Third week of internship

This week I drafted out four press releases for different watch models with the help of my in-charge who is also my boss. He typed out in words of how to write a press release to let me use as a guideline when I do up my own releases. With his help, I could easily draft out the content but the facts of the watches I have to slowly Google links by links. As these watches are not the main-stream watch line, the facts of the watches are difficult to find.

After doing up the draft, I was told to do up a media list. At first, I search the contacts of the editors through websites as that was what we are taught in school. My boss said the fastest way is to go to bookshops and look at the magazine and get the contacts from there. In the meantime, I can also look out to what other magazines that we can feature our watches. This kind of method is not something that we can learn in class, we have to experience it in real life to understand the way of working efficiently.

During the week, a customer dropped a private message on our Facebook. It was a long message that describes his unpleasant trip in one of shops at Indonesia. I forward the email to the director in Indonesia, to my astonishment he asked me to delete the comment. In my mind, I only can think of “this person seriously need to learn how to handle customer's complain”. There was a delay in the reply because I have to investigate what had happen in Indonesia. However, the delay may have upset the customer and he already posted on the wall where the public can see. Still I will never have the idea of deleting this negative comments, as I feel it is fair for everyone to voice out their disappointment.

I think this is part of public relations, as there were cases of company deleting comments causing the company to go into crisis. One of the crisis that I have learn from school is the Nestle Kit Kat Palm Oil Crisis. An activist group, Greenpeace, launched its "Have a Break Campaign" against Nestle's use of palm oil in its product. The video on youtube badly affected the reputation of Kit Kat and many negative comments appears on Kit Kat's social media account. They removed all the negative comments and got youtube to remove the video, which leads to boycott of the brand from consumers. This is a very good example of social media public relations failure that we should keep in mind and avoid such mistake.

That's all for today! Will update again next week.

Jieting