Community, Transparency & PR

I hope everyone is enjoying the placement experience and taking with them an abundance of new encounters, skills and general knowledge from working within the field of PR. I certainly am!

This is my first post and I decided to wait until now so that I had a couple of weeks of my placement to be able to contribute appropriately to the posts.

I am doing my placement with PR consulting firm, Clarity Communications in Subiaco. Lucky for me, the office is at the top of my street so getting to and from is always a delightful stroll.

For the purposes of respecting company and client confidentiality, I will refrain from mentioning employee or client names, as well as specific project details. Those that I do mention I have obtained permission to do so.

Clarity has a number of high-profile clientele, including Rio Tinto, Vodafone, Woodside, BP, the Public Transport Authority, the Western Australian Football Commission and AMP, among others. Clarity also undertakes pro-bono work for the Barking Gecko Theatre Company, a WA professional theatre company for young people (www.barkinggecko.com.au). Such a community partnership aligns itself with one of Clarity’s key values of giving back to the community. In addition, Clarity takes on work experience students from both high schools and universities throughout the year as part of their community engagement activities.

Clarity is unique in that the organisation is made up of a PR team, a graphic design team and a Web team. We learn at uni how to ‘brief’ a design company, but Clarity has the added benefit of doing it all in-house. This, to me, makes sense. Having the three teams under the same roof allows for continuity of flow within a project and cuts out much of the ‘communicative traffic’ and time between consultancies. And, of course, this form of organisational structure is likely to positively impact the organisation’s bottom line.

Recently, I was lucky enough to join a PR team meeting on media relations. The head of the graphics team, another director of the business, was also invited to attend. This director very much valued being there as they were able see how PR operated within the context of the media and how their field could contribute and add value to today’s PR techniques. For example, blogging and iGoogle were greatly discussed, and I learned that iGoogle is now being used as one means of in-house media monitoring by using keywords to track relevant media coverage for a client.

The meeting was also very interesting from the point of view of learning about different media, their operations and how each channel their news. For example, Channel 9 has a strong overall focus on crime and will often open news bulletins on this topic, whilst the ABC is more politically oriented.

During the meeting, one of the PR consultants told a story relating to her previous job as the morning news presenter on Nova 93.7. It was her job to source and write the news, as well as read it on air (apparently typical of commercial radio news). Every morning she would receive about 200 (!) media releases and she would read ALL of them.

In the early days in the job, she mentioned how she read two excruciatingly boring paragraphs of a release from a prominent WA organisation, couldn’t bear to read any more and so threw it out. The next morning, it was front-page news in The West Australian! The ‘newsworthy’ part was buried down at the bottom of the release and, being such an unexciting release, was overlooked.

So, two points to keep in mind for media releases:

1. Always put the newsworthy material at the top of the release (as we’re already taught at uni); and
2. If you’re the person receiving media releases to develop story ideas from, always read through the entire release before dismissing it.

This PR consultant learned the hard way, and therefore read every word of every release she received thereafter.

By having the contribution of both PR and Web-based minds applied to the process of media relations, the meeting proved very interesting and thought provoking. We all came away having learned something new. Not long after, the updated media relations process checklist for all work carried out by Clarity was pinned up next to every desk and is the process by which employees now follow when dealing with media relations. I was glad to be a part of its update!

What impresses me most about this organisation to date (including its clientele) is its commitment to the community and the use of transparency in the work that it carries out. At uni, we often focus on the larger, multinational organisations and how these organisations (mis)behave in the fight to stay afloat (a sometimes depressing approach to business in general). It is therefore a refreshing reminder that in the workforce there are those whose organisational focus is based around the improvement and contribution to an operating society, in addition to running a successful business. One may wish to argue otherwise, as is the case of Milton Friedman, but at the end of the day, this is the society in which we live and it’s wonderful to see that not everyone is out for the jugular.

It would be great to hear other's opinions on how their organisation operates (be mindful of confidential information though), so if you feel like adding to this it'd be greatly welcomed.

Enjoy the placement experience and will post again soon.

Claire