My Secret Project

As I said in my last post, it is important for interns, graduates and employees in general to take initiative and try to make yourself visible. One way to do that is to be innovative.

Luckily, you don’t actually have to INVENT something to be considered innovative in the workplace. There are so many developing techniques, strategies and philosophies out there in every industry that leave you plenty of room to introduce a fresh idea to your company.

What I am doing now, as my last hoorah in the internship, is an online social media plan for one of the non-profit clients. There are a couple of factors of this project that make it an innovative project.

1. It is online social media.
Old people don’t like it, new people don’t know how to run it. So it takes a special someone that is classically trained, but contemporarily knowledgeable. You need to grasp the concept of relationship marketing while being able to convey appropriate tones through the Web … which is harder than you think!

2. It is non-profit.
Especially in the communications consulting approach, non-profit organizations are a hybrid breed of clients. In this particular situation, all the work we do for them is pro bono, meaning the work that is being done through the agency is not getting compensated for … meaning not a lot of people are jumping at the chance to stay up until 3 a.m. coming up with something.

Luckily, as an intern, I am not an expense, so it makes sense for me to spend time on it.

The difficult part of the project is finding social media tactics that can be executed by a limited staff on a limited budget who work limited hours. If you know anything about social media, those three things are quite the opposite of what is necessary to be successful.

Since social media is free (the newest kind of earned media), the only investment is time. So in order to come up with a proposal that takes less time with fewer people, the tactics have to be quick and easy, but also effective.

Here are a few of my ideas in case you ever run into this situation, like I did.

ESTABLISH A BLOG
It doesn’t have to be fancy like mine : P There are plenty of free sites to create an account, and they are amazingly user-friendly. Upload videos and pictures, send links to relevant news stories, give some insider information about the company. You don’t want to update too much where you become annoying, but just enough to keep up with what’s going on.

TWEETDECK
Or any other kind of program like it, that can update Facebook and Twitter statuses from one location. This streamlines your promotion of the blog entries, so it saves time. Using services like bit.ly will allow you to track the clicks and develop some profiling information of your audience.

USE FACEBOOK
A lot of people have a Facebook account, but don’t utilize all of its features. If you are a commercial company, put on some promotions through your wall to drive traffic and increase fans. If you are an event center or museum, use the events feature to let everyone know about what’s going on. (If you were really good, you would send them to your blog from your Facebook, and the blog would send them to your main site.) FB is the most popular social networking site on the Web, so your presence there will make or break you.

I know this was long, and irrelevant to most people, but these things are the beginning of a new revelation of PR, marketing and advertising. It is so subtle, and so relationship-based, that we will find ourselves building relationships with brands … maybe even Facebook-official relationships!

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