Musings of Mynewsdesk Singapore's First Intern Part II

It’s my 6^th week here!! Man, how time flies and I must say, it still feels like I joined just a week or two ago!  I’ve been doing quite a bit of things ever since my first blog post so as promised, this post is going to be interesting!

Mynewsdesk team went for team lunch two Mondays ago and picked this place called A-Roi Thai at Funan Mall. It was my first team lunch and I enjoyed it very much. We ordered a few dishes suggested by Robin and Aqila and I was just too excited at the sight of them that I completely forgot to take pictures! It was a very hearty lunch with a good mix of different coloured curries, fish, greens and not forgetting lemongrass drink.  Sadly, I haven’t got many pictures to share with you except for the one below. This is only a portion of the goodness we had that day so I leave it to your imagination about how the full meal would have been! :D

Two days later, on 30^th May, Aqila and I along with a few others attended “One Happy” book launch at Ritz-Carlton Hotel. This was a seminar cum book launch (plus breakfast buffet) involving the author and co-author of Happy Customers book, Bernd Schmitt and Glenn Van Zutphen respectively. They gave a bit of an insight to the contents of the book to pique our interest and told what we could expect from the book very briefly.

Along with them was a team of five panelists from various divisions of the service industry such as tourism, automobile, clothing etc. who gave their views about what it means to keep their customers happy and methods they employ to bring happiness to them.

I’d like to share with you the key takeaway of this session – People experience three types of happiness:  

• Experiencing positive emotions is classified as pleasure, the first kind of happiness.
• Second one being finding meaning in our happiness. Those who fall under the second category usually gain happiness by doing things they consider important to them which are consistent with their values.
• The third type of happiness, happiness through engagement, comes from being involved in an activity so deeply that enjoyment causes us to lose track of time.

It was also brought to our attention during this seminar that “possessions don’t make us happy, experiences do.” That was some food for thought for me there..

I also worked on setting up newsrooms for hotels in Singapore to speed up the process of the meeting when a client from the hotel industry is secured. While doing that, I learnt how scattered information about companies/organizations could be, online, and how it affects the patience and speed of the person sourcing for information. By setting up a newsroom in advance with most recent press releases, images, contact information and news about the hotel, it is much easier to explain what Mynewsdesk can offer  and how useful this platform would be to the hotel if they leverage on it. One observation I made is that there’s a vast difference in the way various hotels display news and contact information about themselves – some are more open than the others so inevitably, getting the conservative ones on board the digital newsroom we offer might require a little more work. but hey, when they’re  finally convinced of what Mynewsdesk can do for them, I’m pretty sure it’s very rewarding for all the hard work put in.

Then came Friday, 1^st June, and all Mynewsdeskers had to dress in a Hippie fashion since it was Hippie Friday! We tried our best to dress to theme with whatever we had in our wardrobe and this is how it turned out – I’ll let this picture do the talking

I spent almost whole of last week attending to two tasks – finding for the PR/corporate communications personnel of airlines operating out of Asia as well as airports in Asia. The instructions were simple but boy, finding the right contact person for the airlines I had shortlisted..phew, no easy feat! I had to search high and low, try various key word combinations on Google hoping to chance upon some website/press release of the airline. At the other end of the scale however, there were a couple of airlines that provided information on PR/corporate communications personnel  and truly made my life easier.

Just as I thought it could only get better when searching for airport contact information, I realized it was very tough to find contact information of airports in countries further in in the Southeast Asian region especially. I guess they haven’t started believing in the importance of having information of themselves online as much as we do and Mynewsdesk’s services could be just the right solution for them.

These are what I’ve been occupied with for the past two to three weeks and though managing Twitter postings along with all of the above has been quite a bit to handle, I had fun juggling all of them. One more post from me next week so stay tuned (still)!