Planning and Understanding

Hey PR Experiences,

So its the end of another week. Hope everyone's week was full of learning :P

Yesterday i finalised my business proposal to be sent to in-house PR/Marketing departments of large corporations in Western Australia for Dynomedia to acquire more business and raise awareness. That has gone to the printing press to make the cover and package so it will be quite exciting when all my work is materialized and i can start to see results.

Today we planned the wedding expo that we will be attending on the 21st and 22nd of August (in my previous post i said it was sooner, but its not). It made me realise just how much planning must go into trade shows and how important it is for all those attending to be fully informed of the key messages, the set-up and how everything is going to pan out. I had to quick educate myself (i love Google) on the ins-and-outs of staging and lighting so i could ring up and get quotes without sounding completely stupid.

Lesson learnt: PR practitioners are required to know at least a little about everything and if you don't, quickly fill yourself in before you make any phone calls. There are somethings you cant just guess your way through, especially in the field of technicalities and technologies (some terms just aren't common knowledge).

We then had a team meeting and stepped out the size of the space we had to work with at the expo and what we were required to say, do and wear. There is 3 of us working on the PR checklist for the event so together we wrote up a checklist of what we will require, what we need to reiterate to interested people and the roles each of us will be doing. We also formulated the outlines of the brochures that will be available, the pricing of packages etc.

The tradeshow coach website was an enormous help to me in trying to understand the most important aspects of tradeshows and the role of public relations. What was constantly reiterated was the need of following up leads. So we made sure that the 3 of us would be in the office the few days after the show to call and email our leads, add them to our databases and make sure that we get a good ROI out of the expo.

I continue to be excited about getting out there and putting on my public relations hat for two days! :) Being so involved in the whole process is such a good experience and something i can apply and understand in the future.