Social Status' and Crucial Communication

Hi all!

Since my last blog post I've been able to dive into preparation for the remaining Momentum events for the year. The Pink Ribbon Ball and the Perth Pet Expo are the only two events left on Momentum Forum Events' calendar for 2016, so the organisation and preparation of both events has become the centre of attention in the office.

In October 2016, the Pink Ribbon Ball will be held in support of breast cancer awareness. This annual event is held at the Perth Exhibition and Convention Centre and garners a huge amount of support from attendees in raising money for the Momentum For Australia Charity.

The Brian Gardner Pink Ribbon Ball

In planning for the event, I was able to sit down with the CEO and organiser of the event, Barbara, and go through the confirmations and table arrangements for the event. In such a small company like Momentum Forum Events, everything is organised by a few people and so it was incredibly inspiring to see such a strong driving force behind the cause that allows Barbara to work tirelessly to put on this event. Once again I learned that having systems in place and having great organisational skills is key! With such a large scale event like the Pink Ribbon Ball, managing the hundreds of guests and arranging them onto tables, particularly on the purchase of individual tickets rather than guests purchasing a table, is an surprisingly complex task. Although the confirmation of table seating arrangements is yet to be finalised, being able to keep track of table numbers and ensuring names are entered correctly is time consuming and a tedious process. In addition to keeping track of the guest names and tables, the invoicing and confirmation of ticket sales is another entire section that needs to be handled that I hadn't even considered.

I was able to create invoices for the confirmed guests and email them out along with a thank you for their participation in a worthy cause. I think it's important to ensure open communication with clients and an event is no exception. Sending an email to show appreciation for someone's involvement can take up time when sending to many people, however it acknowledges someone's contribution. As most of my PR units have taught me, relationships are incredibly important. If a person attends the event once or if they've attended it every year since its origin, sending thanks can cement that support for the cause and the event.

In addition to preparation of the Pink Ribbon Ball, I was also able to work on some social media posts. Momentum Forum Events has a side project called Hello Darlink!. Hello Darlink! is a series of YouTube videos that explore extraordinary stories and the people behind them. There have been some amazing stories posted up-to-date including Dana Vulin, Tony Galati, and the CEO of Global Goals, Caterina Sullivan.

Hello Darlink!'s Facebook post

The two most recent videos from Hello Darlink! are from the two speakers at the Men In Black Ball, Soa 'The Hulk' Palelei and Carmelo Pizzino. Both Carmelo and Soa had severe struggles with depression, leaving them at an all time low despite their celebrity status. The two interviews explored the stigma around men's mental health and showed a great amount of courage for both men to share their stories. In order to promote the videos on the other social media platforms, I was able to create a Facebook post for both interviews - one a teaser and one a thank you. The post above is the Facebook post I created for Carmelo's interview that was set to be released two days later. I think it ended up being a relatively well received post and the photo captured the positive side to the interview rather than focusing on the gloom. This post was then shared on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Soa 'The Hulk' Palelei's Facebook Post

The second post, as pictured above, was a thank you to the viewers of the interview with Soa. It had reached 10,000 views within 4 days and had received an incredible response. The post was also shared on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Overall I think both posts were captivating enough to receive responses from the followers on all social media channels, especially considering they were my first official posts on behalf of a company! If you have any criticism for the posts please feel free to leave a comment! There's no better way to learn.

Thank you for reading and have a great day/night!

Jess

Watching a Campaign Go Viral

One of the clients I have been fortunate to work with for gtmedia is Chicken Treat. Chicken Treat has very different and fun campaigns that are created by their marketing team which we create the publicity for. A few weeks ago we were travelling around Perth to delivery giant burgers with a 30cm diameter to different media outlets to launch a new burger. The current project we have been working on for the fast food restaurant is called #chichkentweet, and I’m sure many of you have already heard about it.

The Chicken Tweet project’s aim is to increase Chicken Tweets twitter following, to break a world record and to also have some fun. Chicken treat has a large chicken coop with a chicken, called Betty, and a computer inside. Betty will be pecking and scratching around in her coop on the keyboard sending out tweets. We are hoping that she will be able to tweet a five letter word and break a world record! It is day 7 of 30 and she has already managed to tweet few and bum.

On Wednesday we managed to get Betty a segment on the Today show during one of their highest rating segments for the following morning. About half an hour later when searching the hashtag #chickentweet we discovered that Vice had written and posted an article to their 4.5 million people following on their Facebook page. Since then Betty has been featured on many types of local, nation and international media. The office was most excited when she was featured in TIME on Thursday (yesterday) and when the Orange is The New Black twitter, with 1.7 million followers, tweeted Betty.

Initially we predicted that Chicken Treat would gain about 5K more followers on twitter but today only seven days in they have gone from roughly 700 followers to 11.5K. The campaign really started to take off when I was in the office on Wednesday afternoon, which was really exciting. It has since progressed into a viral campaign and it is incredible to watch knowing you have been a part of it.

The next step is to tweet Orange is The New Black back and then my ambitions directors (they know it) have set their sights on the Ellen DeGenerous show!

If you haven’t already hop onto Chick Treats twitter account to read what Betty has to say. Thank you for reading, Jodie.

What's on my mind? Status content creation

At its core, Public Relations is the management of the face of an organisation and their visible behaviours; managing their public actions in business. Traditionally, this has been achieved through the creation of media relationships - the writing of media releases, media alerts and other relevant information. While these items remain vital to operation in contemporary practice, another medium is on the rise. We’re talking Social Media...and Social Media is talking back (well, sometimes anyway).

These past few weeks in my internship have highlighted the extent of the importance of social media to Public Relations.

It's not that I don't understand the importance of posting current and engaging information about a business, or that I don't appreciate how it can affect public perception. I've studied it in theory and even maintain a social media presence for a local café in Perth. However now I’ve had the opportunity to see real, long-term planned social media undertakings on the scale that's necessary for large organisations. So I've shifted from writing social media for a café in a Word document each week to writing 13 weeks of social media content, 4 posts per week, in an Excel spreadsheet where text, image and links are all detailed.

Writing week to week, the task is a lot easier – each day there is something to talk about that's happening then and there, be it a new menu item or wine tasting. Now, compare that with writing 13 weeks of content in one hit for an organisation where you have limited information to go on. Significant difference. I think I'm developing a personal relationship with Google. It's become my workday friend. I use it to search everything, from industry news that might still be relevant in 13 weeks to random points of related interest to searching #inspo on Pinterest.

I've had a couple of interesting moments in my content creation journey. One piece of content writing I completed for a client organisation's social media was deleted because it asked the audience a question – so it involved a response. I was genuinely surprised by this as my understanding of social media is that audience engagement is desirable and might result in more individuals discovering the page. But as it turns out, that was both its strength and weakness; it required engagement. If the audience didn’t respond it could be seen as a failed post and if they did respond it would require further action which might be a drain on human resources or the action might not be positive.

From a PR perspective, the ability to maintain and control social media is vital in modern day business because it's all about controlling the message. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and more - they all provide avenues to portray desired images and present an array information of varying degrees of interest and importance. Social media is great for launching products and announcing events but it isn’t just a method of information distribution, it is also an important method of maintaining a presence and nurturing an ongoing relationship; 4 posts a week over 13 weeks is a significant commitment to that relationship. Planned, created and curated with care, social media is all about the success of the message and, for many businesses, that success is often determined simply by the size of the audience.

Logging out

Bella

And that's a wrap!

The 2015 Perth Garden Festival

What a whirlwind the past two weeks have been! The event I have been working on since I started my internship with Corporate Sports Australia was held over the weekend and there are so many experiences to share.

In my last post I introduced you to my internship and the event I would be primarily working on; The Perth Garden Festival. It was interesting to see how the event came together over time and how the different professions in the workplace contributed to the planning and execution of the event itself.

As an intern I am working underneath the media coordinator but also alongside the event operations team so my role so far has been a mix of event management, public relations, sales and marketing.

As I mentioned in my first blog post, my responsibility for the duration of the event was to organise and manage the Children’s Education Playground, supported by Lotterywest. My role up until the event commenced was revolved around social media but I was also responsible for booking primary school excursions for the Thursday and Friday of the event which was a daunting task.

With only two weeks until the event commenced, it was a challenge to book schools into the remaining sessions due to the short notice and time restraints of organising transport. As the area was sponsored by Lotterywest, it was very important that all the sessions were booked to comply with the requirements of the Lotterywest grant. Finally, after several discussions with a Principal I was able to secure a local primary school into all remaining excursion sessions - a huge relief to the event director and a great triumph for me!

Photo of the Lotterywest Children's Educational Playground

All that was left to organise for the Children’s area was the timetable and confirm the facilitators for the activities that the schools would be working through. By this time I was well trained to speaking professionally on the phone. During the school excursions, the primary school kids were working through workshops with the Water Corporation, Earthwise and Joy of Wood while Kindergarten kids had a presentation by Scitech and activities with Remida. On the weekend we had gnome painting, the Swan Valley Cuddly Animal Farm, Scitech, Remida and Eco Faeries to entertain the children. 

Gnome Painting (Photo courtesy from Perth Garden Festival Facebook) 

Cuddly Animal Farm (Photo courtesy from Perth Garden Festival Facebook) 

School Excursion Earthwise Workshop (Photo courtesy from Perth Garden Festival Facebook) 

The day before the event started the office was chaos as I was taken to site to assist the event operations team with set up and to ensure that everything was prepared ahead of the opening day. The not-so-glamorous side of event management that everyone has been telling us about was evident with manual labour required to make sure everything was ready for the next day!

The next four days of the event flew past with early mornings and late finishes as I worked through many challenges with the schools on the Thursday and Friday of the event, and the general public over the weekend.

After the company received disappointing feedback after the 2014 festival, it was great to hear that patrons really enjoyed the 2015 festival and responded positively to the changes that were made. I felt so proud to have been a part of creating the experiences that people had while they were at the festival. It helped me understand that this is the industry I want to work in, knowing that it was an accomplishment to me because I was a small part of that process.

After five full on days working the event I am exhausted but really happy and proud of the work we achieved!

I’m planning another post centralised around the media at the event and the role public relations played so stay posted!

Until next time,
Megan

xxx

Behind the scenes of the 2015 Perth Garden Festival!

Hi Everyone!

I'm Megan - a final semester student studying a Bachelor of Commerce with a double major in Public Relations and Event Management. This is my first blog post and I'm excited to share the experiences and challenges of my internship so far with a company called Corporate Sports Australia.

Corporate Sports Australia Logo (Source: http://www.csports.com.au/) 

In summary, Corporate Sports Australia (CSA) are an event management and corporate hospitality company who specialise in large scale participation events. The biggest event which the company manages is the Chevron City to Surf for Activ marathon series which attract over 50,000 participants state wide! I was interested in interning with this organisation because in the future I hope to build a career in the sports event management industry.

I've already done seven days with CSA and how time flies in such a busy work environment! Initially there were some big challenges in the first couple of days of my internship. My interview was conducted a couple of weeks before I actually started because the company were moving offices from the CBD to West Perth. 

Every interns worst nightmare came true when I turned up to their new offices on my first day and they had no idea I was coming! The media coordinator who I had originally interviewed with had finished her last day the day before I started, even though I had confirmed the internship details a week before! I stayed calm and luckily the other person who interviewed me remembered my face and introduced me to the new media and marketing coordinator (who's first day it was as well). After I was able to settle in I was given all the information about the event I would be working on - the 2015 Perth Garden Festival!

Perth Garden Festival Logo (Source: http://perthgardenfestival.com.au/)

This is the second year that CSA has managed the Perth Garden Festival (PGF) and after a slightly disappointing response to the 2014 festival there have been some BIG changes to this year's festival! The Perth Garden Festival, formerly known as Garden Week, has been running for 43 years and is Perth's premier horticultural event. This year the festival will be held at the picturesque location of McCallum Park in Victoria Park from April 30-May 3. The festival will feature the SunSmart Show Gardens, Bupa Garden Main Stage, Children's Education Playground as well as over 100 exhibitors offering a whole range of products and services. 

You could imagine my excitement to be working on such a large scale event! So far my responsibilities and and tasks have mostly been social media based but have included:

• Drafting and editing media releases
• Creating content for social media pages
• Posting and scheduling social media posts
• Social media monitoring and tracking for compliance with contractual agreements with suppliers, exhibitors and sponsors
• Editing and creating content for the webpage
• Contacting and liaising with exhibitors
• Sourcing media contacts
• Working with the graphic designer to create content for social media
• Printing and organising event packages and supplies

My primary role during the festival will be to effectively manage the Children's Education Playground for the duration of the event. This involves liaising with the schools who have booked excursions for the Children's Education Playground on the Thursday and Friday of the event, as well as manage the area over the weekend. I will also be involved with the social media during the event as well as have other responsibilities alongside the media coordinator.

With under two weeks until the event commences the office is extremely busy - I can't wait to share more news as the event unfolds!

Until next time,

Megan

xxx