Throughout the duration of my internship, social media was a big focus. Sunset has social media pages for all of their separate events along with official Sunset Events pages. On facebook, these pages are a great tool in creating two-way relationships with not only the punters but also large media partners and upcoming bands/venues. Only from working on maintaining these facebook pages did I actually experience how valuable they can be at building relationships and getting contacts with really important people!
Building relationships is also a major part of the culture at Sunset. Their workplace is very laid back and operates like a family as there are only about eight full time employees! The managing director, Dave Chitty, is very adamant about everyone working together and getting along as a team. Whilst I was doing my internship, we all participated in a weekly yoga session, every Wednesday at 11am. This was actually a great experience as you got to know the team and actually enjoy the working experience. We also went out to a group lunch and I really enjoyed meeting and working with everyone which made my internship a lot more meaningful. This team environment is also expressed to the public using social media and the internet which demonstrates that good employee relations can have many positive effects for an organisation. Did everyone else enjoy their working environment as much as I did??
The team doing our Wednesday morning Yoga session!
Not only was employee relations valued within communications at Sunset but as was media relations. They currently have in place a lot of strong long term relationships with various print, online and radio outlets which makes the communication job a lot easier! If you pick up any entertainment magazine such as The Wire, Drum Perth or X-Press I can pretty much guarantee a Sunset event will feature in there somewhere! However, having such strong relationships with different medias can sometimes cause problems. During my internship, there was a stage where The West threatened to break a media release embargo. This was because the information in the release was being featured on Triple J radio, however this is national. So because it was being broadcasted over east, people listening to the radio in Perth would have received the info a couple of hours before The West was able to publish their info (due to the embargo time). So they threatened to publish the info at the same time it would be heard on Triple J. In the end, there wasn’t really much Sunset could do to stop them. What do you think can be done about embargo times?? Do you think the West had the right to break it seeing as the info would be heard on Triple J anyway? In my opinion, I didn’t see the point in not allowing The West to do so if it was going to harm the relationship.
So relationship building was a major aspect of my internship and only by the end did I realise the real importance of it!! I hope your internships were just as insightful as mine was!
Melissa
Curtin Bentley Campus
