Love-Hate Relationship with Phone Calls

Greetings everyone,

Making phone call is not my forte as I have trouble with speaking and trust me, I was so nervous when I was given a task to make phone calls on my third day of my internship. I know I am not going to be better if I didn't train myself with phone calls. So, I took it as a challenge for me. Before I'm making the phone call, I learnt from the other intern, Joan on how they make a media phone call by observing.

As I get a grasp of it, I picked up the phone and dialled the number. My very first phone call was for Nokia Malaysia and my duty was to call the media and enquire if they still keep the Lumia 900 or Lumia 800 device and ask when is the right time to collect the phones from them. It wasn't that hard as I thought and I'm glad I received positive respond for my first few calls that I've made. 

Then, slowly I dare myself to answer every calls the company received and transferred the calls like a receptionist as Joan's contract almost ended so by default, I need to replace her spot as the 'receptionist'. Phone is like my best friend that can be annoying sometime as the calls keep coming in like every 5-10 minutes. There was this one time, I didn't even put down the phone and all I did was pressing the end-call button to make another phone call as there were a lot of calls to be made on that day. Yes, I made phone calls like Chris Gardner before he become a millionaire.

However, not every phone calls are positive. Its a challenge to every PR person to receive negative responder and its a must to remain subtle, calm and nice although deep inside your heart is burning and you feel like screaming and flip your table or throw away the phone. Let me share you my bad phone call experience. When I was in-charge to update the master media database, I called one of the media to enquire about their editorial team. The receptionist were so rude and not being helpful at all as they feel annoyed. Believe me, I wanted to explode but for the sake of the company, I just remain calm and spoke to them nicely and I managed to handle the situation. 

If you're hot tempered person, try to train yourself not to be one. Learn to stay calm and speak politely because you're not only representing yourself but a company. This is a must have characteristics/ skills in every PR person to protect the company's reputation. Once you blow up to the media, you're not the only one who is screwed but the company as well. My advice is, stay calm and be prepared.

All the best.

Best regards,
Fazar Ria Muneera
13761196/ 7D5B3504
Semester 1, 2013
Curtin University Sarawak Campus

The Media Database

In my second last week here at JW Marriott Hotel Bangkok, and things are quite uneventful. Seems like PR has downtime, usually around late December to early January because everything has been tied up for the year 2012.

The next major thing to look forward to is the PR plan for the year ahead. My boss has said that she will allow us a look at the plan and a discussion session so we can understand how it works and talk about it. This should be interesting to see whether it ties in with the PR plans we study about in class. Will update you more on that next week when she shows us it.

Other than that, we interns are put to work on another important part of PR which is not really mentioned-the media database. In other words, the database that consists of the list of media contacts with telephone numbers and emails so that we can send press releases to be published in magazines, newspapers, etc.

This is something that obviously needs to be updated properly as people are always going in and out so emails and numbers will change. The difficulty with doing this is finding the right telephone numbers (usually online or in the magazine itself) and then calling them one by one to get the right email to send press releases too. Simply looking up a valid email and filling it in the database is just enough-a publication can have multiple editors/writers and simply sending it to one lowers the chances of it being published, so you have to make sure you have the one who handles press releases.

As this is my second last week, I'm starting to feel quite melancholy. I had a great time here and I feel like I got exposed to alot of things, from the day to day media monitoring to the more exciting events where I got to meet members of the media. I'm almost 100% sure this is the career path I want to choose. I'm so glad I got the chance to pursue this internship. :)

More next week!

Christy Lau Su Mei
15130659
Curtin Bentley (Sem 1, 2013)