From July 2012-August 2012 I took on an eight-week internship with
Social Media Knowledge (SMK). SMK is a business responsible for running
training seminars (with in-house training also available) guiding businesses on
how to best approach social media to better their brand. I took on this
experience for a number of reasons. One of the main ones was that I saw a large
gap in my resume I wished to fill. I had no professional writing experience and
I felt combined with my media degree and my PR internships writing experience
was needed to round out my CV and experience.
At SMK I completed a number of research based tasks including
researching for others and myself in order to produce and publish articles on
the SMK blog, something which supplements the business and is very specifically
aimed at Australian consumers.
While researching for others I sourced a lot of information on
Australian case studies of social media campaigns. My own research also
involved looking through a broad array of social media news on the Internet and
picking out topics to write my own articles on. This was interesting as a lot
of the topics were new to Australia and I had to write the tone of the article
with the thought in mind “what can a brand take away from this, what can a
brand do with this idea?” I was lucky enough to have a number of articles
published on the blog. (Links can be found in my portfolio). This work also
drew on my skills developed during the 12 months I studied a Bachelor of Social
Science (Policy and Research) at RMIT.
During my time the blog editor and my supervisor had two weeks leave
where my role was to edit the articles that had been submitted by contributing
authors and sit down with another staff member and decide the order in which
these articles would be published during the week. From here I would publish the articles then
push them out via the social media pages including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
and Google+. With this work I learnt a lot about using social media
professionally. I also learnt about using Bit.ly to shorten URL’s and Hootsuite
to manage the profiles.
SMK was a great experience to take on something different. I was
really pleased to be able to get some articles published and add some more depth
to my professional skills and knowledge.
