Olivia’s week of work experience with Bees Buzz 

We recently had the pleasure of Olivia Spanner-Johnson joining us for her media work experience. Olivia has family connection in the AV industry, and it was wonderful to show her how Bees operate, as well as provide tasks and advice on media messaging to assist with her College education and journalist ambitions. 

Keen, talented and a willingness to learn, Olivia is welcome back with us any time!

Check out Olivia’s review of her week here:

My personal insight into working in AV public relations

by Olivia Spanner- Johnson on 14th July 2023 

This Blog will give a brief insight into my week’s work experience in a job sector I had no knowledge about prior to this week. I will be speaking about the aims I had when starting this work experience and all the major tools I have gathered that will have led me to be an extremely knowledgeable 17-year-old in the AV business. I will also be reciting all the work I have done this week and on top of that, after my week with Bees Buzz, reflecting whether this is something I can see myself doing in the future.  

Day 1 – Monday

At the start of this week, I was absolutely terrified at the thought of working with a proper business in something I was actually interested in and passionate about. I put a lot of pressure on myself and knew I wanted to work super hard in everything that Stuart Hillis gave me to work on. I set myself many aims that, looking back on now, were unachievable. I set myself a main aim of not getting anything wrong, which was my first mistake. After writing a first draft of a press release, I soon came to find that I most definitely had many skills to learn and that it was not going to be a perfect first try. After reading more press releases, I soon came to realise how hard it is to perfect a skill of writing about many different key points in such a small number of words, which for me being an English literature student, found this extremely difficult as I’m used to writing 10,000-word essays.

Day 2 – Tuesday

After my first day on the job, I had started to get the hang of what Stuart wanted, and how to go about doing pieces of work. I’d had a few meeting calls at this point, and this was the part I really enjoyed. By the end of Tuesday I had completed a press release, started planning a social media post, and researched potential new clients, all of which was very new and exciting for me. While searching for potential new clients, I made a LinkedIn account and started learning how to use it. I spent a few hours searching for AV businesses which needed better PR or just needed extra help with their marketing strategies. Overall, Tuesday was very enlightening for me as I got to learn about different social platforms used for job seeking and where people posted about their businesses which is strangely far more interesting than scrolling on TikTok for a few hours. 

Day 3 – Wednesday

Wednesday was extremely fun for me; I had an opportunity to look through a case study and edit it. I came to find I was quite good at it and once I had completed editing this over 750-word document to no more than 250-word document, while also keeping all the key information there and allowing it to read properly and fluently, I handed it away to Stuart who was impressed by my work. This really gave me the push I needed to get through the rest of the week. On top of that, I finalised the 3 new potential clients I found and put all the information needed into a spreadsheet to make it easily readable and trackable for Stuart.

Day 4 – Thursday

Thursday was one of the quieter days. I had already completed a large chunk of my work and all that was left now was to prepare and plan for my LinkedIn post which would be posted onto the Bees Buzz business page. This sounded very scary to me as I wanted to ensure that I put out the best post I could regarding my week’s work experience. On top of that I had started planning the layout for this blog and how I would structure it along with what parts of my week to mention. I knew I wanted bold colours and a striking image to entice people to subsequently want to read about my experience as a 17-year-old working in the AV business. I wrapped up my day by creating a mood board for my social media post and already prepared a plan of how I wanted to write my blog. 

Day 5 – Friday

My final day, I am surprisingly quite sad to be ending my work experience here but while finishing up my blog and editing the pictures for my post, I have come to the conclusion that PR is a great profession to be in. While also working with some amazing writers, I have learnt an extreme amount on this job and am definitely considering working in PR in the future – and hopefully alongside such a welcoming group of people like Bees Buzz. My favourite part of the whole week was speaking to the rest of the team and getting constructive feedback from Stuart daily, who majorly helped me with my learning.