The last few days - Time to say goodbye

Name: Christoph
Campus: LUCT

One of my last tasks included to write an article for Unisys, one of Maisberger’s clients in the IT sector. The article was aimed to explain how biometrics technology works and how it is used practically, showing the benefits and advantages of the technology. My supervisor gave me a free hand in how to write the article, which was weal and woe at the same time. On one side, I could structure the article according to what I think is the best, on the other side, I didn’t have much orientation and was first a bit unsure how to structure the article.  

But after conducting some proper research, one of the most important tasks in preparation of writing an article, I started my first draft and it wasn’t hard for me to write the article once I started. My supervisor gave me some suggestions and ideas how to improve the article and what to add. Hereby it was especially important that the article, though of course our client Unisys should be mentioned here and there, does not look like an advertisement for or on behalf of Unisys but contains verifiable and objective facts from a different number of sources.

After adding and changing the things mentioned by my supervisor, the article was sent to the Unisys PR department who approved the article and finally in March this year, ‘my’ article got published on searchsecurity.de. It’s really cool to have one’s own article published and yes, I was kinda proud of it ;-).

Here's a link to the article. It's in German language, but if you are interested just use Google Translator or any other translation services.

http://www.searchsecurity.de/themenbereiche/identity-und-access-management/biometrie/articles/353497/  

The last few days brought mixed emotions for me. On one side, I felt happy and relieved that I completed my internship and have overcome all the challenges.  On the other side I also felt kind of sad to leave the place as I enjoyed my work and met many nice colleagues which I will miss. 

This feeling of mixed emotions was also present on my last day of work. I did work as usual till the early afternoon, then I used the rest of the time to ‘clean up’ my desk and gather all of my belongings. Then it was time to say goodbye to my colleagues. They surprised me with a farewell gift, a card signed by the whole team and a huge box full with sweets and chocolates. I was so happy about this as it showed that my colleagues appreciated my contributions to their work and apart from that we also became sort of friends..

So this was my last blog post, thanks for reading and goodbye!

The growth of Social Media - No end in sight!

Name: Christoph

Campus: LUCT

Every Friday morning, all the Maisberger  trainees meet for the so-called ‘Trainee Breakfast’ , a 1 hour meeting where all the Trainees have breakfast together and discuss about one specific topic, presented by a senior member of the Maisberger team. During my time as intern at Maisberger, I was invited to join the Trainee breakfast which was a great opportunity to broaden my horizon and get some more exposure of the real PR world. The topics covered while I was there ranged from ‘how to write the perfect media release’ or ‘how do I conduct interviews’ to ‘the importance of Social Media’. Since I find this topic very interesting and exciting and some of you already discussed the use of Social Media in your blog posts, I would like to share with you some facts & figures I learned from the 'Trainee Breakfast' which show the enormous potential of Social Networks for PR practitioners.

First of all, what actually is the definition of Social Media? Everyone talks about it, but how to describe it? Social Media platforms are characterized by two basic features:

- They are being used digitally

- Everyone can use them as receiver as well as sender of 'messages'

The second feature makes Social Media so distinctive from 'traditional' media, where there is a clear split between the role of receiver and sender.

So let’s talk about some interesting statistics of Social Media that show its importance and influence:

In Germany, 46.1 million people are online, spending 24 hours a month online on average.

76 % of those are registered on one or more Social Media platforms and among the age group 14 – 49, a staggering 96 % are members of at least one Social Network. 

This shows that through Social Networks, one can reach out to a vast amount of people that otherwise could not be targeted.

The world’s biggest Social Network as we all know is Facebook. Launched in 2004, it has more than 500 million active members worldwide, among them 19 million German users. 

50 % of Facebook users are younger than 35 years.

50 % of users follow 2 – 5 brands / organizations (like-button)

All these numbers just show what an important and influential role Facebook and other Social Media platforms will play in the upcoming years. I think it was never easier for PR practitioners to reach out to the (young) target group and get their messages across. 

However, this being said, an organization’s Social Media appearance is of course not automatically running successfully by itself. Many organizations start Social Media activities without having a clear strategy and concept. In my opinion, it is not sufficient to just open a Facebook account and put some posts about the organization / client, but PR practitioners must develop an individual strategy tailored to meet the organization’s goals and to reach out to a specific target group.

What do you guys think about the use of Social Media within Public Relations? Can you share any examples how you used Social Networks during your internship?

The importance (and fun) of internal Public Relations

Name: Christoph
Campus: LUCT

Internal Public Relations, the way an organization communicates with its employees, is one of the most important yet often neglected aspects of Public Relations, as we already learned through the previous PR modules in university. 

So how does a PR agency itself handle internal public relations? For my placement at Maisberger PR agency I can say that the company is very well aware of the importance of employee communications and engages in a lot of activities to keep their employees satisfied and ‘happy’.

The first day I joined Maisberger started with a ‘lunch meeting’. This lunch meeting is a weekly activity at Maisberger, where all employees come together and discuss about a current issue, for example about a new client acquisition, about a current PR project the company is doing or just about any topic that is important for PR work in general or the company's work in particular. Because the employees ‘sacrifice’ their lunch time and stay in the office for the lunch meeting, the company provides lunch for everyone. 

Each week, one or more employees of the Maisberger team will prepare the lunch meeting and present ‘their topic’. In the eight weeks I was there, topics ranged from the creation & development process of a new client's website or the strategy behind a social media campaign to the topic of how to pitch to clients in a self-confident way and the presentation of a research study about the upcoming PR trends. 

But more than learning about a lot of interesting things that are useful for your PR work, the weekly lunch meeting was also a great opportunity to get to know my colleagues. As I also mentioned in my previous post, a good working climate and good understanding between colleagues is very important as it helps you to be confident and happy with your own work. Being included in the team from day one made me much more confident in my work and encouraged me to rather ask questions when I faced some difficulties instead of losing confidence and just giving up.

A highlight each year for the whole team is the Maisberger Christmas staff party. I was very lucky to do my internship during this time and was invited to join the staff for the Christmas party, which I felt was really nice from the company since I just joined them as intern. Every year, someone from the Maisberger management team is organizing a surprise Christmas trip for the whole staff. Only the management team knows what place we go to, the rest of the team just gets informed about what things to bring with them and what kind of clothes to wear. This created a very exciting atmosphere in the weeks before the trip, where everyone was speculating about where the trip this year would go.

And this year’s trip was an overnight excursion into the Bavarian mountains near the Austrian border. We had to climb up a hill for about 45 mins in the light of the torches to reach a small idyllic hotel with a beautiful panoramic view of the Alps. Here we had a delicious 3-course dinner, a great entertainment program with traditional Bavarian music and much more. This was a great opportunity to get to know more about my colleagues and it was a lot of fun to spend some time together in a very relaxed atmosphere. 

Below you can find some pictures from the Christmas celebration. It is also tradition that all new employees, trainees as well as the intern ;-) , have to do some entertaining performance for the team. This year, the ‘new ones’ had to dress as Santa Claus (all women) respectively angels (all guys) and sing some popular Christmas songs in a special version for Maisberger. After being a bit worried about my performance, it was actually a lot of fun, as you hopefully can see from the pictures.

So from my point of view, my internship company Maisberger is truly committed to satisfy their employee's needs and can be a leading example for great employee communications. 

What about your placement, did you also feel welcome from the first day or was it more hard for you to adapt to your new environment? Do you also think that internal Public Relations is extremely important for any organization?

Our hotel for the night

                                  The peformance of the 'new ones' dressed as Santa Claus / Angels 

                                                                   (I am 5th from right)

                                         Entertainment program with traditional Bavarian Music

Week One: Cloud Computing & Virtualization

Name: Christoph
Campus: LUCT

Did you guys ever hear about ‘server virtualization’ or ‘cloud computing’? Well, I didn’t, though actually being a quite tech-savvy person (or at least I thought so), before I started my internship at Maisberger GmbH, a Munich-based PR agency with focus on clients from the IT and technology sector. 

The first client I was assigned to deal with was VMware, one of the global leaders in virtualization and cloud infrastructure. My first task was to handle the media clippings of VMware in the German press. I actually thought this would be a very easy –and quite boring - task, but I was wrong. Since I had to categorize the articles according to which product/services/technology they featured and if the articles were positive/neutral/negative, I had to really understand what VMware is doing and what services and technologies VMware offers. This is an extremely complex topic, and it takes some time to get familiar with all the different terms.

During my first week, it was really hard for me to have a good grasp of the topic, and I had to ask my colleagues quite a lot of times what this or that article actually was about. I dealt mostly with specialized IT press, which doesn’t make it any easier since the articles use almost exclusively technical jargon as they are targeted at IT and computer experts. However, my colleagues were all very helpful and also reassured me that they were at the same situation like me when they joined Maisberger and I don’t need to worry about it. Encouraged by that, I also did my own research to learn more about the topic and bit by bit, I understood more about VMware’s business. 

Since I had to do daily media clippings for VMware, I also got to learn and understand more and more about cloud computing etc. through the articles I had to read through. So the daily routine of going through the media clippings actually helped me quite a lot to understand more about this complex topic. Besides that, I also learned how important media clippings are to document the successful work for the client.

How about you guys, did you also have some situations where you learned that actually simple, “boring” tasks such as media clippings are quite important and helpful for your PR work?

Christoph.