Communications Professional

So at high school I really loved subjects like media studies, English,
classics, essentially doing a lot of writing,
which was a testament to where I ended up. Hi,
I'm Emily and I'm a senior account executive at a public relations agency.
This is my day in the life video.
Come with me. At a public relations agency,
we essentially try and help get our clients and their businesses into the news
in any way possible.
So that might be pitching them into journalists to get them on TV,
on the newspaper and radio, on websites, whatever that might be.
But that kind of extends even further into telling their brand stories. Day in
the life of me. Essentially in the morning I come on,
I sit down and I catch up on my emails.
Messages from clients have come through overnight.
If there was anything important, you know,
that happened in the news that might be relevant to our clients,
I'll go through reply to the urgent ones.
There are a few things that I do really love about this job.
One of the biggest things is, of course, when you
you score that little win of getting your client into the news. On a larger
scale,
that'd be something like getting them on TV and a significant segment on TV that
people actually watch. And then slightly smaller than that is just being able to
actually tell their story on a news website. So that always feels really great.
So the interesting part about PR, or at least the firm that I'm in,
is that we do have a lot of overlap with different things. You know,
we do a little bit of marketing, a little bit of advertising here and there.
And something that we do quite a lot of as well is social media management. When
you're writing a social post or something like this,
you need to consider the brand's chosen tone and style,
because at the end of the day you are writing in their voice.
So you can't just write in your own voice, you know,
use the random emojis that you want to,
you need to think about what they actually like to say, how they like to sound,
what brand they want to put out to their audience. I went to uni at
AUT and I studied a Bachelor of Communications and I majored in advertising
minoring and digital media. So no PR in there.
That was just a 3 year undergraduate degree.
Internships are really the key to getting your foot in the door,
making those connections, start networking. It sounds corny,
but that networking is really valuable. I wish that the general public didn't
think of PR as just being spin doctors, you know,
we are not just responding to a crisis or trying to cover something up.
We're actually telling some really cool brand stories. You know,
there might be some brands that have an awesome product, an awesome offering,
but no one knows about them. So that's where we come in.