UPS & rising

Hello everyone! I’m Damien from Curtin Singapore!

For my maiden entry, allow me to have a quick introduction of myself and my placement.

I’m a part-time student with a full-time job in the day. This became one of the challenges for me while I was trying to find a placement for myself, as I will not be able to commit the working hours of the day in my internship placement’s office.

After much search, I’m blessed and have found myself a placement in the PR team of United Parcel Services-UPS, a global leader in the package delivery and supply chain services. I was truly happy and excited as I have found a placement in a MNC, which has also kindly accede to my weird working hours-week nights and weekends.

Fast-forwarding a week, I have since started on my attachment a week ago, and below are some of the sharing that I have about my internship:
I
was being tasked to study on the feasibility and to propose on how UPS can integrate social media into part of their communication with their key stakeholders-media, customers (businesses) and consumers. I was thrilled to be given this project to handle, as social media is a hot topic in today’s communication world.

Facebook, blogs, twitter and forum groups, this must have been a piece of cake for many of us in this generation. I was already thinking and forming ideas in my head, on the possible strategies and campaigns that I can propose to reach out to the public, based on the rich amount of evidences and case studies that we see in our daily lives and cyber world today.

However, my placement supervisor has clarified that the target audience for the campaign should be targeted towards business organizations instead of consumers. This is due to the share of business that was contributed from this group of audiences.

My bubble was burst… How in the world do I reach out to corporations? How do I reach out to busy executives and senior management? Do they even blog, twitter, or have a Facebook account? Even if they were to be savvy in social media, how do we make use of social media to attract them to use the services of UPS? Will social media be the right tool to reach out to them? Will it be sustainable with an active discussion and forum?

This is certainly going to be tough. Even tougher when my job experiences in the past 4 years involves dealing with consumer products, marketing and reaching out to consumers. This is an entire paradigm shift to market supply chain services to businesses, which I have no experience in!

While I have spent the week researching more on social media tools and how businesses have used social media for B2B, I would also greatly appreciate if anyone could provide me with some ideas on how we can reach out to these corporations through social media effectively.

I believe this can be a great forum discussion! Looking forward to your contributions!

Till then, see you!