Communication - all types of it - is key!

Hello all,

How goes the internships? I have to say while I am thoroughly enjoying working office hours in an office environment, I am looking forward to skipping the 2 hours I spend on the underground tube every day. At the moment in London there are tube strikes going on and so many of trains aren’t running. The result is lots of antsy people squashed into a worn and blackened carriage like sardines.

The other evening as a hoard of people got off the carriage and onto the platform alongside me, one lady said “Ah get that fresh air!” I wouldn’t consider the air in the underground particularly fresh; it hasn’t seen sunlight in days, it’s full of emissions from the trains and God knows how many people are down there every day breathing the same air in and out… Urgh. She hasn’t visited Perth clearly!

Enough about that. Working in beauty PR has been a lot of fun – a few free bits here and there and always plenty to get done. A few days ago The Communications Store hosted its biannual Press Day, and it was so amazing. They hired out this big old church, and I mean old, London style, and filled it mostly with fashion collections, and also with a lot of our beauty products and services.

The purpose of Press Day is virtually just an opportunity for the agency to showcase a whole lot of product all at once, and invite as many journalists, bloggers etc as possible to come along. I found Press Day interesting as it helped me understand a bit about the different models of communication that we learnt in University.

Now, I was always under the impression that symmetrical two-way communication was the only way to go, with clients, audiences and the press. I suppose I have an ethic which extends into my everyday life, and that is the motto ‘communication is key’. To me this means having frequent and balanced communication between all parties is the ideal way to build relationships, as it promotes honesty and trust.

For the most part, TCS works on the symmetrical two-way model of communication, as they place an emphasis on listening to the client’s wants and needs and keep them informed on any activity. However I see the Press Day as a prime example where Grunig’s “Public Information model” is used; as information about the client is simply distributed to the public without there being a conversation. This example showed me that two-way communication isn’t always necessary – sometimes it can be more efficient for everyone if the information is pre-packaged, succinct and in large quantities. I found this worked well for the beauty and fashion clients at Press Day, as they simply needed to display the exact same information and products to a large group of people.

So, it appears hands-on learning is all it cracked up to be! My placement continues to open my mind to how public relations operates in the real world and my knowledge on this industry seems to be growing.

That’s all for now folks. I hope nobody has nodded off over their keyboards!

Jessie x