Sarah Klymkiw is working in the fashion industry at a PR and production agency. Making contact Sometimes it’s those drunken nights that provide the most enlightenment. In the Lord Stanley in Camden with my housemate over a bottle of house wine we discussed the pros and cons of facebook. It seems people are flocking to this website to reacquaint themselves with old school friends and colleagues, as well as reinforcing current friendships that have gone awry. My housemate, not particularly computer savvy, wanted to know what it was all about and made an interesting point about the industries we work in.
Contacts in the media industry and fashion industry alike are key to getting ahead. After almost completing a mass mailout of all the photographers’ cards at the agency, the ring-arounds have begun to drum up new work. An attempt to forge relationships with people via telephone and email requires clever, tactical liaising, for example, knowing when to push and when to leave it with a virtual stranger and more importantly the luck of timing. The television industry, as my housemate tells me (I am by no means an expert), is heavily reliant on forging strong ‘friendships’ with work colleagues, or people from work placements and staying in contact whilst tracking their career movements. In the media industry, jobs are often short-term and so comes a time when an email to a company and name-dropping gets you further, or rather gets you that next job. As my housemate’s show has finished, her current contract is now coming to an end. She has sent several emails to companies she wants to work for next, to see if any new shows that she can work on are being produced and if there are any vacancies. A week after sending out emails she’s been offered a job and MTV have come back having remembered her from a two-week internship and want her to come back. A friend, in tech-speakWith this in mind I mentioned to her a classmate that I discovered (through facebook no less!) now working for a fashion magazine. Although at school I would never have classed her as a friend, I knew her, we’d say a polite ‘Hello’, had friends in common and would maybe share a joke. My housemate reiterated that in our industries the term ‘friend’ is used loosely, that in tech-speak a ‘friend’ is not necessarily someone you socialised with, or indeed even spoke to – as long as you know them, that’s as good as a friendship and this is allowed. I told her my reservations of contacting someone I went to school with seven years ago and haven’t been in contact with since with an obvious ulterior motive. She reassured me that anyone in the industry is well aware of the ‘game’. So, I plucked up the courage to email my school ‘friend’. It took me a good 10 minutes to construct a short email that was light-hearted and friendly but had an underlying mission – to receive ‘feedback’ on the new cards that she had been sent (before I had discovered facebook and worked out that she was in fact an old classmate). A short time later I received an abrupt reply. She did remember me; she had been away for two weeks and vaguely remembers the cards; she will go through her post and if she finds them only then will she let me know if she wants to book a photographer or pass them on to a colleague that will book them. Game over. Read Sarah's earlier blogs: | 
