First Chapter of PR Life

Today is the first day of my two months internship placement in Hill+Knowlton Strategies Malaysia. It is a famous international public relations consultancy firm under its parent company WPP, a well known British multinational advertising company. My internship journey began with these three questions:

• What do you know about PR
•   How do you find out about our company
•  Why you choose our company 

These are the most common questions your supervisor or managing director might ask you on your first day or interview session. As for me I got to know this company from one of the famous ethic case study in the lecture slide at Curtin. The other two questions seeks to understand your knowledge in PR and pitching skills; after successfully getting shortlisted from a vast pool of potential candidate, my internship finally took off today.

On the first day morning, my supervisor brought me around the department and introduced me to all the staff in the company. The new working environment has its own unique working system and style. Soon after the tour a friendly human resource staff briefed me on the operation system of computers and working rules & regulation. My company has its own online messenger which operates under Microsoft Lync and everybody called it as OCS which is the acronym of Office Communication System. I observed that all staffs depend heavily on it as it provides easy access for working conversation between the colleagues anytime and occasionally used to carry out project discussion smoothly without wasting time.   Every staffs need to achieve a minimum eight working hours per day. Therefore, the company has a clock-in system to calculate the billable and non-billable hours of account by filling up a timesheet for tracking the hours spent in a day. This system can boost the productivity of project & ensure that it is done on time while assisting efficient project planning. Eventually, this has made me think of account management theory which mainly talks about the operational pattern of PR consultancies work, economic of consulting, capacity management and utilization, payment system and business development.

Newspaper monitoring is one of the ‘MUST’ do things every morning as it is a priority to monitor and keep media clippings of any news stories which is related to our client. Normally I don’t have the habit of reading newspaper, but this job made come out of my comfort zone by giving me the opportunity to read all the total 17 copies of main three languages of newspaper in Malay, Mandarin and English in Malaysia. This task enlightened me further on the publishing pattern of each media, respective news placement and their publishing scope. Throughout the newspaper monitoring process, I got to know of the circulation and readership details of each media. One of the unexpected facts that I learned at Hill+Knowlton is the Harian Metro is the biggest press media in Malaysia which has the largest circulation and readership. Such facts are crucial for us in order to target media effectively when we want to publish any specific client press releases to the right medium by aiming for a large readership base.

Since I have the capability of reading Mandarin, my supervisor has assigned me to monitor all the Chinese newspaper and magazines. Apart from that I am also assigned to help my colleagues and senior associates to translate the Mandarin news into English for clients & for our own documenting needs. During the media monitoring task, the client news on the newspaper will need to be cut out and made into a media clipping for the client to easily observe their current situation of business on the mainstream media. This also acts as a guideline to monitor the public sphere reaction towards the organization which in turn can assist the consultants in effectively analyzing the current trend of client business and enable them to provide ideas of improving corporate communication in business world. Besides that, news updates of government regulatory system and technology changes could easily affect the client business operation. For instances, our company have kept the clippings of many news about the announcement of National Automotive Policy (NAP) 2014 which can affect the automotive business of our client, like Ford. Moreover, media clippings must be scanned in a softcopy form and send out to client through email at 11am sharp on a daily basis in order to keep them alert constantly about their corporate news. Throughout the process I had to learn how to use the Microsoft Office Picture Manager which is new software for me; it was deemed important as Hill+Knowlton required me to edit the media clippings articles & photos so that the final presentation form looks professionally neat and readable.

Lim Min Yuan
Curtin Sarawak
15625074 / 7E0B7821