Thursday, March 31, 2016

So much different form others

Dear all,

I finished my placement at first day of March. I really felt appreciate and grateful that SOPB willing to give me this opportunity to explore public relations practice as well as palm oil industry.

My job scopes are slightly different from others classmates in this blog. Most of my classmates focus on media clippings and various events. I also expected I will have the similar tasks as them.

Our department scans through online media daily but not including offline media such as local newspaper. We only scan through the printed media when we had sent out press release to local press for our events. The local presses that we focused on are Borneo Post, Utusan Borneo and See Hua Daily News. These three presses are having the highest readership coverage in Sarawak.

One of the Borneo Post for media scanning.

The media scanning includes the industry news as well. Initially, we went through the online media and picked the positive industry news for the purpose of sharing to our employees. We sent out the selected industry news and daily motivational quote internally via email in order to boost the motivational level of employee. However, they are now deciding to send out the negative news (such as the market price of palm oil is dropping because of several factors.) to employee because they should aware of every single movement of the industry.

During my internship with SOPB, I been given a task to sort out the documents in the files accordingly. I found out that the year 2015’s newspaper cutting file is not so effective when we want to refer to the old newspaper cutting. 

Some files are waiting to be settle.

I suggested to standardize the format of media clippings rather than just cut and paste the media clippings. My executive agreed and asked me to draft a format out as well as listed out the details needed. I ever did a same thing during Media Relations class so I managed to come out with a format that satisfied by my executive. After he finish amended the format, I started to sort the 2016’s newspaper cutting with the new format.

My media scanning experience is slightly different with others. Looking forward to hear more media scanning methods from this blog.

Warmest Regards,
Chung Jia Yiing
17136837 / 7e2a1122

Curtin University Sarawak, Malaysia

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Caslyn,

I find it really interesting that SOPB utilise their own media to communication overall values and highlight the companies market position with various printed articles. I do think it is a fabulous idea to do so as it highlights the reality of what is being said for the company from an external source. Like you said I believe it would work as positive motivation to see your efforts either paying off or having to work harder for your expected outcome.

I am curious as to why SOPB doesn't check the web when it comes to sourcing articles about the company. As discussed in class the importance and transformation of the web has led to changes in communication of a workplace and given how much can be spread and conveniently accessed by stakeholders I think it would be beneficial for SOPB to start filtering their online presence in the near future.

I thoroughly enjoyed your post and congratulations for finishing your internship.

Regards,
Georgia

Unknown said...

Hi Caslyn! Guess what? We are in the same page for the printed media scanning because my placement also did the scanning for printed media right after we had sent our press release to the local newspapers. We bought newspapers on the next day just to check whether our news has been published by the press or not.