Wonder what I wished for... ?
I know I don't talk much about my job on here, mostly because I don't like to think about work when I'm not in the office... but since no one seems to really get what I do, I'll try to explain what I spend 45 odd hours of my week doing...
The wonderful world of PR: I work for a communications consulting firm that specializes in corporate and financial public relations. This means our clients are mostly investment banks and other big corporations, both foreign and Japanese. Basically, our job is to make them look good. We do this by directly communicating with their target audiences, but mainly we use the media to get out the messages they want to communicate. Particularly in Japan, people trust and rely on newspapers for their information. The Asahi Shimbun has the most readers of any newspaper in the world, and in the world of business, the Nikkei might as well just be renamed "Za Baiburu" (the Bible, hehe). Media is the mediUM to first reach the audience, and then to either reinforce or in some cases, change what people think about a company. This is especially important when one of these corporations or banks has something important going on, i.e. a merger or acquisition, restructuring, etc., or if they have no profile at all, i.e. they have newly entered the Japanese market, etc. In the first case, companies will hire us to carry out the communications for these complicated transactions, or in the second case, we will become a retainer for the clients and basically become their PR department, or an advisory team for their own in-house PR department.
What do I do? Well, each of our clients has an account team from our office, with maybe 3-6 of us who work on their account. Before the company hires us, usually they ask us to make a presentation for them, so they can decide if they want to hire us or another firm. So, if I'm on the prospective team, I make a power point presentation and then go with the team to pitch our ideas to them. Then if we're hired, it all depends on the nature of the account. I write press releases, attend meetings, draft other types of documents, take care of account logistics-- a lot of different types of things. I'm actually really happy with the amount of responsibility I have, and if you've noticed, the blog entries have been becoming more and more infrequent-- meaning I'm really busy!! This past week I had 2 big things going on-- a huge deadline on Friday, which included a 3 hour meeting with clients to go over all of the English documents for a restructuring transaction. I drafted maybe 30-40% of the documents, and it's a large account-- probably the most involved I've been so far. Also, I attended a press briefing (actually at Frenchy's former office and Frenchy 2's current office-- it's a small world-- can't say I wasn't hoping to run into a hot French banker, but it didn't happen) to hear two visiting economists speak on forecasts for the Japanese economy, and then wrote a summary press release about it. It was cool-- almost felt like I was back at university sitting and listening to economics lectures on power point and taking notes... except I was surrounded by Japanese reporters!
So, I get to write a lot, and I'm learning a ton about finance and Japanese business... Only negative is I sometimes have moral issues with some work I do but that's a longer story for a different entry. Anyway, the fact is I really do like my job. And my three months probation period is now up and I didn't get fired!! Hehe, and now I can take vacation too, which is great! Only 3 more weeks until Hawaii!!!!
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