Another Busy Day of Miniscule Tasks

First thing in the morning we had a meeting with the Starlight Foundation district manager. We are coming up with an event for a client during back-to-school that could be conducted annually and bring in repeat patrons. The foundation is really interesting. They raise money to provide programs to help terminally ill children and their families inside and outside of the hospital. Unfortunately, in Chicago they have no national stars for promotional purposes, but their Los Angeles office has Jamie Lee Curtis and Corbin Bleu. We are going to try and get Corbin Bleu. That would be great for our target audience and since High School Musical is such a hit right now, it will draw a massive amount of people. Keeping my fingers crossed that this works out and the client will be pleased.

Then I had to look up real estate reporters/editors in the Chicagoland area due to a crisis with one of our clients. Crain’s Chicago Business published an article about our client that did not make them look to good and now we are in charge of crisis management (Sadly the only thing in public relations other than event planning that I like and I don’t really get to be involved. I just get to look up contact information). Literally while I was doing this we had a conference phone call with client 6. We discussed vertical market opportunities and the press releases we have already created. They seemed to like everything. The conversation was only fifteen minutes long (short in reference to other meetings). I was suppose to take notes, but there wasn’t any real new input from the client, so I didn’t right anything down…
Afterwards I wrote up the notes from the Starlight meeting and distributed to the others in the office. Finally we got the headshot for the second new appointment release. I sent the release out with the headshot to all the trade and Chicago publications I was directed to.

My boss told me to look up the date of when back-to-school shopping officially starts. I had trouble finding a specific date and most stores do not have back-to-school on their websites yet. I finally found two articles that said that back-to-school shopping officially begins late July. Once my boss got that information, she asked me to look up this paid press release service. I bulleted some information about the service they provide to companies and emailed it to her. She sent a nasty reply saying that she could of found that information herself (why did she ask) and said answer these two questions (apparently the questions she wanted answered all along and I should have been able to read her mind to get her the answers she wanted originally). The aggravating part was the questions were answered in the bullets I sent previously, which was less than one-page of information. You know what I did, I pulled the answers straight from my information sheet, copied and pasted so she could tell it was in the information I already sent to her. I think my frustration with being the information retriever only has boiled over and I decided to be a bit sassy. Probably not professional, but my boss and her associate tend to use an extremely rude, cheerleader attitude a lot. At this point, in other words, I don’t care.

The last thing I did today was compile the real estate contact information into a nice chart and saved it in our shared files. I also started to compile the Europe security trade publication media contact sheet. Let’s just say it is difficult since we don’t have access to an international media database and Google isn’t very helpful, but I’m doing my best.