The Agency and I(ntern) – Part 1

How my PR Agency works – (my experience)

My agency is a beautiful small office with five members in a team. The agency functions by servicing multiple clients, or in our terms, retainers. These clients usually co-exist in the same industry but at different sectors. It is therefore the agency’s responsibility to ensure that when signing up with new retainers, there is no conflict of interest between the existing retainers.

Most of the time, the agency comes into play by helping the retainers create presence in a specific region by disseminating press releases, doing launches, creating videos, managing social media accounts and arranging for interview with the trade media. Therefore, it can be really hectic on some days.

The team consists of an associate director or team leader, three associates and an intern. The job of the associate director is to lead the team, source for new business opportunities and ensure the deliverables of the team on behalf of the agency. The associates work in a buddy system where each associate usually gets to be in charge of servicing up to two retainer accounts with another associate performing as a cover. As such, the retainers will never face a service lapse.

Lastly, the intern main tasks are to do media clippings and help out with disseminating the press releases, creating videos and managing social media accounts. Through all these, the intern is expected to learn and be able to apply these skills successfully by the end of the internship. This week’s blog post I will be sharing on media clippings.

Media Clippings

I remember when we were in school, one of the graded assignments was to simulate doing media clippings for a given client. Then it seemed so simple and easy choosing the media, media type and analyzing if the media clipping was beneficial to the client etc. However when I actually experienced it first hand, it does not seem as easy as I once thought it was.

The difficulty I assume lies in not knowing your clients well. In order to do a proper media clipping that is beneficial for the client or even worth your time, it is essential that you know the SWOT of your client. The idea of media clipping generally is so that you are in touch with the news and through this knowledge, pick up suitable articles of interest to advise/ help your clients either to capitalize on their strengths or to grab opportunities to gain more awareness and presence in the market.

In the working world, getting articles are fairly easy but explaining or creating an angle out of your media clippings is the difficult part. Most of the time you will find that the media clippings are relevant or related to your client but you do not know how to make use of it and it is left wasted in the media clippings pile. Over these few weeks, I learnt that the best way to maximize your efforts in doing media clippings is to do the following,

·         Understand the client: Immerse yourself in the knowledge of your client, their history, their mission and vision, their goals. Know what they have done. Go through their press releases, interviews and reports in the media. Get a feel of how the client wants to be seen and represented.

·         Know your media: Mainstream media usually does not provide you with many opportunities for leverage. Seek out your trade media, they are full of opportunities and even give you ideas for your angles.

·         Set keywords: Go back to basics. Think and remember what does your clients stand for in the industry and look out for these words in articles when doing media clippings. You will be surprised to find that there are much more opportunities that you can suggest to the client.

·         Create bridges: Articles that are related or relevant to your client may not always seem useful alone. Try piecing them together, you might get new ideas.

Hope these experiences and learning take aways will help make media clipping for you more fruitful and enriching. Next week I will be touching on managing social media and maybe uploading some pictures of my agency!

Please feel free to put forth your feedback or inputs. Till the next post!