Hello everyone,
My name is Ourvashi Dewan a student from Charles
Telfair Institute Mauritius campus undertaking my final semester with a BCOM
with double majors in Tourism, Events Management, Hospitality and Public
Relations.
As during our course of study this internship
program is compulsory to gain an insight of the industry and for the sake of
our report, even I have faced lots of struggle before getting a placement. Like
many of you, my struggle even went to 3 to 4 months of endless search before
getting the great chance to be an intern within Marcom Co Ltd which is a
company that deal mainly with the media and communication aspect of British
American Investment (BAI) Group within Mauritius.
During my experience as an intern, the most
challenging and interesting task I was allocated focuses on the use of social
media namely Facebook as a communication tool by the different companies under
BAI. After analyzing the pages, I was assigned to present a report and derive a
power point slide from these elements.
While performing the task, I was able to identify
what I have learned in theory during the course and how it is indeed being used
in the real world and how it is impacting on the potential audience. For me,
this was a real learning experience because now I was clearly able to visualise
the effects of social media within the communication industry out here in
Mauritius.
According to the book Strategic Public Relations by
Kim Harrison, it defines social media as a tool that plays an important role in
creating a more transparent and responsive organizational interaction with
external audiences. It also mentions that practitioners have to be much more
aware of the external consequences of their actions.
Moreover, in this ever-evolving world of social
media, public relations professionals and journalists have more and more
opportunities than ever to build on relationship with audience. It serves the
audience to get quick and fast news and on the other side the company can
communicate newsworthy information. Sometime, it can also be said that journalist
even source out information from these Facebook pages to write up relevant
articles.
During my analysis of the Facebook pages, I found
that organisations like Courts Mauritius which is a seller of furniture and
electrical appliances in Mauritius, Apollo Bramwell Hospital and Iframac leader
of automotive dealership in Mauritius make good and efficient use of social
media as a communication tool because they post very frequently to get the
message to the public and even the clients queries are answered within minutes
after they post their queries.
From what I have learned from my work environment,
social media use can help a company to increase its name recognition, increase
brand loyalty as well now when devising communication plan or strategies,
social media is always an inclusive part of the whole plan.
While doing some research on social media, I fell
across some of these links which provide some quite useful information on the
topic discussed throughout:
Even we youngsters of today who are active on blogging
and other social media sites source out our information from Facebook, Twitter
and so on. For example, to get information about companies we like their social
media page and when they post something we immediately get a notification which
related to us the news, thus social media is helpful to us as well as we are
also their targeted audience in a way.
Till then, thank you for reading my post and posting
your comments.
