Getting a "clear" perspective of public relations

Firstly I would like to note that this will be my first official public blog and I would absolutely love feedback! Constructive criticism or just a handful of compliments are encouraged please! I know I can ramble as my brain works in very mysterious ways, so hopefully I do not bore you! 

So today marks the end of my second week at Clear Public Relations consultancy (also known as the Clear Group). I am situated in London, UK for this internship as I decided I wanted some global experience and a chance to network with people on the other side of the world (and also the fact I am a travel freak). It was interesting coming to the UK when brexit was introduced, and this was the topic of the office nearly every single day so far!
The Clear Group consultancy was established in 1998 and is a small successful creative PR business running in central London that is involved in b2b and consumer PR services (I have included a link to their homepage for more information.)
So far it has been a really positive experience as everyone at the office is lovely and helpful. On my first day I came to the office early to make a good impression. I dressed up professionally and shook each of my colleagues hands. My first impressions of the office were that it is like a small and cosy house, it has a kitchen, bathroom, garden and shed, a boardroom and of course a work space with 6 desks and clutter, so much clutter, everywhere. Magazines, papers, flyers, books, notes, client materials you name it the office was full of it! As well as boxes and stock to giveaway as prizes. 
The managing directors of Clear are two very nice and experienced professionals who work with a few different clients and have three other employees in the office helping them out. To get this internship I had an interview over Skype and then I was offered a place for the internship.
I was handed a starter pack which contained files such as "Welcome to  Clear" and "Handover Notes". I flipped through them getting to know how the business was run. One of the things reiterated in the files was that tea every hour is how they deal with all the workloads (so making tea and drinking a lot of tea is a requirement here, which I honestly love, I am in London after all!)
As I mentioned there are a few clients that the firm deals with and they include a European cheese company called Dziugas, a sausage company called debbie&andrew's, a lock, safe and security company called Burg Wachter and some more but the main ones I am working on and focus on are those three. Being a consultancy that deals with different clients means having to be extremely organised and time conscious I am learning, as the time goes on there are more and more different tasks I need to achieve, my diary and notebook are full of notes and checklists.

My tasks so far are to pick competition winners on Facebook for Dziugas and Burg Wachter (which are easy and fun to do) and reply to the Facebook messages and update the scheduled post to announce new competitions via Hootsuite, which I must do every Monday. I also send out prizes to the Facebook competition winners when they replied with their details and update the relevant files with the information. We send out different cheese every week which I think is quite cool! 

I update UK competition websites such as Loquax and Prize Finder which help boost competition involvement and was easy to do! I also do a lot of screen-shotting of positive comments for the monthly reviews and work with photoshop a lot. I also research into different topics for the different clients such as events, products, media scanning, blogger and editor research and much more. I proof read media releases, emails, Facebook posts and anything the managing directors need me to edit/ read. I have also learnt a new PR tool called PRmax which helps find relevant media and media contacts to any topic and can save data and figures from public interest.

I have so far communicated with media on the phone and by email and have gained approval from an editor of a local magazine and newspapers to run our competition in their weekly print (a small achievement but am proud of it as I had many rejections!)

I have also been to an exhibition for one of our clients which unfortunately went poorly as there was not the expectant number of attendees but I got to see other presentations and ideas from other unique companies which sound very interesting. 

The days are long but they go quite quickly.  I think I can say now that I have gotten out of the classroom, that I really enjoy this industry. I think that it is very much for me and I am very glad I have chosen it as a major. I think I can thank Curtin University for making PR Internship 3002 a core unit so that students can delve into the workplace and create a clear and better perspective of what we want to do and where we want to be as public relations professionals.