PR Events

What an exciting week it's been for me working at the JW Marriott! I'm loving learning more about the real life duties of a PR manager from my very talented boss.

Last week on Thursday, I had my first event which was a press trip for international members of the media who toured various Marriott hotels around Thailand. The first two were beach hotels and our hotel was the last stop before they headed back home. The purpose was to highlight to them the MICE properties of the hotel. MICE is an acronym for meeting, incentive, conference and exhibition. JW Marriott as a luxury business hotel offers facilities to accommodate the business traveler's needs, such as meeting rooms, an executive lounge and specialized executive rooms to stay in. My job leading up to that involved the planning and organizing of the activities they would take part in during their stay. Me and the other intern sat down with the PR manager to discuss the activities chosen which was actually a clever and fun way to get them to remember important facts of our hotel so they could go back and write about it.

After that, it was out duty to create the tools needed, such as a crossword board and a power point presentation of a JW Marriott style quiz game, testing them on the important facts of the hotel. On the day itself, we had to standby and make sure things ran smoothly and be on hand so that we could help out if needed. I ran to the different locations to check with the staff that everything was set before the media came to visit. It was tiring but everything went smoothly which was good and hearing the very positive feedback from one of the cluster PR people that came with the media was great. Hopefully, we'll be seeing some more coverage of the hotel in the news soon! Last Monday brought some difficulty with one media who was asking more than what he would give us back in PR value, and we had some debate about how to handle him as it was a delicate situation. Thankfully, it went ok. This is the real trouble of PR-deciding whether the return and PR value for the media is worth what we are giving to them, whether it's a free lunch (for a food review) or the use of a hotel room for a night (an extra cost so they can do the review).

And then yesterday night, I attended an event hosted by a local magazine which was a good opportunity to network and meet important people in the industry and of course to maintain the important relationship between media and PR. I had two events this Thursday to attend but we had to pick only one. I learned that you have to set your priorities in PR and as one was for the launch an up and coming magazine against one for a party for a magazine we already have good connections with, my boss decided we should go to the first one so we could try and create new connections.

That's all for now!

Christy Lau Su Mei
15130659
Curtin Bentley (Sem 1, 2013)