I felt very nervous because it was my first time handling a project. I thought to myself, what if I made mistakes? I did not want that to happen because it would look bad on us. Though I was very thankful to have colleagues to guide me along the way!

Here was what I had to do:
- Preparing a media list for the six different cities
- Contact the various media outlets, explaining to them my purpose of calling, getting their email address, etc.
- Translating press release, biography, other related documents into Chinese language
- Sending out press release to targeted media on media list
- Follow-up calls and liaising with media on daily basis

Eventually, we did manage to secure a good number of media outlets to attend the event. There were also journalists who expressed interest in conducting an interview with the winemaker.There were several obstacles I met with along the way. At the first city, we had an interview arranged for the winemaker. The interview was scheduled at 10am, but the day before at 5pm, the journalist casually dropped me an email saying he could not make it.

I was in great shock and immediately called the journalist, in hope to persuade him to carry out the interview. But I apparently could not get him on the line. It was already quite late, and definitely impossible for me to look for other interview opportunities! I felt so upset and angry at the same time. It was like all my hard work had gone to waste and how could someone not honour his words! But, that was when I understood from my colleagues that such situation is quite common in this industry.

After this happened, I tried to ensure that this would not happen for other cities. There were also cases that made me really happy. For example, a media who dropped me an email saying she had great interest in this, and wanted me to make arrangements for an interview. Wow, that really made my day!! The entire team was happy about that too!

So what have I learnt from this? 
- Cultural difference! What I learnt during PR International module definitely played a great part! If I weren't able to converse in Chinese, it would be the largest obstacle. Also, I had to adapt to the way they work because I realised the journalists are very open to providing their mobile contact. I could just ring them on their mobile and communicate with them directly. Or, add them on WeChat to communicate, they are very open to that too! This is different from here in Singapore.

- Staying calm and reacting to crisis! There are several unexpected situations that happened, and I've learnt that the first thing I should be doing is to resolve the problem FIRST before getting all panicky.

- Appreciating wines! Because we have a wine client, we definitely need to have a taste of the wine in order to do PR for our client. So we did have a few wine tasting sessions in the office. It was quite interesting, while tasting the wine and reading the tasting guides.

Here is one of the white wines we have tasted,

I used to not know how to appreciate wine, but probably it gets better after this project! 

I'm glad to have this opportunity to be out of my comfort zone and be familiarize with an area that I have not much clue about! Till my next entry! 

Sherrill