International PR: Working Offshore

Congratulation to MATAORA, which is opening a new office in Hong-Kong, in the territory of the 'nine dragons'; Kowloon by the end of August   :)


Mataora, having 10 years’ experience in Design & Web has created a well reputed name internationally. Unfortunately not yet in Mauritius, We did work with a lot of Mauritian companies but mainly offshores; especially with French clients.

Since the beginning of my Internship, I’ve been mainly working for international clients of Mataora , namely Weedo-IT, a French advertising agency; specialized in creating Internet traffic and acquisition of qualified contacts. That is a great experience since you have the opportunity to be in contact with people from a different culture and share ideas, different approaches to solve problems as well as learn from them. You have to learn how things are done three and adapt to their culture to be able to create a good and satisfying project.

These things were really assets in term of personal and professional development. The only disadvantage that I can see is that, in my case, is that since we have been mainly working with international companies (Total/Peugeot/Intermarché/Nikon/WWF (NGO)/), our team is always trying to apply French PR & Marketing strategies for the Mauritian clients’ projects that do not always go well.

Visit us : www.mataora.com

Introduction

Hi everyone!

I’m completing my internship at my current place of work, as I work fulltime and only have this unit left to complete before I graduate as a fully fledged PR professional! I work in the oil and gas industry and am currently working in an internal communications department for a large oil and gas project.  

I started as the junior in the communications team, so my duties were fairly basic at the beginning and I primarily provided support to the other members of my team. However my role has developed fairly quickly since I’ve settled in, and I’m now responsible for developing my own communications materials. At the moment, alongside my own duties I am covering the communications advisor role which looks after all communications needs for our offices located in London and Asia.  This can be tricky at times, especially when managing cultural differences, but has provided me with some great learning experiences in international communications.

When I was at uni I used to think that internal communications was a fairly small job without much of an audience but working on such a large project has changed all of that!  Our workforce spans several thousand people, and there is a huge contractor workforce that we also need to communicate with. It’s so important to deliver consistent messages, but challenging to make sure you reach everyone effectively. Many communications tools such as Facebook, which are incredibly successful for external communications, can’t be used to deliver internal communications as in many cases the information is confidential and these platforms are inappropriate. As such, we need to be more creative with the avenues we have available. 

Looking forward to reading about everyone's placements and experiences out in the real world!