I'm just going to call this one the "embarrassment post"

It has been yet another great week at the Clear Group but also a very nerve wrecking and embarrassing one. We are very busy with preparing for the International Cheese Awards which is being held in Nantwich, Cheshire, for our client Dziugas. You can visit the website for more info on the event here.  I have been working at contacting local magazines and trying to find the right people to prepare goodie-bags for or send samples to for comments and reviews. I have contacted quite a few bloggers and editors, but unfortunately have only gotten few replies. The show runs every year and Nantwich Cheshire is one of the well-known county's for cheese. This year it seems like many well-known media types, from my research will not be attending which is making it even harder to endorse the brand.

My first really embarrassing and not thought through properly thing I did when contacting the different media was I accidentally called a vegan magazine company and asked them if they were going to the event and offered them a sample of Dziugas cheese. This company had the same title as another media news company. This vegan company blatantly told me "Sorry we have a an anti animal cruelty policy and will not be taking any part in this cheese event and would certainly not like to be sent any samples". I quickly apologised and fare-welled them respectfully, but I was seriously embarrassed to the bone! I think at least now I will be super careful about contacting media and making sure I get the right company and it really gets me thinking about how careful you need to be even with tasks such as this. Even though the clients I am working with are no where near vegan standards (cheese and sausages) it can still impact the firm's reputation and I know this from learning stakeholder concerns in my units at university.

At least I am learning and growing, it is hard to jump into all this work and not really know or understand much about what I am doing, especially in a completely different place I am not too familiar with but it is starting to all make sense to me (slowly but surely).

I have done a lot of research this week, researching all different things for different clients. Nurseries, bloggers/local media, events and have been doing the usual stuff on social media and using the usual PR tools I mentioned in last weeks blog. Also helping out the team in preparing for the monthly review of our clients by gathering our statistics and features.

I am currently very nervous when speaking on the phone to media but hopefully in time I will overcome this. However I will mention another hard thing about being an intern in London is that I sometimes do not understand others accents, especially on the phone. This country is very multicultural (I think maybe much more than Australia) and there are a lot of accents that I can not seem to understand (even the British one sometimes) and I find it embarrassing having to ask people to repeat themselves over again and again whether it be in person or over the phone. 


Does anyone have any advice to give me on that? How can I better understand people? Or is it just something I have to put up with? It is surely making me favour emails over calling people, but the timeliness of answers is a struggle. 

Anyway that's my week summed up into a blog! 

Thanks for reading,

Jessica Abberton.