It
has been two weeks here in Hill & Knowlton Strategies. I am starting to
adapt to the busy working life in KL city by waking up early every single
morning and squeezing into a crowded LRT in order to get to work on time. This
is probably the first aspect of working life that you would experience after
university stage & once you start working for a paycheck.
Now
let’s talk more about what I learnt from H&K. Before starting to handle any
PR report, I did a comprehensive research on all of the company’s portfolio of
clients and their current business activities. Why am I doing this? This is
because the most basic & important requirement as a public relations
consultant is understanding and analyzing your customer’s needs and wants, which would become your single most
reliant tool to make the right decision and advise your client accordingly
using a suitable communication plan for their business. Therefore it is crucial
to be alert of the surroundings and the changes in client business activities
as it will directly impact their organization.
In
the case of H&K, they practice having an updated database of the entire
client’s media coverage. To do this, my company prepares monthly report and I
have been assisting my supervisor in two monthly reports for our two main
clients; Maxis and Sony. This PR monthly report mainly will tabulate and
evaluate all the media coverage of the Maxis, Sony and also their competitor’s
news stories each month. Our company has subscribed a service of news
monitoring system which is provided by Nama News and Ads Monitoring Agency that
tracks all the news stories of the newspapers and magazines in Malaysia. This can ensure that we don’t leave out any of
our client news stories and it makes the process of monitoring easier.
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Following
is the official website of nama media
monitoring that consist the coverage of national media outlets. Click in
and take a look http://www.namaasia.com/aboutus/ .
All
the news stories will be extracted into the Microsoft Excel files and then the
news coverage will be categorized into competitor and main client tab. This is
the moment that I can polish up my Microsoft Excel skill since all these time I
just only using Microsoft Word and PowerPoint during studying. All the PR value
of news articles will be calculated accordingly with its media publication rate
card which specifies the amount of news values based on various size, length
and placement of stories. Even though both reports are only submitted on every end
of the month, we still need to do it as weekly task to ensure the quality of
work and punctuality of work submission.
Online
coverage monitoring also needs to be included in the report as well. Therefore,
every day I must monitor the online media coverage on several target websites
or blogs such as Lowyat.NET, SoyaCincau and Malaysian Wireless by using internet
searching tool or what we usually calls as ‘Google-ing’. The most interesting
part during the process of calculating the PR values of online coverage is
using our hand to calculate it. In addition, we also need to identify certain
relevant words that are mentioned in the article & event activities and
also decide the news tonality. This is the crucial part that requires me to
always keep myself updated about our client’s latest activities or their
industry news on their official company media portals. For example, I knew that
Maxis recently launched some Christmas promotion for mobile data package and introduced
the new Hotlink 4G Internet plan, so I can easily & accurately name out the
event activities as well as list out the spokesperson who in-charge of the
event and decide the news tonality as a positive coverage without any
hesitation whenever I found the related news stories.
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This picture shows how to measure the PR value of online news coverage. One span of the hand is equal to one page of news story.
Sometimes
I might feel a little bit bored of doing monthly report, but from doing so I
have realized that monthly report not only can let the client know of the
portrayal of organization’s image in media outlets and it also can be a minor
analysis report in guiding the public relations consultant to analyze the
current business trend in certain sectors such as telecommunication, automotive
and consumer technology from time to time. Eventually better understanding of
business trend can boost the company revenue and improve business communication
strategy. By reading hundreds of industry news per day while doing monthly
report have broaden my mind in various aspect such as politic, global economic,
foreign affairs and social change which is will be the most crucial lesson from
my internship at Hills & Knowlton.
Lim Min Yuan
Curtin Sarawak 15625074 / 7E0B7821 |
4 comments:
Database management is important in PR career as it can help to understand more on the client's need and want.
Nice experience, you not only need to monitor the media, but also required to evaluate on the content and length of the press coverage. Your sharing did explore some insight and let us have a better understanding on that.
Monitoring media is an important task for every public relations practitioners, thanks for your sharing, I learned something special from your blog post.
Yes, monitoring the media gives a more insight view of your client. It was good that you had an opportunity to have done this
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