5th 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?
