It is definitely not a final goodbye...

Hi all,

I feel very nostalgic writing this blog right now and believe me folks, it is not the same feeling as I wrote my first blog a month back when I had just started my internship. I have completed 30 days of my internship on a part-time basis at Marcom, an In-house Communication agency for the British American Investment.

There are a lot of things I have learnt and faced different challenges. During my last week at Marcom, I was asked to conduct research about our conglomerates and give some recommendations on how they could improve. It was really a tough job since I had to scrutinize their Facebook page, websites, blogs and anything else that talked about them and record it. I was even asked to provide links of blogs who talked about our conglomerates ( both negative and positive). I thought it was the same as the social media power-point presentation I had done previously but it was not the same.

This time things were different. I had to monitor almost everything that was being said on the clients and record it. It was a mini business report. The aim behind it was to scrutinize what they public thinks of our conglomerates and why is it so. This was done so as we could evaluate the effectiveness of our strategies used. This would not only tell us how effective the strategies were but also tell us what people are expecting and what should out next step be. It also helps the organisation to identify new market opportunities.

It was indeed to easy job as I had to go through a lot of things; A LOT and I had to read every single thing being said about our conglomerates. Yes it is time consuming and needs a lot of patience and attention but like I have said in one of my previous posts, WHEN YOU ARE IN THE COMMUNICATION FIELD, YOU DO ALMOST EVERYTHING!

So this is it people! I have loved sharing every moment of my internship be it the good or challenging parts and I have also appreciated that some took the time to respond to my blog.
And as the title says it all, this is not a goodbye but just a disguised hello from the future endeavors.

I wish everyone good-luck with their internships and report.
Keep us updated with your internship journey.

Karishma Rughoonundun
15636461
CTI Mauritius

Is Media Monitoring really that Challenging?

Hi all,

I am almost coming to an end of my internship and I am feeling sad already. Along with drafting media releases for the first few times, another challenging issue that I encountered was media monitoring and I have also come to realise that Media Monitoring is not always fun. If you remember well, on my first post I said I liked doing media monitoring but now after this long I see how challenging of a work it is and it needs to be done with much care and attention. The thing the first few times I was only checking if there was anything about my organisation or its events and then digital press cutting for media clipping.

                     My table filled with the piles of newspapers (The Observer, Le Matinal, L`Express, Le Defi Quotidien, Star, News on Sunday, Weekend, Le Mauricien, Defi Plus, Mauritius Times, Express Dimanche, 5-Plus,Sunday Times, Capital, Samdi Plus, People, Business Magazine, Weekly Magazine)


But now as time flew and we are reaching to almost and end of the year, I have realised it is also important to know what your competitors are up to and record those as well. So now imagine every time I attend work the first thing that I have to do is read and srutinize over 15 newspapers/magazines to not only look for articles about your organisation but also for that of your competitors. This not only tracks the effectiveness of your organisation`s communication but also keeps you up to date about what your competitors are doing. So among all so far I found it really challenging as it needed attention to details while reading almost the whole newspapers so as not to miss anything. It even happened to me that I had to go trice thru the same newspaper to cross-check if i have not previously missed anything as I had to record whatever I have come across to into our 'research and analysis' folder to see the positioning of our organisation and that of our competitors. A matter of fact is that the angle of the story more often reflect the relationship between the journalist and the PR person. One of the reasons for why I found this to be challenging is because you have to read and understand the articles to be able to record it later. And many often it happened that after first few times of reading I still was not able to understand certain articles on our competitors because of the jargons used. So yeah, it was really a tough job and to start your day with piles of newspapers and after reading scrutising, start with the press-clipping; it is definitely not easy and takes a lot of your time.

However, I have realised that this is the real PR world and this reflects how our future will be. It is said a good PR does nothing but everything and Now having done all those I can proudly say it is true :D 

No matter how difficult it is, Media monitoring is very important in PR.  

Please find some sample newspaper and some articles about our clients below.  Thank you.

                                This is all the newspapers I had to go through for media monitoring

                                       Article on Bramer Bank who is one of our major clients

                                     While doing media monitoring, I stumbled upon one of our Press Releases

Thank you for reading :) I guess by now everyone is coming to and end of their internship so good luck with the report.

Karishma Rughoonundun
15636461
CTI Mauritius

PR v/s Journalist!?

Hi all,

Hope you are doing good. I have reached half way of my journey and I was waiting for this event to be done so I could talk about it. One thing I have to agree that this internship is teaching me a lot of things and things which I had actually learnt from books and now I am actually experiencing it all.

Very often we used to come to the golden question of whether PR person needs journalists and vice-versa. While at university we have had several debates and learnt that both need each other specially nowadays since no other thing can replace the role of a journalist and Public Relations; it is only now that I have been able to witness it.

I had been to my very first press conference at Apollo Bramwell ( who is one of our clients) a few days ago. It was an awesome experience :) The press conference had been organised by our company and it was about the new ottoblock system at Apollo Bramwell. Our organisation has to finalize the venue which was at the Apollo Bramwell Conference Centre and cater for the logistics during the whole event. My role was to assist the supervisor with taking pictures and taking notes during the seminar so we could draft our Press Release. I also had to sort of confirm the names of the 'interviewees'. Needless to say many took to me to be one of the journalists.

                               Me assisting/helping  my supervisor with taking photos during the conference

                               Mr David Gray, Depute Chairman of Apollo Bramwell Hospital during his presentation

                                          Presentation on the newly set otthoblock clinic at ABH

Now coming to the main issue,some journalists had informed us that they would be late, therefore we had to wait for them. I asked myself the question, granted they are important persons but some do we need to wait for all the journalists to be present so we could proceed? ( bearing in mind some were already present) It was really intriguing. I then asked my supervisor why...

She simply asked me 2 questions : 1) who will write articles (different angles) on us if we do not wait for all of them?   2) Who will they contact if they need additional background information such as interviews or Press Release?  This got me thinking! Actually it is true, we need different articles about us. As PR persons, the more media coverage about our event, the better for us. Similarly, the more relationship building, the better will it be to both parties. And finally where will the journalists go if they need information. So this gets back to our question of who needs whom? I guess we all have the answer for that.

That having said, we can see how at times we tend to neglect things. Like me for example I thought some journalists were present, so it was still good for us. At the end of the day we come to see that journalists are those who can either take us up or down the ladder according to our behaviour towards them. They are indeed important person and they are well aware of that. We need to please them to maintain this mutually beneficial relationship.
Lesson learnt is that we both need to understand the need of each other to be able to reach mutual satisfaction!

And to be honest, all the waiting paid off because we were almost on every newspapers during that whole week :D  ( * Find some print screens below )
Thant`s all for today. Hope to hear about your experiences so far and comments are most welcomed ^_^


Karishma Rughoonundun
15636461

First Day of my new journey...

Hi all,

Hope you all are having fun at their respective work place. Well first of all let me introduce myself. I am Karishma Rughoonundun, a full-time student at the Charles Telfair Institute (Mauritius). I am doing my internship on a part-time basis at the British American Investment (BAI).

So first of all, let me tell you how i secured my placement. You people need to know it and I hope no one ever repeat the mistakes I did. So I was waiting until I get my PR results because i was not sure if I had made it. This was mistake number 1! Because by the time I waited for my results, my classmates had already secured their internship.So I started to hunt after I got my results which turned out to be pretty good actually. Second mistakes was to send my application letter and CV only to Communication and PR agencies because I blindly thought that it  would be the best place for me since it was already within the PR  capacity and thus for me it would have been the best place. NEVER DO THAT! I have learnt to never limit yourself because as you, there are several people seeking for the internship that also from different universities. So following that I applied almost everywhere I could and I started getting positive responses from a few. The first company to have contacted me for the interview was BAI and just after the interview my boss told me I can come as from next week. Following my interview with BAI, several other companies contacted me but I had to declined the internship because there was something at BAI that really left me mesmerized and I knew for sure this is where i belonged. So from there started my new journey...

My first day went pretty much okay. I was bit stress because I had never worked for a big company like that before. But hours were enough to get me back to the track. The very first job I had to do was media monitoring. I was told every morning we need to read and monitor the news to know if there are articles about our clients and stuffs. We needed to read like around 7 newspapers or so. I felt bit nostalgic because it had been long since I last read newspapers like that. The only times i used to read almost all the newspapers were for the Current Affairs quiz tests for Journalism; so it brought back the memories of those time. Luckily for me, it happened to have 2 articles on one of our clients and I was showed how to proceed with the media clipping.

The second half of my day went into doing a media release. On my very first day, I saw how its all different from the things we do at university. The media release template and everything else is so different. To be honest, I had some trouble with that media release and I had to actually do that trice. I was really stressed out because I thought I was on the right track until I was told I was not. Following that, my supervisor carefully explained to me where I went wrong and gave me another media release to work on which happened to be slightly better than the first which I will talk about later on.

Well that`s all about my first day. I am eager to hear about your first day guys.
Let`s take it as a challenge and make it  a wonderful journey :)

Thank you and see you soon


karishma Rughoonundun
15636461