This entry is about two of my favorite people/topics in the world. Interns and social media. Interns are great. They don’t cost a ton of money, can be super smart and don’t come with all that emotional workplace baggage that is pretty common out there. And when it comes to social media, they oftentimes are much smarter than their more experienced peers - as they grew up with media like Twitter, Facebook and in the case of my current intern, Adam, Match.com.
Social media is an up and coming marketing channel that is understood by few, abused by the sleezy but as a whole presents a ginormous opportunities for smart marketers anywhere. How do you explore that ginormous opportunity? By putting your intern to work. So, here are four tasks that your intern should be working on right now.
1. Monitor what people are saying about you online
Step one of any successful social media effort needs to be to listen to what people are saying about your brand, products, competitors and category in general. Sure there are all kinds of social media monitoring tools (I like ScoutLabs) but you can also start by setting up some automated searches and RSS subscriptions via Google News, Google Blogsearch, Twitter Search and Technorati. Outside of any social media emergencies that require immediate attention, your intern should put together a monthly report for you.
2. Identify and keep track of key influencers
Business is about relationships. Public relations is too. And so is success in social media. If you want your company to be mentioned by influential bloggers, tweeters and social networking aficionados, then you a) need to know who they are and b) they need to know you are. Building relationships shouldn't be a tasked managed by your intern, but identifying key influencers, what they like and what they write about is something your intern should be doing for you right now. You can set-up a simple Google Docs spreadsheet to keep track of people, or for more sophistication you can use Highrise which is an awesome entry-level CRM tool. Don't waste your intern's efforts, and put together an action-oriented contact plan to help you bring this initiative to life.
3. Manage your Twitter stream and Facebook page
What? Twitter? Facebook? I am going to go on the record now in saying that if you haven't thought about how those two social media darlings can help your business, then you don't deserve to have an intern. Your business needs to have both a Twitter feed and a Facebook page. And your intern is the perfect candidate to be managing both those channels. What kind of content goes up there? Updates about your company, interesting articles that you came across as well as special offers and promotions. That's a good start. If you think your intern will run the risk of ruining your company's reputation through spelling and grammatical mistakes, then you hired the wrong intern. For right now, the content of your Twitter feed and Facebook page can almost mirror each other. Your intern should be able to single-handedly manage these initiatives, but one thing that you might want to get involved with is to give some guidelines on how to converse with Twitter follower and Facebook fans of yours who're trying to do just that.
4. Telling you what's next
There are other things to do. For once, you should constantly be registering your company's name on any new social media tools and channels. You don't want your competition or some disgruntled customer to own your company's username on the next Twitter. But in addition, your intern should be putting together a monthly report that talks about how other companies are using social media successfully as well as an overview of relevant trends, tools and sites.
For more inspiration, learn about Pizza Hut's Twintern. What other social media tasks can be managed by your intern?
It looks like Intern Adam is spending his time looking at naked women holding cameras.