I figured with a four week internship it would make sense to post at least once a week, so here goes.
Week one at Go Communications, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
One of the biggest requirements for this unit is to relate the lessons we learn at University to the experiences we gain from our internships.
Already, one week in, I've realised that Public Relations in Malaysia differs quite a bit from the practices we learn in Australia.
One of the first things we learnt in PR Consultancy at Curtin was "the importance of billable hours". From day one it's stressed to us that as consultants it's crucial to record our activities. Our time must be accounted for and this is commonly done through a time-sheet; a sheet that records every minute of our day to ensure the right clients are billed for the correct amount of time worked.
At Go Comm's, they use a different practice to account for their efforts and to show the worth of their work.
This brings me to one of the biggest differences I've noticed so far. At Curtin we were taught that charging clients or showing clients the PR Value of media articles and clippings is old practice and no longer used in Australia, although we weren't really given an exact reason.
In Malaysia this is one of the biggest techniques used by consultants to prove their worth. After discussing this with one of my fellow interns who has grown up in Malaysia but studied in Melbourne he believed this might be a cultural thing. In a paraphrased version of our conversation he went on to say that Malaysians generally want a dollar value to everything, a receipt of their spending so to speak. This made a lot of sense to me and has given me a temporary answer to the oranges and apples of PR worth.
It was interesting to learn the formula, for calculating PR value which went a little something like this.
Article Height X Article Width (which gets converted into columns) X Casual Rate + Colour Cost X likelihood = PR VALUE
The columns, Casual Rate, Colour Cost and Liklihood is derived from a published book called Media Planner Guide Malaysia 2013.
The casual rate and colour cost changes based on the media source and pretty much means the cost of the article and the added costs if published in colour. The likelihood, is a scale from one to ten determining how easy or hard it is for that industry to get published with ten being the hardest, when a number is not provided by a supervisor the default is 4.
It was fun to add a bit of math to my day as it's not overly common in PR.
Once a PR Value is determined we type up a media clippings form, paste in the article and add it to the clients media file, very similar to the Media Clippings activity in PR MEDIA.
The next activity I got to do was a Media Landscape, this was a document we prepared to send to a client. The document listed all the media sources we contact on their behalf and a brief explanation on the type of media they are, including circulation rates and frequency.
It was interesting to have such a broad list of newspapers and magazines as Malaysia has three dominate languages; Malaysian, English and Chinese. Go Communications operates in all three languages to ensure clients reach all potential media platforms.
The most interesting part of my week was when the COO (Chief Operating Officer) asked myself and fellow intern Eve to put together a proposal for Puma. The firm received a really brief, brief (my attempt at PR humour) from Puma, the brief wanted a list of PR tactics that would gain exposure for the Puma Leisure line, underlining that Puma isn't just a sports brand.
Eve and I had just one day to put together as many ideas as we could to present to our boss. It was really interesting to bounce ideas of someone with such a different background to myself and also someone I had just met.
We both agreed that social media needed to be a strong part of our pitch and through further research decided that we needed fun PR activations to gain public exposure, the idea was that these ideas would be interesting enough for the general public to want to post online.
The pitch is this week coming so I better not give too much away but some of our ideas included a touch screen wardrobe, human mannequins, 3D lifestyle backdrops and an online treasure hunt.
Although the week started slow, it went by really quick, I'm not sure if it was because of all the learning or the fact that we had two public holidays. Malaysia has over 18 public holidays a year... I knew I lived in the wrong country.
Until next time.
Hannah
