I thought to do a quick post regarding my two months at my internship and how I now feel about Public relations as a profession or career in my home city.
To start I would like to say that I've enjoyed my time and experience with the company I'm currently with. My duration is now coming to an end sadly, however what they have given me is more than just an insight into the profession. But also what PR practitioners currently face each and everyday in my city.
The PR profession in Miri isn't treated as a upstanding profession . People here tend to regard accountants, Engineers, Lawyers, Managers and Doctors (name a few) as upstanding professionals, while PR is viewed as a profession on the level similar to a salesman going from door to door trying to sell a product. I did not understand why that perception has been cast on PRs in my city until I started the job.
During my first month with my company I was introduced to an array of individuals who are public realtors by title. They each share a network of people whom they meet on a monthly basis to build their business relationship between their represented companies or businesses.
This practice usually involves regular meetings at cafes or coffee shops. They last around an hour or two where the two individuals discuss propositions and ideas on from their respective companies which later ends with an agreement or reexamination of proposal ( which means someone dislike the idea). It is odd that discussions like these are treated as PR work when it's obvious it isn't. Regardless the people here tend to believe that PR workers are similar to salesmen and therefore not require a degree to practice.
Often I find myself trying to defend what I have studied and answer questions which usually have the topics of "what I do" and "why PR should be a profession worthy of recognition".
Even a company as vast as Li & Fung have people who question the benefits of being a PR officer, due to vastness in size of the corporation, not every part of the company feels that having a PR officer is important or needed. Due to this the job of a public relations falls on to the manager or in my case the branch manager.
This man would maintain relationships with other companies in regards to crisis or continual support. I have asked him if the role is in his job description and he just said "I just do whatever they tell me to do".
That sounds very concerning because as long as a person is in charge their role will include PR regardless of your job role.
Another example is with the PR officer of our general hospital I was working with on the blood donation drive. She told me that she had never studied the subject of PR yet she's here running it for the general hospitals' blood bank. The question which surprised me the most was about what I would study in a degree about Public relations. I explain about the classes we have of course and then asked if whatever I had studied would be applicable to their work. The officer said not really as they would only need to do is organise events and occasionally contact the newspaper agents for upcoming events. Which to me sounds exactly like what we learn about in our classes anyways.
A little long of a rant however my conclusion is that I believe, this problem is relative mostly to encounters with people that either do not understand the complete aspect of what PR professionals can do or are urgent jus untrained in the art, as I have not heard similar testimonies from others that currently intern in Miri. However if any of you who share similarities in your company or city please do share what you have been gone through so at least those who have graduated and have already entered the PR world in Malaysia have an idea of what to expect from their companies, while hopefully change the perception people have of the Public relator profession.
Showing posts with label 14444333. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 14444333. Show all posts
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Monday, September 10, 2012
Not for the squimish, Event planning part 1
It's been a few weeks since I previously posted on the blog, things have been busy for myself as whenever I would like to write about my day at work. I tend to leave it until after work, which by then I'm terribly exhausted and uninterested in looking at my computer. Therefore I find myself trying to compile all the things I have done over the weeks which I have not posted anything.
Day by day
So what exactly has been keeping me so busy lately?
Well, I was tasked to approach our local general hospital and establish contact with them to organize a charity event for the month of December 2012. In contacting them I was directed to thier Public Relations officer representative, who quickly spoke about donors and blood drives. It was a long conversation which ended with me providing blood for them. This was the very first time I had given blood away or even thought of participating in a blood donation. However since I was about to run my own blood donation event I might as well give it a try.
Around 30 minutes later, a pine of blood was produce and I am left drained. Having blood taken from you can be a very odd experience, which leaves you feeling either exhausted or refresehed (as I was told by my manager). I personally felt exhausted, and actually wondered who has gone to the extent of giving thier sweat and blood for thier internship.
After that exercise, I couldn’t really move therefore I sat
down in the office for little longer and started talking to the PR officer
again. Having explained how I felt and also explaining that I have a moderately
common blood type. It made me curious as to how long the blood can be kept in
the hospital before it is thrown away due to expiry. She then explained that
due to the resources at hand in our local hospital. The blood collected from
the month it is extracted from donors, only last up to a month. In which after
a month has passed, the hospital may be in shortage due to a lacking of donors.
I was then told that even with say 600 donors giving their blood. Roughly 6 of
those who have donated their blood can be considered usable by the hospital.
She then explained that donors who are frequent, are only allowed to donate
blood once every three months as it would take that long to completely produce
enough blood for another donation.
Day by day
So what exactly has been keeping me so busy lately?
Well, I was tasked to approach our local general hospital and establish contact with them to organize a charity event for the month of December 2012. In contacting them I was directed to thier Public Relations officer representative, who quickly spoke about donors and blood drives. It was a long conversation which ended with me providing blood for them. This was the very first time I had given blood away or even thought of participating in a blood donation. However since I was about to run my own blood donation event I might as well give it a try.
Around 30 minutes later, a pine of blood was produce and I am left drained. Having blood taken from you can be a very odd experience, which leaves you feeling either exhausted or refresehed (as I was told by my manager). I personally felt exhausted, and actually wondered who has gone to the extent of giving thier sweat and blood for thier internship.
The one other thing I wondered about was my blood type,
having never tested my blood before I was curious to find out what I was made
of. According to the nurse I was a AB positive type, which was not as rare or
as common as other types of blood.
Having understood, I was more determined to make the blood donation
in December a great success for both the company I was representing and also to
save lives.
Overall the entire experience was very unique and I felt as
though I made a difference in someone’s world that day. In my next post I shall
talk about the planning and venue selection for the event.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Discovering Public Relations in a Large Corporation
.
Greetings, I find it hard to believe that its been over a week now since I started this internship with this company.
In my previous post I described what the office was like and what I did in my first week with the company.
In today's post I will be writing on my experiences so far with this company and also the project I was handed to undertake during the duration of my internship with this company.
The Beverage Division
After completing my duration with the Beauty and Skin care division, I was posted to the Consumer and Beverage division, this division focused its' efforts on selling and distributing brands such as Guiness, Tiger beer and Livita. They are also responsible for seven other well-known brands that are available in any establish retail stores or outlets. This division also provided me access to thier 'Intranet' which allowed me to do research on the company as well as learn about their scale.
For my first task with the division, I was asked only to study on the LF Asia corporation, where I learnt that they also have a department dedicated to Public Relations and Corporate Relations. On thier portal, I also found out that they would organize charities and public fairs depending on the occasion permitted. It was here that I discovered that each branch of the LF Asia Corporate body would need to be involved in some form of Corporate Social Responsibility event throughout the year.
CSR and Public Relations
It was a requirement tasked by the head office in Hong Kong for demonstrating CSR to the community, therefore the task wasn't mandatory, however it was required to be perform at least once every two years. I quickly contacted the branch manager to enquire on this point.
In his explanation I was told that two years ago, they had organize a Charity for the blood bank Miri's General Hospital. However due to the lack of human resources, they decided to cancel the next event.
The manager then explained that he wanted to host another blood charity drive this year, however wasn't able to again find time to organize and rally in sponsors or supportors for the cause. He then explained that if I was willing to provide my own service he would gladly provide me the resources and guidance to organize this year's event.
I accepted the offer, and asked when I would begin working on the project.
Getting started
He then explained to me that I would need to start with locating an available venue, choose a date for the event and seek the approval from the Blood bank itself on whether they are available for the set
date.
In any case, there's alot to do and I feel as though there only a limited window of opportunity for it.
Personal Thoughts
It's odd how sometimes a large corporation such as this, can forget that they are part of a larger community and therefore neglect the need to give back to that very community for years of thier loyalty. The other aspect of this entire situation is that the manager himself never realized that what he was doing was Public Relations. He just calls it a charity event and does it. I had a long chat with him after discussing the event itself, and we discussed on the progression of a company and how the time for old methods of 'doing things' were starting to fade out. I asked him what he meant by that and he explained about how he has been in this business for 30 over years and that his methods and techniques are starting to die out. Giving room to the newer and better strategies and tactics and used the term 'public relations' as an example of how that context has changed over the last 30 years. I then explained that regardless of how many strategies or tactics a younger person can pull out, theres always a lacking of experience and that without much help from the previous generations the newer context of 'PR' would probably have never been fully developed to what it is today. We both agreed that very thing cannot be replaced.
For now, I will end my post here. In my next post I shall put up some documents in which I was able to retreive from the Blood Bank and also getting in contact with a possible venue for the future event.
(Apologies for the lack of pictures in this post as there wasn't really anything to put up in regards to what I was working as thier 'intranet' had a confidential banner attached to it denying me any screen-capturing)
Greetings, I find it hard to believe that its been over a week now since I started this internship with this company.
In my previous post I described what the office was like and what I did in my first week with the company.
In today's post I will be writing on my experiences so far with this company and also the project I was handed to undertake during the duration of my internship with this company.
The Beverage Division
After completing my duration with the Beauty and Skin care division, I was posted to the Consumer and Beverage division, this division focused its' efforts on selling and distributing brands such as Guiness, Tiger beer and Livita. They are also responsible for seven other well-known brands that are available in any establish retail stores or outlets. This division also provided me access to thier 'Intranet' which allowed me to do research on the company as well as learn about their scale.
For my first task with the division, I was asked only to study on the LF Asia corporation, where I learnt that they also have a department dedicated to Public Relations and Corporate Relations. On thier portal, I also found out that they would organize charities and public fairs depending on the occasion permitted. It was here that I discovered that each branch of the LF Asia Corporate body would need to be involved in some form of Corporate Social Responsibility event throughout the year.
CSR and Public Relations
It was a requirement tasked by the head office in Hong Kong for demonstrating CSR to the community, therefore the task wasn't mandatory, however it was required to be perform at least once every two years. I quickly contacted the branch manager to enquire on this point.
In his explanation I was told that two years ago, they had organize a Charity for the blood bank Miri's General Hospital. However due to the lack of human resources, they decided to cancel the next event.
The manager then explained that he wanted to host another blood charity drive this year, however wasn't able to again find time to organize and rally in sponsors or supportors for the cause. He then explained that if I was willing to provide my own service he would gladly provide me the resources and guidance to organize this year's event.
I accepted the offer, and asked when I would begin working on the project.
Getting started
He then explained to me that I would need to start with locating an available venue, choose a date for the event and seek the approval from the Blood bank itself on whether they are available for the set
date.
In any case, there's alot to do and I feel as though there only a limited window of opportunity for it.
Personal Thoughts
It's odd how sometimes a large corporation such as this, can forget that they are part of a larger community and therefore neglect the need to give back to that very community for years of thier loyalty. The other aspect of this entire situation is that the manager himself never realized that what he was doing was Public Relations. He just calls it a charity event and does it. I had a long chat with him after discussing the event itself, and we discussed on the progression of a company and how the time for old methods of 'doing things' were starting to fade out. I asked him what he meant by that and he explained about how he has been in this business for 30 over years and that his methods and techniques are starting to die out. Giving room to the newer and better strategies and tactics and used the term 'public relations' as an example of how that context has changed over the last 30 years. I then explained that regardless of how many strategies or tactics a younger person can pull out, theres always a lacking of experience and that without much help from the previous generations the newer context of 'PR' would probably have never been fully developed to what it is today. We both agreed that very thing cannot be replaced.
For now, I will end my post here. In my next post I shall put up some documents in which I was able to retreive from the Blood Bank and also getting in contact with a possible venue for the future event.
(Apologies for the lack of pictures in this post as there wasn't really anything to put up in regards to what I was working as thier 'intranet' had a confidential banner attached to it denying me any screen-capturing)
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