Tuesday, April 14, 2015

When practice differs from theory

Hi everyone,

Here is my first post and I am very excited to share with you my placement experience during my last semester.


I am currently doing my placement at Imagine Communication, which is specialised in Public relations consultancy and media relation. During the internship I have a look of how theory and practicality differ. In books, we rather learn how the basic of public relations; how to make a PR plan, media release and so on but books never told students how petty things have significant effects during an event or in daily tasks.


There are so many tasks to do while being in the PR field especially when doing media relations. In media relations we have to consider all press media and to listen to all radio station to know whether the media is writing or talking about one of the company’s client. And I can assure that each day there are new information about one of their clients. Following these new updates we must write press summaries, radio transcripts and collect each and every pieces of information in all media outlets in order to send it to the client so as they can have an update about their visibility in the press and also what is being done in their industry. This task can be difficult as there is a daily deadline which needs to be met according to the client requirement.


Newspapers of the day



While in books they do tell us that PR is a continuous work, they do not tell us that there is much thing to do for one particular client and that it is every day and at times some nights a constant work for the same client. This was a critical issue during the first few days as we were not trained for such hard work but there is a need to adapt and to coop with the requirements of the company.

Thank you for reading, hope you enjoy it!!!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Cedric,

I hope that you are settling into your placement well. Your blog captured my attention because of a similar experience I had whilst interning at GO Communications in Malaysia. Firstly, I had to do things like calculating the PR Value of a media clipping, which is something I actually never learned at University. I remember my mentor saying to me, "this is where the real learning begins"! The workload is hectic at first, I also struggled meeting daily deadlines at first, but I think that with time it gets easier.

The challenging experiences are always the most impactful.

I wish you all the best!

Naomi James
Curtin University, Bentley

Unknown said...

Hi Cedric, hope the semester started well for you.
When I read your blog I cannot stop thinking about myself when I was on placement at Maluti Communications. I would have never imagined that most of my time will be spend on media monitoring and that I will need to reas to all these news papers. In fact, its true real life and what we learn in class is completely different, however, now we can see the importance of the PR tecnhiques module!!!
Wish you all the best

Unknown said...

Hi Cedric

I enjoyed reading your blog post although I didnt have to do any calculating of values in my internship I always wondered how we would do this in the 'real world'.

In one PR unit they briefly talked about calculating the value of social media but never media clippings so I found your blog very interesting as it sure does bring a different meaning to PR and something more to consider...hopefully this is only a small part of your placement and you will get more hands on creative tasks :)

Goodluck I enjoy reading your next post.