Final lap

Regular coffee spams

Hi readers!

I’m Justine Lai, currently pursuing my final semester as an undergraduate for BA in Marketing and Public Relations.

I finally ended my internship with Porter Novelli (PN) Singapore last week and I must say that I felt really appeased, yet sad to leave. I learnt so much during these three and a half months and every single day was fruitful. Despite the OTs, heavy workload, and coffee spamming, I really enjoyed my time working at the office. Everyone was really nice and generous with their patience and understanding.

For my final blog post, I would like to reflect on my overall experience and past mistakes made.

I remember making several mistakes during this internship, and one of the most memorable ones was a phone call to a luxury magazine. A post-event press release was disseminated to the media a week before and I was tasked to call several journalists to follow-on the status. I was still inexperienced speaking with the media at that time and I was really nervous. The first call went alright, as it was short and the person made it clear that he wasn’t interested. For the second call, the journalist I spoke to mentioned that she only publishes exclusive pictures of events, and at a state of white-headedness, I promised to send her a folder of it, without checking in with my colleagues. When I ended the call, my colleague beside me looked horrified and whispered, “We don’t have exclusive pictures, the ones we sent out are the only ones we have. Why didn’t you clarify with us?” My heart stopped and I wanted to cry. I ran towards my colleague, Navreet, who was handling that account and told her what had happened. She looked surprised, but kept calm and said, “Let me discuss this with Gabriel (another colleague on that account.)” Scary thoughts ran through my mind, such as being fired, getting scolded, causing a relationship breakoff with the magazine etc. However after their careful discussion, they managed to come up with a solution, which is to get client's agreement to send them other pictures that weren't used before. Then they told me, "Don't worry, there are many other problems much worse than this. This is nothing really."

I couldn't help but feel fortunate, as my colleagues were always generous with their patience and encouragement regardless of my mistakes which I really appreciate.

Another thing that I would like to reflect on is my attitude, as I sometimes gets a little angsty during days with heavy workload, and I may have appeared rude or impolite when my colleagues ask me to help out. Guess I wasn't used to multitasking and I'll need to be more prepared for work pressure. Thus, I included a phrase into my farewell email, "If I had in any way messed up, please accept my apologies."

Occasional sweet treats from colleagues

 

It's been a wonderful experience  and I must say that everything was so worth it. All the regular OT sessions, bringing-work home to do, were all worth it.

Guess I'll be missing my colleagues, conversations, gossips, laughter and the random lunches as well as the occasional sweet treats from the team.

Thank you for reading!

With love,

Justine Lai

15215640

Curtin Singapore

Brainpower Sessions!

Vision-Board Making

Hello everyone!

I’m Justine Lai, currently interning at Porter Novelli (PN) Singapore and in the midst of my final semester.

For my third post, I would like to share some valuable things that I’ve learnt working at the PN office.

When I first entered, the office had just begun to undergo some managerial changes due to change of employees and staffing. Our new Managing Director, Jimmy, implemented fresh practices and one of them is the Brainpower Session, where the PN team gets together every week to learn and share topics that are beneficial and could be applied to our public relations (PR) work.

For our very first session, we had guest speaker Tim Love (Biography), Vice-Chairman Omnicom and CEO of APIMA, to speak with us on ‘How Asia Got Its Name.’ Porter Novelli is part of Omnicom Group, a holding company which specializes in advertising and marketing and has a network of more than 175 companies worldwide. Thus, we all felt appreciative of Tim for taking his time off to speak with us.

Being in the industry for over 39 years, Tim Love oversaw how the media affected each of the generations and the evolution of new media. The internet shifted the influence power from traditional media to people, who now possess greater influence as well as the ability to control the social media and trends. An advice given by Tim was that clients appreciate and value the ability to shape things fast, and the right application of strategies. It was a very fascinating and thought provoking presentation.

Another session that caught my interest was by GMR Marketing, a company also under Omnicom which shares the same office as PN. Lisa Johnson heads GMR Singapore as its Asia Lead and the company specializes in sports marketing.

One of the recent projects undertaken by GMR was the P&G campaign for the London Olympics 2012 shown above. The GMR team shared some back-story of how sports marketing is being carried out, such as having athletes undertaking ambassadorial roles and how products are being marketed through sports. The team also described the challenges that they faced during the P&G Mom Campaign as they had numerous of responsibilities, like taking-charge of the linguistics and hospitality of the athletes’ mothers during the London Olympics. The session was very intriguing as it never occurred to me how huge sports marketing is in the industry and the crucial role that athletes play in product marketing.

The PN team also had our own creative discussions during the weekly brainpower sessions, such as vision-board making where we thought about our own future achievements and how we aim to balance our work-life.

Product of our Vision-board making session, guess which one is mine?

These weekly sessions are extremely refreshing and really beneficial. I think it is really good to put off work for a few hours and learn about the different facets of PR. Being too focus with our work may not always be good, and the knowledge that we gain during these sessions definitely make a difference to how we perform in our work. I feel really lucky that I’m in PN, as I’m able to take these great insights home with me every week.

With love,

Justine Lai

15215640

Curtin Singapore

My first PR event: Overtime and Adrenaline rush

Hello everyone!

I’m Justine Lai, currently interning at Porter Novelli (PN) Singapore.

This is the second post about my internship, and I’m going to blog on a brief overview about the day of my very first PR event – SKF Business Press Day.

Let me start with a little introduction about SKF – SKF is a global engineering company with over 46,000 employees in 130 countries. Their core products are bearings, mechatronics, lubrication systems and services to construction and manufacturing corporations which include technical support, maintenance, consulting and training (Yes very engineering, I know). Its past projects include the Singapore Flyer and the Marina Bay Sands.

The SKF Business Press Day was held on the 4^th of July 2012 at the company building located in Changi, which was during my 4^th week of internship. On the day before the actual event, my colleague Shirley gave the team a ‘Minute-by-minute’ schedule on what would be happening and a brief on our individual roles. She also gave a heads-up on the contingency plan and the list of things to prepare. Through my colleagues’ comprehensive preparation and emphasis on minor details, I’ve come to realize that PR practitioners feel the most pressure during media events, and they would do tons of precautions to prevent any mishaps from happening.

I stayed in the office till 11pm that day (my personal latest record) to prepare the press kits and event materials needed for the event, and I got reimbursed for MacDonald’s’ dinner and cab fare (which totally made my day)!

 

Reception Area & Press Materials

I arrived at the event site 15mins before the meeting time and my first task was to prepare the reception area and arrange the press kits accordingly. After about an hour, journalists began to arrive at the venue and that’s when the adrenaline came - media backing out and some of them had lost their way. It was quite a nerve-wrecking moment, as my colleagues start to get daunted by thoughts of having no media present at the event. Fortunately each of us saved the media contacts onto our phones and as I received a few calls, I could recognize who they were, which publication they were from and I gave them instructions as directed.

The press event then commenced, with each of the main executives giving their presentations – Tom Johnstone, President and CEO of SKF, Rakesh Makhija, President Asia and Member of SKF Group Management and David Bishop, Asia Pacific Director. There was a short interval in between the presentations and A Roundtable Q&A session for the media was then carried out.

The session took about two hours and it wasn’t very relaxing for me. I was tasked to record the presentations and jot down notes of the whole event.

A picture of me writing frantically and recording the whole session with my phone and colleagues’ tablet.

After the note-taking (and quite frankly painful) session, a media tour was conducted on SKF’s applications and solutions around an exhibition area where the team and I followed the media around, listened to the tour and jotted down notes along the way.

The event concluded with a delicious lunch session where we were served with finger food around the exhibition area and I finally got to satisfy my cravings – sushi, fried prawns, mini sandwiches, and other delightful pastries! Of course, the end of the day doesn’t mean the end of it all. The team and I had to compile post-event tasks, such as media follow-ups calls, media monitoring, and the compilations of reports to wrap up the whole project. Here's one of the coverage that we had from the event - SKF launches green strategy.

It was a really eventful and interesting day as I got to interact with some of the journalists present at the event. I learnt a lot about press events and onsite PR skills that day, and how it felt to have nerve-wrecking moments when we encounter problems during a media event. A contingency plan is always needed, and with the right planning and management, the possibility of success of an event would be much greater.

Best Regards,

Justine Lai

15215640

Curtin Singapore