Thrown in at the deep end for my first week!

On my first week on the job I thought my days would have been all about observing and learning from others but I was plunged into the deep ocean that the business world is and left to fend for myself. At Imagine Communication they are all about learning from firsthand experiences and mistakes, which at first I saw as a harsh situation to impose on an inexperienced intern but in the hand it shaped me into a strong and independent employee, ready to faced everything the business world would throw at me. So on my first week I went to a conference organized by a client of Imagine Communication at Hotel Labourdonnais Port-Louis, I had to keep track of all the press present, the journalists that attended and their contact details. That was the easiest part of my job because then during the conference I had to record and memorize all the important information discussed by the client during the conference, which was a bit hard due to the strong German accent the speakers had. The hardest part of the job was managing all the interviews that were taking place at the end of the conference. I never thought about the importance of supervising all the questions asked to the clients by journalists but my supervisor told me on the day that it was vital for me to successfully complete this task. Managing to assist and record every interviews was quite hard but in the end I managed. In this situation nothing went wrong during the interviews conducted by the journalists but I learned that being present at every interviews is vital as inappropriate questions can be asked to the clients or they may also feel overwhelmed by the amount of journalists bombarding them with questions which is when we are needed to assist and render help to the clients. When I got back to the office later, I felt relieved for having closely paid attention to the conference as my supervisor immediately told me to write a report summarizing all the press present, all the information divulged by the clients and a brief summary of the interviews. I was already exhausted after the event but I had two days to complete it so after a short break I started on working on the report immediately.

This was on the day on the event itself but now let me give you a glimpse of the behind the scene of the conference. Most of you must have learned by now that behind an event is a lot of preparation and stress, which we never seem to realize when not being the one organizing or hosting it. I spent a total of four full days working on the preparations and still had some last minute details to confirm on the day of the conference. First it was all about looking for a venue for the conference, the clients asked for something simple but classy so we had to brainstorm all the ideas we had for possible venues and finally we decided on the hotel Labourdonnais at Port-Louis. The client wanted to invite all the press of the island to the conference so I had to prepare an official invitation for the event and send it by mail to all of the media outlets of Mauritius. At Imagine Communication follow-up calls are seen as vital, so I then had to call all the media outlets to confirmed if they received the invitation that was sent by mail which took most of my afternoon. After two days I had to call them back to confirm their presence and which journalist that they were sending to the conference. I still had to make some calls on the day of the conference as most of the journals Chief Editors have busy schedules or have debriefing meetings at any time of the day.

After this whole week of hard work, I thought that they would give me some lightweight work, but guess I should have known better after an event media monitoring is vital and the client often ask for a press book. So, I had to monitor all the online Mauritian newspapers and magazines for any details concerning the client and the conference. The first week was pretty hard and hectic but I loved every minute of it as I learnt as much as possible and above all I had my first true experience of the PR world and it was exhilarating and superb!

Cheers,

Sophie.