Back to blogging..

Its been a while since i've come back to blog.. This has been one hectic semester! 

But here's a little update...

Majority of my sixth day was spent media monitoring. Wednesdays are a big day for monitoring as all of the new weekly editions of the Community Group’s newspapers are released that day.  A lot of these newspapers carry information about Perth’s eastern region, so it is a great source of articles in relation to EMRC. Some of the publications we monitor are:

• ·      The Echo News
• ·      WA Business News
• ·      The Eastern Reporter
• ·      The Hills Gazette
• ·      The Midland Reporter
• ·      The Southern Gazette
• ·      The Advocate
• ·      The Local Government Focus
• ·      The West Australian; and
• ·      The Financial Review

Articles that relate to EMRC are tracked on a spreadsheet, which is used monthly to track the performance and targets of the Marketing, Communications team.

I spent the rest of the day captioning photographs of the organization, which was to be used in a submission form for Local Governments Leading by Example for the 2011 Western Australian Environment Awards.

I dedicated my next day at EMRC entirely to the research of social media and how it can be used in an organization such as EMRC. I did a lot of brainstorming into the policies used from other local governments, not only in Australia but through out the world, as I felt this would expose me to a lot of variety and different types of governments and policies. The other perspective I took was researching the use of social media from business-to-business. EMRC deals mainly with local governments, but are essentially a business who have other businesses as clients. Even though I have spent many hours researching into social media and how EMRC could use it, I am still very much at the beginning and only starting to form ideas of whether it should be used or not. If you have any ideas or know any policies that you are using in your placement in regards to social media, feel free to comment!

The Western Australian Local Government Association (WALGA) had organized a sundowner on Friday afternoon, which I was lucky to be invited to. It was organized specifically for the Communications or Marketing/PR teams within WALGA. The sundowner was a great event to meet and introduce myself to people, as well as learn about the roles that people play within local government. From going to this event, I ended up meeting a lot of people that had also just finished their professional placement units, and were now working within their industry, or people that had been to Curtin and had completed their placement in years past. This was great as it was a good way to start a conversation and learn about people, not to mention the fact that I could relate to everyone in the room too! This was the first networking event I’d ever been to, so I was quite nervous… luckily a lady started talking to me and started introducing me to everyone in the room. It was truly a great experience! I managed to give me email address to a few people in case they ever needed my help, as well as be given some of their cards while being told “feel free to contact me whenever you need”. It’s amazing to see a network of people out there in the world, who are just waiting to help and always offer advice (even to a complete stranger like me!). It definitely makes the “real word” far less scary for me!

The best part of going to this sundowner was seeing a room full of people just like me… Very comforting indeed!

Aditi Subramanya

14166611 – Curtin University, Bentley Campus