Today was my first day as PR intern at JW Marriott Bangkok. I was super nervous but also super excited to take all the things I learned in my course and apply them in the real world. I knew this would be a good experience as doing PR, especially in a city is extremely high pressure and there will always be something to do and something new to be exposed to.
Right off, I got introduced to the PR manager who gave me and another intern a long briefing about the 3 brands we'll be looking after under the Marriott name. Each brand has a unique writing style which will be used for the press release. We continued later with her explaining the different tasks we had to do under PR including drafting press releases, monitoring media clippings, event planning and strategy. All of the things felt very familiar as I had already covered them in PR 220 but she did mention calculating PR value which was something I wasn't too familiar with. This is basically calculating the ROI by measuring the inches of space any mention of the hotel took up and multiplying it by the ad value, followed by the PR value. All this has to be recorded in a spreadsheet which will make up the basis of the monthly media clippings report.
After this, me and the other intern got on with our work which was going through all the different magazines sent to the department, finding any mention of JW and marking it down. Then we had a meeting with the event organizer about Thursday's press trip where members of the press will come down to view the hotel and which featured an 'Amazing Race' style contest to make things more memorable. This will be a major event that we interns have to take part in and we were allowed to give our input and suggestions on how to improve it.
After that it was back to the media monitoring and then it was time to call it a day.
I definitely feel excited about what else is to come now that the initial nervousness has worn off and I know more what I am expected to do. Everyone is super friendly and even though the hours are long, it's quite enjoyable as there was (and hopefully will be later on as well) lots to do. This wasn't how I expected it to be because I thought PR would be rigidly strict and stressful but you still have fun as well! I think PR 220 and 250 will be the most useful for my time here as I will be expected to help out a lot in the creation of PR documents, more so than any planning or strategy making.
I look forward to my first big PR event on Thursday!
Till then!
Christy Lau 15130659
Bentley (for Sem 1, 2013)
2 comments:
Glad to hear you are having fun over there. I just found out about PR value too when I was doing media monitoring for Volvo Malaysia account on my first day of intern. Doing media monitoring is fun but the biggest challenge is to summarise non-English news such as Chinese news article. I can't speak nor read Chinese at all but gladly there is another intern here that can translate it for me. My advice, learn as many languages as you can.
Whao! JW Marriott! Nice! It's really a great experience for us to gain extra knowledge and experience in the real business world. And seems like everyone are doing the same task -- media monitoring at the very beginning. Haha! Let's enjoy our PR life!
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