I have tested all my skills and now I know what I want!

Throughout my 20-day placement with Event and Conference Co I have been able to understand the implications of Public Relations. Gaining the hands on experience in a broad variety of public relation activities I am more appreciative, aware and open minded of how much research and effort PR practitioners undertake daily.

Zawawi and Johnston (2009) quote "The deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organisation (or individual) and its (or their) publics."

I understand now the true meaning of PR and how important it is for an organisation to communicate effectively to their publics on a regular basis. In this modern diverse society it is essential for organisations to maintain Grunig’s two-way communication model in order to maintain ongoing overall business success. Moreover having the skills to multi –task, always open for comments/criticisms, being self-effacing, continuously engaging with publics daily, and to help and support others is essentially required.

This is a broad overview of activities I have conducted throughout my PR internship:

• Hands on experience at the Perth Tourism Industry Exchange Awards.

• Brainstorm: Marketing, ways to build the ECC business.

• Conduct blogs for their website.

• Conduct media releases.

•  Consider sponsorship opportunities for Event Series events.

•  Communicate with key vendors and research quotes for venues.  

• Brainstorm ideas for donated gift ideas for the Creativity in Practice workshop.

• Create a list of event stylists/designers to present at the creative workshop.

• Research and develop a database of bloggers for the #INSTAGRAM event, and ideas to help the bloggers interact with one another at the event (prior and during)

• Research and create a database for potential guest speakers for the PTSD Gala Dinner.

From writing blogs, media releases, creating event plans, risk management plans, creating ideas for social media tactics, to basic coffee runs and posting letters, this all matters! Whichever task they assign me to will be a reflection on how I can effectively and efficiently work as a potential PR practitioner within the real world. Having both Rebecca and Anna as my mentors have opened my eyes up to the importance of events, why we need events, and how PR is implemented to planning and evaluating events.

Throughout the Public Relations course of study I have gained an understanding that, a public relations graduate should strive for a set of specialized skills. These skills include strong communication skills, strong writing skills, international mindset, creativity, and an understanding of how communications theory and PR informs public relations practice. My goals at the beginning of the placement were to develop all of these specialized skills and become an important asset to their organisation. I have been able to gain most of these specialised skills at ECC however I want to achieve higher and continuously work on these skills throughout my career. This particular unit has been the foremost beneficial unit throughout my degree, for the very first time I now know what drives me to go further in my career. I have realised my future lies more with managing events, rather than just focusing on public relations alone. Although my internship has come to an end, I am still supporting Event and Conference Co by volunteering at their events. Given that working at Crown Perth, Perth Arena or even specialise in planning weddings and music festivals would be my ideal career.

Follow me on INSTAGRAM @siobhansmith to gain more of an insight of my work experience placement!

Thank you for your time guys!

~ Siobhan Smith ~

Breaking the Language Barrier

For the past weeks during internship, i always end up having to deal with many stakeholders and farmers that owns and work at the field of the palm oil plantations, its not easy because of the language barrier i faced. This is one of the hardships i'm facing, trying to understand what they are saying or asking. But fortunately everyone here already got used to the languages that has been spoken here and so i seek some help from them and soon enough i'm able to understand some of the language and be able to converse with the stakeholders and farmers properly.

On the other hand, i am now given the role of handling the paperwork of the license registration at the counter and the reason being is that my supervisor wants me to converse more with the stakeholders and farmers to learn the language they speak. I learned a lot everyday and i'm thankful for being able to serve in MPOB.

Future Music Festival Management

What a crazy experience I've had over the past week. Everything that we have worked towards came down to this one week.

All week was spent organising and managing all the 15 volunteers we had come into the office from Monday through to Saturday.

Whilst doing this, I also was also contacting and updating the staffing sheet for both Future Music and Good Life Festival. 

To get the staff, we put out gumtree ads, which over 500 people looked at and hundreds responded to. I needed to make sure every division of the Festival had the right amount of volunteers and that everyone would be able to get to work done. I read resume after resume assigning them to the right and most suited role to their abilities.

 

With working the whole week, there were also exciting perks, such as getting the chance to look at and help prepare each individual international artist riders. This is what they requested to have in their green rooms and what drinks and food they wanted. I also got to see the set times, which is all exciting when you're working backstage at your first festival.

At Future Music Festival I was local artist Liaison. I arrived at 7am, getting to the backstage of the Cocoon tent. I arrived to find there was no spot for me to sign on the artists so I had to quickly organise with the event managers to get 2 tables and a marque. After setting up my area, I waited for my artists to arrive. I was hoping they would sign in with me with a maximum of ten minutes before they are meant to be on stage. Lots of the starting acts didn't sign in with me, leaving me in crisis mode as many of them needed an Artist pass to get on stage as their local ones wouldn't allow it. This meant I was having to run around the arena trying to find them all in time. Luckily, everyone was where I told them to be so that when the gates opened, they could start playing. When I got back to my sign on desk, just to be sure that this wouldn't happen again; I messaged everyone telling them to come sign in with me as soon as they came to the arena which should be at a minimum an hour before their set start time. I would then send a reminder text to the artists ten minutes before their set, that they should be at their stage ready to take over from the artist before them. From then on , everything went extremely smoothly and the day ran completely according to plan.

Being the local artist liaison for Future, I had to create my own run sheet. This ran extremely smoothly on the day. I had made a run sheet that would allow me to know when they arrived, when they had to head to stage, where they were playing and what time their set started and finished. I also had a column for if they had handed in their APRA forms, invoices and if they had collected or had their dedicated rider. 

At GoodLife, I had a much more involved role. I was the Meet and Greet Co-ordinator, this meant I was backstage where the Artist Sign on was for the International Artists. Being the Meet and Greet Co-ordinator, I had to go pick up all artists either from stage or the artist commune area and take them to the VIP Ultimate Meet and Greet Area. The Artists only had a maximum of 20 minutes to take photographs with fans. The lesser known artists were easy to manage, but when it came to artists like Timmy Trumpet and Will Sparkers, there were hundreds of people wanting photographers. Here I would have to manage the crowd, telling them to make friends as no one would be able to get a photograph alone nor can they take 'selfies.' This was an extremely fun role as it tested my time, crowd and crisis management.
We also had a few international stars we had to manage. These stars would go to a meet and greet where they would be there for an hour or so as an even larger crowd would be waiting.

First Month and I can't complain!

Wow, what an amazing first few weeks I've had at my internship.

I've been lucky enough to land myself at Mellen Events working in the Promotion, Activations and Marketing sector! Everyone here is just like what you'd think a music events company would be like, they're amazingly nice, funny, creative, smart, friendly, quirky and beyond everything just super cool.

From day one I've been straight into doing work, I found myself making a spreadsheet of bloggers to invite them to the CoLAB Festival at UWA and asking them to cover the event. This was an ongoing task requiring constant updating, management and communication. I was sending out press releases, posters and accreditation forms to all the bloggers who had replied.

On my second day I worked with the awesome marketing team and brainstormed on how to market and promote CoLAB to the right demographic. Through doing a quick run-through we figured that the best ways were through Facebook on a sunday night, STM and Facebook advertisement.

The real fun came when I was asked to work backstage at A Evening On The Green at the Rodriguez and Jimmy Barnes shows. Here I was doing backstage work, going through the run sheet and making sure everything was going smoothly for the night ahead.

At Stereosonic I was required to create and manage a Promotional team for Future Music Festival. Here we handed out stickers and just promoted the festival, this was a bit of a challenge as we had a bit of problems with the council and the opposing festival Stereonsonic not liking that we were promoting our festival at theres. This made me put in my crisis management skills and find a way to keep everyone happy which was much easier than I thought!

Hopefully in the New Year I'll get to do a bit more PR related things but I can't complain about the work that I've been asked to do because it's been so much fun!

Merry Christmas to everyone! Hope everyone's internships aren't stressing them out too much :)