My name is Ben Carey-Evans and I am a recent graduate currently interning at Firefly Communications. I have been working in Firefly’s Soho Square office since the start of December, learning all about public relations. Throughout my time here, I have helped various members of the team with an array of tasks, ranging from the manic to the more serene. On my first day, I became immersed in Firefly’s Christmas present operation, which encountered a few hiccups and late scrambles (to get presents into the four o’clock post) but ultimately, was successful. Since then, and after my daily editing of the Firewire (a daily news summary sent out to clients and friends of Firefly, which involves me desperately scribing headlines that are being read out in rapid succession), things have settled into a nice pace. The Firewire is a daily mainstay and has, amongst other things, become an effective way of bringing me back to life in the mornings.

The rest of my day tends to be quite varied, as I regularly receive a range of tasks from different people. Some take a matter of minutes whereas others can be on my to-do list for a couple of weeks; they range from updating contact lists to larger-scale research projects. Aside from compiling the Firewire, my most frequent job is to scour the internet in search of media coverage on any of Firefly’s clients, which I either record in our database or compile in the form of a weekly newsround for the client.

I write this having recently attended my first PR outing – a PRCA briefing about ‘understanding search’ and ‘search optimisation’. The key message from the briefing seemed to be that good content and good PR are the most important factors behind search optimisation; as regardless of how many pages link into your website, if the website is dull, people will not be interested.

As far as my learnings up to this point, I feel I have developed certain skills, such as organisation, due to regularly managing a long to-do-list and generally keeping it under control. Similarly, I have brushed up on my writing skills, which had been greatly under used since my graduation last summer. I am currently about halfway through the Firefly internship and I look forward to seeing how my role develops over the next month-and-a-half.