First Event: Linde launches first Remote Operating Centre in Malaysia

Before I go into the nitty-gritty of my first event, let me first introduce where am I currently undergoing my internship. I am interning at Edelman Kuala Lumpur, and placed under the corporate practice. In short, I get the opportunity to work with “formal” clients – government bodies, finance institutions, oil & gas companies and so on and so forth.

Moving forward, one of our clients is in-charge of bringing in multinational companies (MNCs) to set up their regional headquarters in Greater Kuala Lumpur by 2020. Linde, an MNC that was brought in  in 2013 were to launch its first Remote Operating Centre (ROC) in Shah Alam, Malaysia. So doing what PR practitioners do best, we were in-charged of helping our client to deal and liaise  with the media.

Here are some of the things I did –

Pre-event:

• Media invite dissemination – Our invitation was sent across to all types of dailies; English, Malay and Chinese as well as business magazines.
•  Media call downs – I was asked to check on the media invite’s receipt and follow-up on RSVPs (I was sort of frustrated that I only got to confirm two media attendance – ONE NIGHT BEFORE THE EVENT, and it was already 9pm!)

Event:

• Media registration – Our team was assigned to welcome and register the media. (Guess what, on the day of the event, another 4 media titles came so we had 6 media titles in total, covering the event! Huge relief!
• Mingle with the media – We did not really mingle with them, but I got the chance to speak to one of the journalists from The Malay Mail, which was cool – it was interesting how she has been writing for auto for the past few years and decided to change to business.
• Refreshments – Malaysians love food. And of course we had the majestic nasi lemak with rendang, curry and other kuih-muih as well.

Post-event:

• Press Release dissemination – We disseminated the event’s press release to all the media titles we have invited to get coverage.
• Media monitoring – The following day, we had to do a manual monitoring, which was to go through all the newspapers manually and check for coverage as well as do an online sweep to check if the news was picked-up by any online news portals.

Since this was my first event, of course I was ecstatic to see the coverage on the newspaper! So here are some of the coverage we've gotten from the event -

Til my next post,

Celeste