Lumix G Launch in London - 12th May

In the run-up to this launch, I was told I would be the UK representative at the KWN Awards in Hamburg, so there were a lot of preparations to be made in a very short space of time. This is not in any way begrudgingly said, it just shows how fast-paced the life of a PR assistant can be!

The event was held in London to launch the amazing new Lumix DMC-G3 micro four thirds compact system camera. The event began in one of the top floors of the LOCOG offices (LOGOC stands for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games), which was incredible and the room looked out over the site for the Olympic stadium – what a view! I arrived in the morning with Claire (head of PR for Lumix) and some of the Lumix Marketing team to set up and prepare for the day’s events. The journalists arrived mid-morning and the new Lumix G3 was revealed to them after a short presentation. Many of them had sung the praises of the previous Lumix G series models, so they were all very excited. We had brought with us a number of pre-production models for the journalists to have a play around with and this gave them the opportunity to ask the Lumix team and our technical specialists any questions they had. The aim of this event was to give the journalists a sneak preview so that they could write up any articles and first-look reviews (the embargo date for the G3 was two days later, so they had to sign forms promising they would not publish any information prior to the launch!)

We took the journalists on a boat ride tour down the River Thames and, as we were very fortunate with the weather, everyone had the chance to take some lovely photos!

All of the journalists were given a Panasonic 4MB SD card to take away, so they could take as many photos as they liked. As the samples were pre-production, it meant that they had to ensure this was stated in their write-ups after the embargo was lifted, if they had included any of the photographs they had taken on the day.

It was a brilliant day and everyone was very impressed with the new model. I got to fiddle around with a Lumix DMC-G2 – a fantastic award-winning model – and got some great snaps! Claire had put a lot of effort into organising the event and we congratulated her for the day’s success in the event de-briefing meeting.

Visit to Durrants, Our Coverage Clippings Agency - 6th May

Durrants is our online coverage clippings service, which we started using in October, to save us manually looking for the coverage ourselves. We gave them a brief, which detailed the keywords we would like them to look out for in articles both in print publications and online. This meant that every time Panasonic was mentioned in any coverage anywhere, we would be notified. Fine-tuning the brief was quite a painstaking task, as there were a lot of conditions we had to ensure Durrants were covering. After a few teething problems (such as Durrants not picking up a piece on a Panasonic camcorder, as Panasonic had not been mentioned in the article’s headline), though, we soon had a coverage service which met all of our needs!

As the coverage is all sent through to me, it is my job to sort the clippings into their relevant product areas and distribute them to the rest of the PR team, as well as internally throughout the company to senior management. Durrants is mainly my responsibility, so my manager set up a meeting for me at the Durrants offices in London for me to look around!

This proved very useful for me, as it gave me the opportunity to see the work that goes into checking through all of the thousands of publications Durrants has to sort through each day. There are even staff there who work on night shifts to ensure nothing is missed! Panasonic is only one of the companies Durrants works for, so, combining all of the different briefs, this must be a very hard job.

Laura was my main contact at Durrants throughout the year and I met her first (along with the head of the company) for a tour of the offices. It was so nice to be able to see the job being done first-hand. A point Laura made to me (and one which I think certainly holds true) is that, when Durrants liaises with a company to correct and maintain a brief, a lot of reference is made to the ‘readers’, who look through all of the coverage, and many people think that the reading is done electronically – it’s not. There are people scanning in the print coverage and other people searching through hundreds of websites online, then going through each piece to search for a company’s keywords.

As well as the obvious ‘Panasonic’, our other keywords include things such as:

• Viera


• Lumix


• Camcorder


• Camera


• LCD


• Plasma


• Breadmaker


• Microwave


• Beauty

There are many more keywords which we have briefed Durrants to look out for and we have given them all of our product codes and names, such as DMC-TZ20 and TX-P46ST30 (a camera and a TV, for those who are wondering!) and when you consider that other electronics companies have product names very similar to ours, you can see that combing through the coverage for any mentions of Panasonic products becomes very difficult!

Another interesting part of the Durrants process I was shown was how the coverage, after being scanned in, is put into a clipping - which is the part I am sent online. The people who work on this area have to cut out (on a software programme) all of the sections on a page and paste them into a new document (the clipping). It has to be done this way due to copyright laws – they cannot simply send us a PDF copy or an online screen-grab of the coverage. After each part of the page is copied across (and it must be put in the correct place), a diagram of the full page is put into the bottom right hand corner of the clipping to show whereabouts on a page the coverage was placed. This is very handy for companies to see exactly how much coverage their product or brand has received and how much impact the coverage has created (such as a half page spread or a double-page spread, for example).

The visit to Durrants also gave me the opportunity to give Durrants any further directions on our brief. It was a great day and it was really nice to meet with people external to the company who we work with, from the Panasonic Press Office, on a daily basis.

KWN UK Awards - Derby Assembly Rooms - 4th May

On the 4th May, I travelled to the Assembly Rooms in Derby for the annual Kid Witness News UK Awards ceremony. The event was held to present the shortlisted films with their awards, as decided at the Judging Panel Day in March. In between the screenings of the schools' film entries, a local band provided entertainment throughout the ceremony. The room crackled with excitement as the results were announced, as follows...

• Best Pictures and Sound - Ryburn Valley School
  




• Best Global Citizenship - Knox Academy





• Best Reporting Team - Leasowes Community College





• Best Learning Journey - George Dixon International School





• Best Story-telling - Testbourne Community School
  

Then came the Grand Prix Award - an extra-special award, as the winners would be travelling to Hamburg later in the month for the KWN European Awards! The children and teachers in attendance were very nervous to hear the results and the winners of this award were:

Testbourne Community College!

The school's excellent film entry, entitled "B is for Apples", was selected as it was engaging, well-researched and brilliantly executed. The film clearly expressed the importance of maintaining the planet’s biodiversity and how the elimination of one species (the bee) would heavily impact upon many others.

What was great about the ceremony was that every school left with an award. KWN is such a good CSR programme in terms of getting schools involved at a professional level and it was lovely to see how proud they were when their films were screened. Everyone in the room applauded the work the children had done, which was wonderful, as the standard of the film entries was really high this year!

What I didn't know at the time of the awards was that I would be travelling with the teacher and the children from Testbourne to the awards in Hamburg as the Panasonic UK representative!! More on this later...

KWN UK Panel Judging Day – 24th March

This day was so exciting! To recap, KWN (Kid Witness News) is a global programme run every year by Panasonic whereby schools from all over the world use Panasonic video equipment to make their very own 4-minute films. It's a bit like a news report, but from the perspective of children - as the KWN tagline states, it's 'the world from their eyes'. Amazing, right?

The two available themes for the entries this year were 'Ecology' and 'Communication' and I was fortunate enough, as the intern, to be able to help judge the UK entries! The judging panel meeting (held at Panasonic UK in Bracknell) was incredible and consisted of the following lovely folk:

• Gill Brigg - KWN UK Education Director




• Adrian Birtwell - KWN UK Operations Manager




• James Stead - KWN UK Trainer and Independent Film Maker




• Paul Press - KWN UK Trainer and Independent Film Maker




• Ian Cameron - Newsgathering Editor for BBC Nations and Regions




• (myself!)




• Gaby Titcombe - Former KWN student from Testbourne Community School




• Suzy Lambert - Director of The Network and Fast Track (Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival)




• Jane Bonner - Walsall Children's Services - Serco




• Anne Molyneux - Citizenship Foundation




• David Mell - Teaching and Learning Consultant (Creative Arts), East Riding of Yorkshire School Improvement Service

We were put into pairs and each team was given a sub-category to judge. My fellow team member and I were given the excellent, but extremely difficult, task of deciding which of the eight shortlisted films deserved to win the award for Best Story-telling. This meant we had to look at how cohesive a film's storyline and script was; if the message was conveyed well through statistics and imagery; and if the reporting style was fluid.

Each film was watched twice, with time for note-taking in between. The other sub-categories included Best Reporting Team, Best Global Citizenship, Best Learning Journey, Best Pictures and Sound and the much-coveted Grand Prix Award (a.k.a. The Best One). Results will be revealed in a later post...

Recruiting the Next PR Assistant Placement Student - March

Being part of the recruitment process was amazing but so bizarre - helping to pick the next 'you' is hard! I sat in on the telephone interviews and then got to meet the successful candidates at the next stage in the face-to-face interviews and it was very surreal, as I'd been in exactly the same position almost a year before!

The interview process for a position at Panasonic is quite a lengthy one, but it's worth it when you consider how many hundreds of people apply for each role - it's so important to hire the right person with not only all of the right skills, but also the enthusiasm and drive to work for the company! The first stage is the telephone interview, then a face-to-face interview where you have the opportunity to meet the team you might soon be working with. After this comes what is called the 'Assessment Centre Day', where you are informally interviewed with the other final potential candidates in individual assessments and also in group tasks. I confess that it was my birthday on the Assessment Centre Day for my role, so I was otherwise engaged (with family time and eating cake...), so the team had to fill me in on who had got the job when I came back! When I'd met all of the candidates at the previous interview stages, though, I felt so nervous for them - you could tell they all really wanted to be there and were giddy that they might soon have a job at Panasonic! I completely understood what it was like to be in their shoes and was rooting for all of them.

When we were narrowing the applications of the possible candidates for the interview process, we decided to only consider students doing a purely PR degree. This was a little weird for me, as I'm on the MAC course at uni (this is Marketing, Advertising and Communications, where PR only plays a partial role in my degree). There were some outstanding applications from students on courses like mine and at first I was, in truth, quite gutted that we didn't get to properly consider them (if you think it may be you I'm talking about, WELL DONE for your awesome application and I bet you were snapped up sharpish elsewhere!)

In the end though, I did see where my team were coming from and we picked an absolute corker for the role: Jenny! She's very excited to start her job at Panasonic and is going to have an absolutely incredible year! We're all super happy to have her on the team as well, lovely lady! x

Oops and hello!

I have left this blog unattended for far too long - sending many apologies through the ether web for this!

There have been so many amazing things which have happened to me on placement at Panasonic since... 16th February. I've written a list and there is an awful lot, which perhaps goes some way to explaining why keeping these blog posts up to date has been a bit tricky. Not making excuses, though - rack me on the wrists and I'll begin...