Here is what they thought of their first month in PR.

What made you consider a job in PR?  

Laurence: Having written for student publications in the past I knew that I would enjoy a job that allowed me to be creative. But what made me consider PR over other creative careers was that it allows for applied strategic thinking alongside more traditionally creative elements.

John: I was looking for a fast-paced, varied job that would allow me to use my strengths and constantly develop new skills, particularly in communication. I have been a freelance reporter for a few years and have a huge passion for writing.

What skills or experience do you have that you think have helped you in your first few weeks at Orchard?   

Laurence: My writing experience has helped me but it is no substitute for learning on the job. Working here has shown me that I still have plenty to learn about the language I speak every day. Coming into the job with an open mind has also been hugely beneficial. I want to learn as much as I can about business, the PR discipline and how the media works so every day I learn something new.

John: I think my interest in writing, research and the media in general helped. My experience with events and in the finance industry has proved useful too. Even my personal interests and hobbies (such as music) seem to have a place and are valued here!

What has surprised you the most about working for a PR consultancy in the Channel Islands?

Laurence: The diversity of the client base. There is no such thing as a typical client or a typical campaign so we get to see the full spectrum of what Channel Island businesses offer. We work with the public sector, the private sector, charitable and voluntary organisations, the entertainment industry and retailers. It’s a wide range that certainly dispels the notion that the Channel Islands are totally dominated by financial services.

John: I was surprised at how organised and meticulous you have to be but this is something you learn to grapple with quite quickly. It’s sink or swim.

Who do you think we should follow on twitter?  

Laurence: I hear that @oscarpuffin and @GFCRoary have an interesting take on current events.

John: I’d say Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) is a favourite – he tweets some interesting and satirical stuff.

You can read up more on Laurence and John at the Orchard website, or you can follow them on twitter at @laurencemakins and @mocaf

Steve: 2012 will be a year when marketing budgets face a further squeeze as corporate belts are tightened further; we’ll have to work even harder to demonstrate the value that good PR delivered by professional practitioners can add in difficult economic times.

Harry: I’m looking forward to studying towards my CIPR Diploma in 2012. I’ll be dusting off my PR books and getting in the swing of writing essays again!

Brooke: Next year I am looking forward to some more fab events launching some new brands (shhhh can’t tell you about them yet!) into Guernsey and Guernsey Festival is going to rock, I just know it is going to feature in my PR highlights for 2012.  Oh did I mention I am getting married… I think my wedding is going to be a pretty big personal PR event for me!!

Pieter: I am looking forward to gaining more experience with the team at Orchard, assisting them with a wide variety of tasks and projects and putting my media skills to good use whenever I can.

Chloe: I am desperate to get started on a PR qualification! I am currently about half way to getting a degree with the Open University which I am really enjoying. I’m really looking forward to taking on something industry specific though and building on the knowledge that I have acquired as an account executive.

Emma: I am looking forward to conducting more media and presentation skills training. I think 2012 will also be the year that our clients will really get to grips with how the media has changed. By their nature, professional services firms are not known for being early adopters but the wave of proof demonstrating how useful social media is can no longer be ignored. I am looking forward to helping them get the best out of these new communication channels.

So there you have it – 2012 will be about big events, the wedding of the year, developing new skills and showing clients that PR delivers value for money. We expect it’s going to be a busy year.

Posted by Chris.

This year our Christmas video starred Adie, Cat, Chloe, Harry and John and was directed and edited by Pieter.

The Orchard team have come up with our three highlights for 2011, showing what is good, bad, and frankly quite weird in the world of PR this year.

First of all, let’s look at the ‘good’. Steve and Cat both suggested the Royal Wedding, which as well as being a good old fashioned knees up for much of the country, was a lesson in absolutely impeccable media and public relations. According to Steve (who knows a thing or two about dealing with Royals) “Paddy Harverson, the director of communications at Clarence House, has done an amazing job in managing the profile of The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall since 2004. The Royal Wedding this year of Prince William and Kate Middleton was a PR masterpiece, combining tradition and ceremony with modern popular touches – and a nice classic car!”

Not everyone had such a good year though, and our resident Aussie Emma had to bring up the ‘pyjama disaster’ at Qantas. As Emma says, if you want an example of bad PR from 2011 “it has to be the Qantas debacle.” She goes on: “Launching a social media campaign a week after the airline grounded its fleet was mind-boggling. Qantas asked users to use the hashtag #QantasLuxury to describe what their “dream luxury inflight experience” would be. Angry and sarcastic Twitter posts flooded Twitter. It was the wrong campaign to be launching at a time when there was an on-going industrial relations dispute with its workers. Lessons should be learned – this was a great example of the power of social media and why PR should not be done in isolation from the rest of the business.”

And finally… No year would be complete without a range of baffling PR stunts gaining coverage despite all norms of taste and decency. While we liked the giant slipper our pick of the year goes to ‘Baby Gaga’, an ice-cream made from human breast milk.

As Harry explains: “Baby Gaga was one of the most out-there stunts of the year. The ice-cream, made from human breast milk, managed to create a number of international headlines for the ice-cream shop in Covent Garden that launched it. It stayed in the news for several days, and caused a lot of controversy even though Westminster Council was reported to have confiscated it amid concerns over safety.

So there you have it: a royal wedding, airline pyjamas and human breast milk ice-cream. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that PR work isn’t varied.

Posted by Chris.

First up the team have been thinking about their personal experiences, and we’ll be finishing off the year with more posts on our PR industry highlights (and lowlights) and a look forward to 2012.

So what have the best bits of 2011 been for Orchard PR?

Brooke: The Waitrose branch openings, all five of them, were a PR highlight for me.  The stakeholder parties that we organised were hard work but brilliant fun – seeing The Farmhouse and La Mare Vineyards transformed and hundreds of eager guests arriving to find bespoke Guernsey and Jersey themed cocktails and Heston and Delia inspired food creations was amazing.

Steve: I’ve enjoyed working with some well-known grandmasters of the media such as Alastair Stewart and Robert Peston, but also some relatively unknown, yet impressive, journalists in the trade press and local media.

Chloe: I can’t believe I have only been at Orchard nine months, so many great things have happened. The one day that particularly stands out is the one I just could not stop grinning – I was so excited when I got to type “Conde Nast” into my contacts.

Pieter: Filming and editing the videos for the Foster Care Campaign was the highlight for me. It is such a worthwhile project and I was pleased to be able to use my skills to be help young people in Guernsey find a foster family.

Harry: Meeting Judge Jules at Fusion Nightclub! I co-ordinated all of his media interviews and he was really friendly, even letting Chloe and I have a photo taken with him. His set was amazing and the Orchard PR crew partied until the Fusion house lights came on.

Catherine: Personally, achieving a distinction for my CIPR Advanced Certificate and being promoted to senior account executive were my best moments of 2011. I think they show that I’ve made some pretty big strides in my PR career this year.

Emma: The Orchard team won six new clients in the space of two months near the end of the year which just shows that, even in uncertain economic times, people recognise the need to use specialists in communications to make their voices heard by the right people.

Come back to the Orchard Blog tomorrow for our top PR industry highlights of 2011.

Posted by Chris.

Having graduated from Portsmouth University in summer 2009 with a degree in media studies I had already made peace with the fact that I would probably never end up with a job in the fiercely competitive media industry and that my degree would be the last qualification on my CV.

Thanks to a combination of good timing and persistence however I managed to get a couple of key breaks and, after a brief stint working as a broadcast journalist, Orchard PR welcomed me with open arms in March 2010.

I soon found out that whilst my studies gave me some of the right skills to succeed, my first six months at Orchard as an account executive were a real eye opener as I learnt very quickly how a busy PR consultancy operates. My organisation and time management skills improved a lot and my confidence was quickly given a boost by the supportive team who pushed me to stretch myself in the early days.

Alongside the frantic pace of on-the-job learning it was made clear from day one that I would be undertaking professional qualifications in PR. Everyone at Orchard is a member of the CIPR, we even have a Fellow in the office. Those of us newbies in the industry start with the Advanced Certificate, and I began mine in October 2010.

The course aims to give a solid grounding in all the key concepts, techniques and skills needed to develop effectively as a PR practitioner. I studied the course online through the PR Academy which consisted of live webinars and two training days in London.  It provided a great opportunity to meet likeminded professionals and share experiences of working in the industry.

Assessment is based on two essays which require students to get to grips with PR theory and then pull it apart and analyse and critique it and a planning assignment which is probably the most practical part of the course. It calls on students to write their own PR campaign based on a case study thinking about aims and objectives, strategy and tactics and evaluation. It is safe to say that after completing that assignment I would never want the task to manage a real life PR campaign for bottled tap water!

As the course is online it requires a certain amount of discipline as much of the study is independent. Therefore after a full day in the office I would often have to go home and hit the books if I wanted to keep up with the curriculum. However the teams at the PR Academy and at Orchard were very supportive; my tutors were very responsive and Orchard gave me study leave time to complete important assignments and attend the workshops in London.

The course certainly lived up to its billing and I have come away a much more confident PR professional. I have learnt to think much more strategically when approaching client matters because I know about the different models available to practitioners when planning. I feel I now have a deeper understanding of the industry as a whole and I’m aware of the opportunities and challenges it faces.

Overall it was a great experience and I would recommend to anyone that is offered the chance to study PR to go for it.

Posted by Cat.

It is also something often heard about entry level roles in PR: agencies will only accept candidates with experience; they want someone with the rough edges knocked off, preferably by someone else and at someone else’s expense.

In the Channel Islands we have a few advantages and disadvantages in play. The lure of the bright lights of London is enough to turn the head of many a young PRO, and this is something we have to accept and adapt to. There is also a very small talent pool. On the plus side, we are a long way from London, and the sector is relatively small. We don’t often have to follow our best young executives to the pub to see who they are meeting in case one of our competitors is looking to steal them. We also have a relatively strong media presence on the island, enabling us to find people with media experience that we can help transfer into PR.

At Orchard we hire at many levels and alongside the experienced consultancy team we have recent graduates and school leavers on the books. Any agency based here that insists on hiring experienced candidates only is on a hiding to nothing.

A key part of keeping our talent pool together is to develop this team into experienced practitioners and help them develop new skills that we can use to support our clients.

At the moment I’m doing the CIPR Diploma, we have two account executives doing the CIPR Advanced Certificate, and we have a gap year student on a one year placement with the company; he wants to be a journalist, but I’m sure we’ll talk him round.

The point of all this is that even though our investments may sometimes walk out the door we know that they do often come back and that there are people out there now with the right skills to work for Orchard. Knowing that we can take a promising graduate, with limited experience, and develop them into a competent and effective PR professional is also important. With such a limited talent pool it is the agencies that are prepared to put the hours into developing staff that will have far fewer problems finding the right people for our business – because we can always ‘make’ them ourselves.

Posted by Chris.

As the display takes place pretty much directly above Orchard HQ, I popped out to take some snaps – more after the jump…

Posted by Chris.

Friend of Orchard Rachel made us these brilliantly branded cakes to celebrate the move to our new home!

They were delicious and disappeared all too quickly.