Week One: Cloud Computing & Virtualization

Name: Christoph
Campus: LUCT

Did you guys ever hear about ‘server virtualization’ or ‘cloud computing’? Well, I didn’t, though actually being a quite tech-savvy person (or at least I thought so), before I started my internship at Maisberger GmbH, a Munich-based PR agency with focus on clients from the IT and technology sector. 

The first client I was assigned to deal with was VMware, one of the global leaders in virtualization and cloud infrastructure. My first task was to handle the media clippings of VMware in the German press. I actually thought this would be a very easy –and quite boring - task, but I was wrong. Since I had to categorize the articles according to which product/services/technology they featured and if the articles were positive/neutral/negative, I had to really understand what VMware is doing and what services and technologies VMware offers. This is an extremely complex topic, and it takes some time to get familiar with all the different terms.

During my first week, it was really hard for me to have a good grasp of the topic, and I had to ask my colleagues quite a lot of times what this or that article actually was about. I dealt mostly with specialized IT press, which doesn’t make it any easier since the articles use almost exclusively technical jargon as they are targeted at IT and computer experts. However, my colleagues were all very helpful and also reassured me that they were at the same situation like me when they joined Maisberger and I don’t need to worry about it. Encouraged by that, I also did my own research to learn more about the topic and bit by bit, I understood more about VMware’s business. 

Since I had to do daily media clippings for VMware, I also got to learn and understand more and more about cloud computing etc. through the articles I had to read through. So the daily routine of going through the media clippings actually helped me quite a lot to understand more about this complex topic. Besides that, I also learned how important media clippings are to document the successful work for the client.

How about you guys, did you also have some situations where you learned that actually simple, “boring” tasks such as media clippings are quite important and helpful for your PR work?

Christoph.