The Real Worker Bee

 

Getting to the halfway mark of my internship, and now I’m starting to feel like a real worker bee. It’s been great to get to know a variety of different people and each day I feel like I’m learning something new!

 

I have been involved with quite a bit of research and development thus far, seeing how other similar organisations have their websites structured. This has been very interesting and I have to say, I will never be able to look at a website in the same way again!! I have been analysing all the information present on the website, even down to the smallest details.

 

I was even able to do some site mapping for the company - something I have never done before - but now a new skill that I have. A sitemap is basically a list of pages that are on a website that is available to users. It’s not hard to do, and I am excited that I was able to learn a new skill.

An example from the Apple website of Site Mapping

 

Surprisingly the website is an important part of communications and PR, as how your website is arranged directly communicates to your stakeholders your key messages and who you are as an organisation. After looking at so many websites I feel I now have a grasp on what is right and what isn't for the industry you are in and what you are trying to communicate.

 

That’s another thing I have been involved with stakeholder identification. Something I feel I have done at university a thousand times is identifying stakeholders. However doing it for a real life organisation can be a little different. Identifying the target audience and different stakeholder groups for a particular project or piece of news is extremely important.

I am also helping with creating news templates and coming up with ideas of how our company’s news will be presented both on the website, and in e-newsletters to subscribers. News and what you directly communicate to your stakeholders is very important. I have learnt that you must have specific guidelines on how much news you want to deliver to people and the quality of the news that you deliver. You cannot send too many emails as people will become annoyed and over saturated with information and not look at them, however send too few and no-one will be updated on company on goings.

 

There has also been discussion of the types of news that we want to deliver to people. Updates of projects, new projects being listed and developments. Soon we will even comprise a list of what news we want our stakeholders to know, and when and how we will release this information.

 

The TNG e-newsletter-an example of how news is communicated to stakeholders

 

I apologise as I can't include anything from the company I intern for as all information is strictly confidential.

 

That’s all for now, hope you’re all going well in your internships!

Sam