Author: anjaliv594

Today was sad because it was our last day but it was still a lot of fun! We learned a lot about social media by working with Hannah, who works in the digital department. She oversees, posts, and responds to followers on behalf of six different clients. She manages not only Facebook for all six, but instagram, twitter, and pinterest for a few. Considering I am on these platforms all day, it was incredible to see the behind the scenes of the large scale accounts I interact with. It’s more than just numbers – responding to comments and being strategically active all help best represent the brand and appeal to certain demographics. For example, if a brand is trying to appeal to younger people, they might try to make their instagram presece stronger since more young people use that platform. We delved farther into the analytics of these platforms and ended our day with Hallie, our supervisor. She took us how she does social media reports for her clients, which are tedious but provide a necessary visual summary of FWV work for their clients. Throughout our two weeks, we really got to see the different sides of PR and how everything happens efficiently but almost discreetly. People don’t realize how many little details go into brand representation, and it was truly eyeopening to witness this work first hand.

Today was so fun!!!! As high school students, we really aren’t qualified to do much “real work,” but at least we can watch stuff go down. But, we had our first real assignment today!! Last week, we were tasked with ideating some ways to celebrate Wilmington, NC’s facebook page (which FWV manages) reaching 100,000 likes. Our supervisor really liked some of our ideas and let us design the actual banner. Our finished product was simple yet just what the client was looking for, and it was awesome to make something they are actually going to use.

Our supervisor asked me to come in an hour earlier than usual so I could sit in on their monthly meeting. This meeting was one of the coolest things of our whole experience – there were 2 phones from LA and NYC and everyone in the raleigh FWV office in one room for a conference call. Within the span of an hour, each branch had presented their major accomplishments of the month, which was surprisingly numerous considering how exclusive the firm is. One of my favorite things I heard was how the Raleigh office had had an idea for a campaign for Rider’s by Lee clothing involving filming in LA. Both firms talked out the plan during the meeting, and flights for the ‘actors’ and the set were booked within 10 minutes. It’s crazy to think how fast these big ideas can happen with a little hard work. The rest of the day consisted of me continuing to catalog pet store addresses which wasn’t necessarily fun, but I’d had my fair share of excitement in the morning.

The morning was spent doing a tedious yet mundane task of catalogingvarious pet store addresses around America. Our supervisor assured us that the information was crucial to their future plans albeit really time consuming to take down the details. Our day got much more interesting when we were invited to sit in on a few meetings. The first meeting was just two people, with one senior team member going over some of the elements of the Pendleton Whiskey client porfolio to someone who was about to join the team – basically just giving them some background information before the new person starts their tasks. Maggie, the senior team member, showed the us and the new person the programs FWV uses such as Slack and Basecamp to organize their workforce. Slack is a really great communication tool that I’ve used before, and it was super interesting to see it within a real business setting. Basecamp is such a powerful tool that I’ve never really heard of, but I guess that’s the point. It’s essentially the “behind the scenes” element of everything that FWV does for its clients. The second meeting we attended involved more of this ‘behind the scenes’ work, for FWV pitched a sponsorship idea to Redbull, which was a huge deal. On social media, we always see and interact with viral content, but we never really acknowledge the process by which it happens. Seeing how a PR firm pitches their sponsorship to a large, prominent company was a really exclusive peek into the business world and how it operates.

 

Today we got to work at the official “Intern Bar” and we met a couple other college-aged interns that work full time. We had a really big research task that took up the entire morning, where we paged through magazine editorial calendars to see if there were any upcoming topics that would be a good advertising opportunity for FWV’s clients. For example, in an upcoming Shape magazine, one of the article topics includes natural foods, which could be a great opportunity for one of FWV’s clients to submit their profile in hopes that Shape writes about them. Looking forward to tomorrow!