I did not own Xiaomi phone…vaguely heard of the brand…definitely NOT part of the Mi Fan community.

But, I had the opportunity to take part in Xiaomi’s official entrance to Indonesia…I even did a selfie with Hugo Barra! Yes, that Hugo Barra, Vice President, Xiaomi Global.

I think I am getting ahead of myself here. Let’s backtrack a little bit.

So it all started when our Director, Mas Adwi and our Principal Consultant, Mas Mercy asked me and my fellow interns (Femi and Thalia) to develop a communication proposal for what they labelled as “up-and-coming” technology company, Xiaomi.

I remembered my lecturer once talked about Xiaomi in one of my classes, but never had the interest to even google it (yes, google is a verb now).

Anyway, allow me to share my brief, yet interesting Xiaomi journey, broken down into 4 stages of PR:

1. Research

We obviously did a lot of research on Xiaomi, since we knew nothing about Xiaomi! Research is the most important thing in developing PR plan, without research it’s like walking in the dark. We also did a mini audit to gauge perception of the brand. A high level of understanding of your client is a necessity.

2. Planning

So, yeah we then knew a lot about Xiaomi. With the information that we gained from our research, we developed a communication plan for Xiaomi. The plan designates what communication tools that will be utilized, when they will be utilized and by whom. We often get caught up with our briliant ideas when developing a communication plan for our client. But one valuable thing that I learned from my intern-ship is that a communication plan needs to be realistic and most-importantly, doable.

3. Implementation

Long story short, Praxis was trusted by Xiaomi to help handle its PR initiatives in Indonesia. So it was time for us to execute our plan. Our first activity is to officially launch Xiaomi and its first product in Indonesia, the Redmi 1S. This was my favorite part (I actually put an extra effort on my make up that day)!! Throughout the event, Praxis covered almost everything, including organizing the event, greeting the journalists, handling interview requests, taking down requests for review units, and so much more. Anyhow, this is the highlight of my day:

Selfie with Hugo Barra!

4. Evaluation

This is basically the last part of my brief Xiaomi Journey. In the evaluation phase, we measured how effective the first activity of our PR plan was. So, how did we do? Well, after we evaluate the quantity and quality of the media coverage, it is quite safe to say that we did a pretty good job. There were 80 journalists from 64 media houses attended the event. The event has generated 152 news coverage and most of them with positive tonality. The main challenge here is to figure out how we can improve on this moving forward.

As an intern, I feel very lucky to have a taste of everything in the process. Thank you, Praxis, I actually learned a lot!

Cheers,

Dyan

The Intern