Oh Hello First Week Jitters

5^th of January 2016, I was officially was ringing in the New Year with an internship at Oh Hello Beaufort Magazine. Thankfully, I organised this internship before exams in 2015 and put my best foot forward in welcoming new experiences before I leave the last of my tertiary education, even if this was a requirement for university.

You’d have to agree with me that the first of any thing is always quite daunting. You don’t know what to expect, what your jobs will be like and what you will have to do. My position for this duration of the internship is mainly based around social media content and social media management for the Magazine.

Being the first week, I had to really get to know the brand and the brand identity. Establishing the voice and persona was also vital. I realised to be one with the brand, you really have to look at your audience, what you are trying to promote and what makes you different to everyone else. There is so much more to just typing words to caption a photo, or replying to comments. Like my mum always used to say, it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it. 

This definitely puts all that theory in the seminars to practice. I mean, how many times do we talk about a company’s social media presence and their ability to write content and reply accordingly. You wouldn’t expect a legal firm to reply on their social media in the same way a local café would. I was getting the hang of this when I started drafting out captions for posts to strategically align with the identity of Oh Hello Beaufort Magazine.

In my first week, I was also introduced or made aware of key stakeholders that were important to the Magazine. Except the term ‘stakeholders’ was not exactly mentioned directly, but enlightened by the amount of attention and support they should receive online. Isn’t it funny when you’re writing reports, ‘stakeholders’ draw one of the first headings and are listed with great thought. When you are entering someone else’s work place, you see the parallels of the theory without the getting the direct explanation. Like the technical term for oxygen in science is O2 and the laymen’s term is air. You’re just supposed to know it.

Then it clicks of course. That’s what experience is for! You take the theory and apply it. I think I was just fascinated to see how much I understood and could link in my head the theory and reality without needing an explanation. It reinforced how much I actually had gained from those reports and theories learnt in classes.

Going into my first week, I was excited to see what we had been taught was really happening in the work place. Other than that, I was also nervous to do well and not mess anything up!!

Anyone else had the same first week jitters?