Young PR Professionals Competition - How I started my PR career

By Season Ho - Student Category Winner 2014

Original post: http://www.cprfhk.org/2015/02/young-pr-professionals-competition-how-i-started-my-pr-career/

Time flies. It has already been a year since I joined the Young Public Relations Professionals Competition, organized annually by the Council of Public Relations Firms in Hong Kong. Winning the competition kick-started my career in PR and communications. Though I am still an undergraduate student, I am fortunate enough to have worked in different international PR and marketing agencies, where I gained practical experience and found my career path.

The brief of the competition last year was set against a week-long art festival for performance arts on Sai Yeung Choi Street. Entrants have to come up with a six month integrated PR campaign for the event. At the time, my knowledge and understanding of PR came mainly from textbooks and case studies. Once I started working on the PR plan for the competition, I found it quite difficult as I never had a chance to develop such a plan from the beginning to the end. The case studies and examples of successful PR campaigns I read in textbooks were huge, and I finally got a chance to plan a similar one. I spent a lot of time brainstorming what makes a street art festival successful, and my friends and teachers gave me some great, inspiring ideas as well. Finally, I proposed a series of creative events under the campaign, ‘Let Art Out’, which aims to encourage young people to express their feelings, ideas and artistic personality in daily life. I was thrilled to win the award of the competition for the Student Category.

As a part of the award, I got to do a 1.5-month internship with FleishmanHillard. It was my first proper internship with a PR agency. I was in the consumer team and I gained exposure to a wide spectrum of PR work, ranging from product launch and award presentation ceremony, to employee engagement and media roundtables, all of which were eye-opening.

Overall, my time at FleishmanHillard turned out to be so much more fruitful and unforgettable than I had expected. By physically going to work full-time and interacting with people and clients in real life situations, I was able to acquire various new skills, not to mention the lunch-time staff training sessions and the awesome Give Me Five parties we had in the office. I had fun at FleishmanHillard.

Afterwards I moved to JWT for another 2-month summer internship where I acquired other client-servicing skills. Working in an advertising agency is quite different, but still it is all about communication.

Right now, I am working as a part-time intern in Edelman’s corporate and finance team. Thanks to previous agency experience, I am more equipped with essential PR skills and I am more confident in taking up new challenges. The work environment, corporate culture, the people - almost everything is very innovative and youthful at Edelman. I am so glad to have accumulated such valuable work experience before graduation and I have treasured every second of it. What is better than doing what you love, and loving what you do?

Looking back, 2014 was really a life-changing year. Since I won the Young PR Professional Competition, I have embarked on a journey that brought me to the real PR world, which convinced me to start my career in PR. I would say that the internship opportunity lined up by CPRFHK as part of the prize is extremely helpful for university students, whether they are from PR, journalism, communication or other marketing related disciplines. I highly recommend interested students to give it a try. 2015 might be the year for you to kick-start your PR career. Game on!

Hong Kong Model United Nations 2015 Opening Speech

by Season Ho

Dear honourable guests, advisors and students,

On behalf of the Hong Kong Model United Nations Club, I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to all of you for supporting our Hong Kong Model United Nations 2015. Thank you Ms Annie Wu, Ms Elsie Leung, Mr. J Ian Burchett and Mr. Patrick Mansier, for sparing the time out of your busy schedule to join our ceremony.

With this edition there starts a new cycle in the life of HKMUN. We strive to offer you an unforgettable experience, by relying on the experience of the past editions, further enhancing the features that made HKMUN such a special project and, at the same time, introducing new and unconventional approaches to MUN’s.

The story of HKMUN started in 2005 with a handful of people who wanted to establish the first international MUN in Hong Kong and a landmark for MUNs in the region. Despite setbacks and unavoidable circumstances, they achieved their goal by organizing the first HKMUN in 2005 to the best of their abilities. It was built with hard work, driven by ambition and professionalism and supported with the help of friends and family. It achieved its purpose as a promoter of the core values of the UN, a forum for young professionals to exchange ideas, but it also became much more: it became a community, a family where bonds are created and shared for a lifetime. In spite of the passing of time and its continuous expansion, HKMUN remains faithful to its original values – professionalism, equality, integrity, commitment to excellence, high levels of academic achievement and social integration.

The theme proposed for this year’s conference challenges you to go an extra mile in the service of humanity. We live in an era of great uncertainty, but also one of profound opportunity for us to make a difference for the sake of others. The human family grows ever so steadily, with more than seven billion members, and this provides us with an opportunity to communicate, collaborate, and find a common ground in order to shape the future that we want and need.

Model UN conferences constitute such a unique experience because, while recreating the work and functioning of the UN and other organisations, as well as the fascinating universe of international relations, they also offer the opportunity for innovation. MUNs help create the premises where fresh ideas can be exchanged and out-of-the-box solutions can be tested for some of the most challenging international issues. On some occasions, they constitute examples of cooperation and creativity that should be taken into account by the “real diplomats”. On other occasions, they present the delegates with the bitter shortcomings of the current state of international affairs that they will have to address as future diplomats. Notwithstanding the outcome, the experience that the participants acquire is invaluable.

Distinguished participants, I strongly encourage you to take full advantage of the opportunity brought forward by HKMUN. I encourage you to be creative, test the limits of current international relations, while remaining realistic, learn as much as you can from this experience and bear these lessons in mind when entrusted with real decision-making power in your future careers.

To conclude, I sincerely hope that you will remain mindful of the fact that even if this conference is a simulation, the problems that you are invited to address are very real. They are not simply numbers in a chart, data in a report or an interesting doctrine; they are or will be part of the everyday reality of actual people. Therefore, they need to be addressed with wisdom, utmost care and perfect awareness of the impact that they will have on the lives and destinies of real people.

I welcome you all and wish you the best of luck in the hope that you achieve what you came looking for in HKMUN 2015.

Learnings of Crisis & Issue Management

by Season Ho

Original post: http://edelmanhkinterns.tumblr.com/post/110057080402/learnings-of-crisis-issue-management

Before stepping into the PR industry, when I browse the websites of international big PR agencies, I always wonder what the 24-hour crisis hotline is for. What elements are so urgent to a company that requires immediate follow-ups? During my internship at Edelman, I have the opportunity to learn and explore more. I gradually understand how important it is for a corporate organization to prepare for any reputational risks. Hence, crisis planning and reputation management is crucial.

In the new age of digital media, the possibility that companies facing risk become much higher in particularly information can spread widely via various social media platforms. At Edelman, we have a specialized practice to help our clients from media training to rapid-response crisis management.

As an intern, I am grateful to have the opportunity to participate in some issue management projects. When companies unable to respond or address to the issue, it escalates quickly when you are least prepared for it. The damage to corporate reputation sometimes is irreparable.
Here are some areas that I have learned through providing different training, trend monitoring and strategy development to help a company to get prepared for crises.

Crisis Preparedness

How to prepare for crisis? It’s important to understand what could be a crisis for an Organization. It is critical to have a clear, consistent, and widely-understood management approach how to handle crisis and also when receiving lots of media enquiries and how to respond to the media.

Edelman has tailor-made training to match the needs and culture of each organization. During my internship, I received different kinds of trainings including media training & crisis planning. The program includes training programs for CEO/Senior Executives or often spokesperson such as Corporate Communication Director. Crisis training will have real-time crisis simulations to test plan and response time. Simulated web sites, inbound calls and faxes are also used to mimic reality. Some others include training specializing in financial media, especially for broadcast media interviews. We also helped our clients recognize that media trainings are a long term investment in their brands and helped the spokesperson of the company to handle a variety of media interviews and public speaking situations.

Senior executives are extremely aware of the need to be better prepared to manage any kind of risks in order to protect their organizations and reputations. We always hear the old saying ‘prevention is better than cure’, but in the case of having training, I think it is ‘precaution as important as cure’!

In picture with Ray Rudowski, Asia Pacific Regional Director in Crisis Planning & Training.

Trend Monitoring

Responses have to be made quickly when it comes to issue management. However, before responding to the issue, one must not overlook the importance of trend monitoring. I have involved in doing research and monitoring for issues and crisis. Trend monitoring is important as every client wants to know what people are saying about the company, and how ‘heated’ the issue is especially in this boundless internet world.

The monitoring includes traditional news monitoring, social media monitoring and opposition desk research. Through all these searches and monitoring, we can accurately identify the stakeholders and strategic plan can be made in a more efficient way. I still remember helping my team to do media monitoring for a client that required monitoring as a region not just a market. As an international PR agency, we utilized our global network to work together with offices in US and UK to provide a 24-hour media monitoring across different regions. This is the first time I feel I am working for a truly global organization. While maintaining close and active communication with the US and UK teams, we are able to gain quantitative and qualitative insight into media coverage for our client’s business. With this basic trend monitoring and research, substantial support is provided for defining the problems and assessing risk. Doing the trend monitoring also helped me to better understand client profiles and the development of the issue, it also exposed me to different media outlets around the world. In fact, doing monitoring is one of my favorite tasks at work!

As the old saying, ‘no news is good news’. Yet, situated in such a digital age, issues and crisis are sometimes inevitable. Edelman helps organization to prepare and deal with it. Reading the successful examples of the global Edelman team in dealing with issues and crisis, except feeling impressed, I am also looking forward to learn more from this practice. We don’t have to be afraid of the words ‘issue’ or ‘ crisis’ as long as there is a good team backing you up, and Edelman, the Team Dragon Boat, is surely the one.