PR agencies - my views

I am into the 6th week of my internship program at Cohn & Wolfe XPR.

When i first got this post, i had the intention to learn as much as i can here, on top of that i have always wanted to be given the opportunity of a conversion after the internship period.

Today when i look back i am very satisfied with what i have gained during my stint here, came in as a new guy who knows next to nothing other than the practical knowledge of Public Relations and to be honest not much of that knowledge is very useful. After weeks and weeks of "Intern Jobs" such as media monitoring, monthly reports and  article translations. But as the days passed i see myself getting more involved in the works at the office. In the past weeks i have been involved in multiple brainstorming sessions with the team, also i have pitched five different laptops from my client to as many as 30 different media partners, which gave me the opportunity to be introduced to the media even if its on a digital point of view. Got to localize a press release from an American context to a Singaporean context, seems like an easy task at first but when i started doing it, it seems like everything has to change in the article. I am very happy with the day to day work that i am doing now, other than the fact that i work a 12 hour day 3 times a week which brings me to the topic of PR practitioners being pushed to the limit.

There are 2 parties that would push us into newer heights first and foremost is the clients, people who pay you to do their PR work, in their mind they are king and queens that can demand for everything. They are not entirely wrong. they are the people who pay us the money. On the other hand we are also always being asked to provide more to the media, things like 1-to-1 meeting and interview with the client, extended testing periods of products and the most common of all is when the media partner asks can they release bits of information earlier to their readers.

however i know that this may be the norm for the industry and i have to say that the amount of workload that is given to us gives us the opportunity to really work under pressure and also to be able to absorb information faster than what we usually do.

i am glad that i got to do this internship as it has gave me an opportunity to see how the actual public relations industry runs and then evaluate if i am suitable for the job.

Launch Event.

Hi all,

My name is Roche from Curtin Singapore, i am currently interning at Cohn & Wolfe XPR. Honestly at times i feel so overwhelmed by the work load here at the agency. But on days i am just thankful that i am on board.

The New Corolla Altis *I am the one on the far right*

My team and i were at the Singapore media launch of the new Toyota Corolla Altis, the experience here was amazing and definitely something that one would not learn in a classroom or in a text book. 

The day started with registering our media friends when they arrive and during that phase i noticed many of the main traditional media were present at the launch. The event was attended by the writers from Straits Times, Business Times and the automobile publications such as Torque and many others. 

The event started with the Chief Engineer of Toyota, Mr Yasui giving a speech about the specification of the vehicle. The agency's role during this phase was to help collate questions for Toyota and send these collated questions back to the client, acting as a middle man and also to iron out all the duplicated questions. This has to be done because there were just too many media friends at the event.
Soon after i was facilitating and interview between 2 bloggers and the CEO of Borneo Motors, who distributes Toyota vehicles in the country. There were many interesting questions asked by them, questions such as "what would Borneo Motors do with the high COE prices now."  I was thinking to myself  "What can they do about it? shouldn't you be asking the government that question?" lessons learnt from the few interviews that i was sitting in, the PR representative in the interview is present to calm tensions and remove away the awkward silences if there is one, also to help the client prepare answers for the frequently asked questions.
After the interview, the rest of the day was spent  building relationship with the media friends there, because i am new to the scene, my supervisor was very nice to actually do introductions for me, i personally enjoy the talks with the writers. Honestly whats there not to like about chatting with people on a workday with Champagne!

This to me is the interesting side of  our job, away from all the reports and media monitoring, an event or two in a month would give me my needed fresh air!

Who are the important Media now?

Tomorrow my team would be running a media event for the launch of a NEW CAR!! I am unable to state the name of the car due to confidentiality issues. 

But during the inviting and scheduling the media partners for the event and test driving of the car, I seem to notice that there is still a very high priority given to the mainstream media. We always try our best to schedule them for the priority time slots and give them the best interview timings.

I feel that the alternative media, mainly bloggers and community influencers should be given an equal priority to the interviews. Many people these days would search forums and blogs when they are deciding to buy a car, to have a good review on these pages would be very beneficial for the brand.

I have spoken to my superior and the reason they gave me was that in Singapore, there are only few daily newspapers and news channels, on the other hand there are so many blogs out there which makes it very hard to satisfy all bloggers with what they want, the easiest way is to feed the mainstream media with the information and when they publish their articles the social media world would be able to get their information from there.

Will be submitting another post post-event!

Cheers!

The process of getting an Internship

Hi All,

My name is Roche Kwan, a final year student at Curtin Singapore. I chose to do my internship module as my final module so that i give myself the option to carry on with whichever organization i am with during my internship.

Deciding which agency was not an easy task, the popular or larger agencies are always the favorite pick by all students and it is very competitive to secure a place in such an agency. I felt that even if i were to land a job at the large agencies, the learning opportunities may not be there as these agencies would not risk allowing their interns to get their hands on the important tasks. I did not want to do any in-house Public Relations as it would narrow my scope and i would be doing similar tasks most of the time. That left me with the smaller sized agencies, it was surprising to find out that in Singapore there were many small sized agencies, even though most of them were Marketing Communications agencies which had a larger focus on Marketing.

When i sent out my resumes to the few agencies i chose, i was hoping that whichever agency that i would be interning with must have an interesting group of people that i can work with. I always felt that the people around me when i am working is the most important aspect to a job because if the team is bright and cheerful, working hours would not be such a bore and i would always look forward to the job.

3 agencies called me down for interviews and writing tests. When i heard that there was a writing test, the first thing that came to mind was "what do they want me to write?" i remember myself reading up as much on PR writing as i could for three days. The interviews and test went smoothly, and during the interviews, i have made up my mind on which agency i wanted the most. Cohn & Wolfe XPR was the agency that i wanted the most because of their clientele, they have a strong presence in the gaming technology and video games industry. When i received a acceptance letter form another agency i was very reluctant to accept it, i decided to delay my reply for as long as i could, in hope that Cohn & Wolfe would reply me. Thankfully i got accepted by Cohn & Wolfe within the week and i accepted the offer immediately.

When i entered the office for my first day, i was shocked by the work that they have given me, on my first day i was asked to localize a press release and also invited to participate in a brainstorming session that the team was having. During a short meeting with my supervisors, they told me that the company's client volume is growing faster than the number of employees and  that was the reason that i did not have an orientation period and was thrown straight into the work blender.