Friday, May 22, 2009

Freaky Friday- With a twist!

(An delightful experience describing April’s much enjoyed Freaky Friday contributed also scoring on ‘why should the winners have all the fun’.)

The most awaited activity of the month and in Blue Lotus parlance fondly called, ‘Freaky Friday’, for the month of April, was organized by team Bluetterflies. Their idea was pretty unique and was based on judging the acting and creative skills of Blue Lotus employees. Each team was assigned a popular fairy tale they were to enact. The fairy tales they had to enact were the lovable ‘The Princess and the Peas‘, ‘Sleeping Beauty‘, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs‘, ‘Cinderella‘, ‘Beauty and Beast’ etc. But that’s not all. The challenging as well as the fun task was to find and create a twist in the tale and then enact it. The teams could modify or distort their assigned original tale, accordingly. The 10 minute script not only had to be duly submitted to the Bluetterflies but also enacted in front of a live audience!

Though the idea required some time, the experience of scriptwriting and then enacting it was quite refreshing. Each team was given one tale. A few like me who are not part of any team had to get our act together literally, for the given task. Thus, we had our own office production with Shweta from Blue Print as our main actress, Bhushan from Blue Insight main actor, Subhash from Blue Bridge as our anchor, Shefali from Blue Point as ‘hero ki amma’ – Nirupa Roy, and finally me, as a supporting actress from Blue Network.

While scripting, we realized the amount of effort put in scriptwriting. It is an art form and creating art is never easy. For a meagre 10 minute play, we went through plenty of iterations in writing, thinking and then rewriting and rethinking again. After a series of brain-storming, our final script took shape with several rounds of rehearsals. We ultimately titled ours as ‘Peenewali Princess’! We are in the 21st century and it was about time for a modern version of ‘Princess and the Peas’!

However, the unfortunate thing was that only two teams, our team and Blue Planet could take part in this activity. The job done by Blue Planet was excellent. They made a 21st century version of Sleeping Beauty. With Prathamesh, the actor in lead role, Shikha, anchor as well as actress in supporting role, Umesh K, actor in second lead and Vrushali and Anil in supporting roles, the whole team participated and did a fabulous job at it. Every sentence of theirs with their punch lines between songs had us all in splits and made for a wonderful 10 minute act. They won the first place with their superb acting and detailed script and we stood the worthy second.

Also have to make a mention of our Ahmedabad team which was tough competition with Nitin mailing us an amazing script. Kudos to him!

All thanks to Bluetterflies team and Freaky Friday, we had a really great time. Primarily, Freaky Friday phenomenon helps us all to come closer, not just as team members in a city, but as colleagues from different branches, getting a chance to share joys with one another.

A Day in the life of Blue Byter

(Blue Byte info ltd is the media tracking wing of Blue Lotus Communicaitons- a fastest grwoing PR agency in Mumbai)

Blue Lotus believes in going that extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction. Established to compliment the efforts of the PR team, blue bytes offers news tracking and monitoring services for the clients. It is also a stand alone service for clients who require only Industry based relevant news.

Organisations need information on the latest happenings in their industry space. Competitor information is of prime importance as that acts as a sounding board to initiate counter actions to minimize the affect. In short, this service provides key market intelligence that puts clients at a strategically advantageous position.

This is how blue bytes Service helps PR service their clients and make life easy. But now let’s have a look at those who make our lives easy. The first service mail of the day is sent out around 9.00am with Client, Industry and Competition news. Does anybody wonder how it happens? For that, let’s live a day of the blue byters.

Their day starts at a time when most of us are comfortably sleeping. Some of them start their day at 5.00 am from home in order to reach office by 6.00 am or 7.00 am. Once they enter office, they work like robots. They are a team of 20-25 doing the groundwork for 100 odd clients. Everyone has their own set of clients, along with a pre-decided set of newspapers and magazines to keen through. Their job profile includes searching for news, differentiating it into Industry and Competition news and then uploading on the website. The task has to be completed in a given timeline and requires tremendous concentration and hard work. To understand the client and its competitors, they have a prepared manual. For better progress and accuracy, tests are regularly conducted.

The blue bytes Software Team of Laxman, Bhushan and Rahul always come to the rescue of byters while handling new the new software. These new softwares help reduce some amount of pressure from blue byters and even the PR staff. Softwares like bluebytes archives, bluebytes analysis, event finder and media tracking software are used in this service.

The entry of Piyush Jain in Blue Bytes has brought about a big change. Piyush, with his dynamic leadership qualities, not only gave confidence to his team but also changed the views of others about blue bytes. He is the person who likes to grow and help others to as well to grow. His guidance helped team blue bytes to do and perform well. Blue bytes which was earlier a ‘no profit, no loss’ team, is now the highest profit making team with a fairly good numbers of clients to cater to.

Blue lotus is an employee friendly organisation. The HR team always tries and has succeeded in making the working environment healthy. However, nobody questions whether byters get to enjoy and use these facilities. Do they have a social life at the work place? The answer is big NO because their work pressure doesn’t allow them even a small break where they can be the part of any social activity. There are Freaky Fridays, Cake-cutting ceremonies, etc, for everyone. But one team is always missing in action at these events, and that’s blue bytes. Since our day starts at 9.30 am, the suitable time for the fun activities is post lunch. But for those whose day starts at a time when others are still in bed, the post lunch activity becomes a bit tiring affair.

On a positive note, a request for those who make our ‘Life easy’. Let’s try and keep the activities before lunch so that the team who makes our life easy can be a part of the fun like all of us. Let’s make their life cheerful.

Cheers to Blue Bytes!
www.bluelotuspr.com
www.bluebytes.info