#interndays

This past week was my last week at the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory. These last days consisted of me meeting with the design firm one last time and tying up loose ends at the office.

On Monday, November 30th, the directors of NIMML and I had an introduction meeting with the design firm to get the ball rolling with the video production. We presented our script (which wasn’t in it’s completion, since we were still making edits to it late on Sunday night). Overall, it was an effective meeting and the students’ part of the design firm had an idea as to where to begin with this project.

I also had my final social media meeting on December 3rd, and was able to discuss the social media analytics from the previous month and the downfall we had during the current week; since I was not given very many tweets to work with during Thanksgiving break, we were not able to be very active online. After showing those analytics, I was able to motivate those in the room to send me more tweets in advance (before the holiday weeks begin) so that we do not experience this again. I was also able to begin a promoted tweets campaign, which will be launching on December 14th, and will go on till the 18th. I was also able to update the Facebook page with a story on the latest graduate student who received his doctorate through the laboratory.

The last two projects that I worked on this week were the education and outreach section of the company’s scientific annual report, and a final presentation. The education and outreach section is the last part of the report which talks about the different programs within the organization that help create learning experiences for undergraduate and graduate students. After receiving the template from a previous year’s report, I was able to create an outline of what that section was going to say. Overall, I think it turned out well, and my written section will be officially published in the report. For my second task, I was told a few weeks in advance to prepare a presentation for the staff meeting about what I have been working on with NIMML. The presentation was scheduled on December 4th, which was very fitting since it was my last day to go into work. I ended up making my presentation to be an introduction presentation on marketing and where I fit in with the organization. Titled “NIMML’s Branding and Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy,” the presentation ended up being a success and everyone was very eager to learn about my field of expertise.

Throughout this internship I was very fortunate to have found two books that were able to guide me through the different implemented marketing strategies. My second book in particular was very helpful in providing ideas for marketing dissemination, and so that is why I used that resource the most. The second read, The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott was a great paperback and I highly recommend it to anyone who is starting out in this field. The final chapters that I focused on this week were titled Great for Any Organization, and Now It’s your Turn. Being the last two chapters in the book, they concluded by saying that anyone, with any line of work, can reach people via the web. The author stated the phrase “word of mouse” and how important it was becoming everyday. I agree with what the author had to say, and I do believe that social media can provide a lot of good for anyone, when used properly. I do not see this marketing channel going away any time soon; rather, I see it growing into something even bigger in the future.

This week’s post will be a short update since I am on Thanksgiving break and did not go into the office. From home, I have been updating Twitter and have gone through our LinkedIn pages and Facebook to see where they are. My postings on LinkedIn and Facebook have not been on schedule since there has been a lack of content and the break has caused a lack of communication between my colleagues and I. Secondly, the script that I have been working on has been submitted and now needs to be edited (that should happen by Sunday).

This week, I focused on the chapter (from The New Rules of Marketing and PR) titled Social Media and Personal Branding. The key point that this chapter was trying to get across was that your online websites play a huge part in your personal branding. The way you reflect yourself online is how people picture your brand. Therefore, my responsibility as an intern to this organization is to make sure that we put out a professional image in front of our audience. Even though adding hashtags to stay on the current trends will lead to a greater audience (an idea I talked about in my post last week) it would not be helping with the professional image we are trying to go for with the organization, since some hashtags could be deemed superfluous. If this were an idea we really wanted to consider, then we would have to be very careful and research each current trend carefully before posting about it on our social profiles.

This past week consisted of working on my social media platforms of Twitter and LinkedIn along with starting a new task of writing up the script for the video being created by FourDesign, the design firm.

Since there were no upcoming articles or events published by NIMML this week, there was no weekly post on LinkedIn. My activities for this platform included adding and managing members in the group. Next week, we will be trying something different and will integrate the newly published book with LinkedIn by publishing a chapter a week with an image. Hopefully this will instill some interest in the book and overall in NIMML as well.

With the slight changes made to Twitter, an increase in engagement rate was noticed. Our analysis last week was accurate and we noticed that with an increase in ‘Real Time Data’ tweets, there was an increase in the amount of clicks our tweets had and an increase in the usage of the link. We will continue this into the last week of November to assure that our analysis was accurate and not an outlier. This next week’s tweets will also focus around food, due to Thanksgiving coming up. We will try to reach a broader audience by using generic hashtags along with our research related hashtags.

My biggest task of this week was to create a script and/or a storyboard for the informative video for NIMML. Since I have never written a script before, this was quite the challenging task for me. After some online research, I was able to create an outline for the script and with the approval for the outline, I was able to start working on a storyboard. I plan on turning in the storyboard tomorrow for approval (will be posted once fully completed).

Besides these tasks, I was given the hold of a new social media site, Facebook. One of the workers in NIMML recently decided to leave the organization and her responsibilities have been divided among the other members. One of her tasks was to be in charge of Facebook and make weekly updates, and so being the marketing intern, this is now under my umbrella. My list of activities to do for this organization is starting to increase and I am hoping that I can still keep up with all of them.

This chapter that I found most helpful this week (from The New Rules of Marketing and PR) was about optimizing social media posts. The bullet points that were mentioned in this section were as follows:

Target a specific audience = reach an audience that your organization is important to the organization

Be a thought leader = show your expertise in your topic

Be authentic and transparent = do not try to copy anyone else’s style

Create lots of links = link back to your sites

Encourage people to contact you = make yourself approachable, ask for feedback

Participate = in groups and online discussions

Make it easy to find you = tag your page

Experiment = try new things with these websites and see what happens; continuously try to improve.

These key points are very fundamental to obtaining a solid presence online and I plan on keeping these in mind as I will start working on Facebook and will continue on with the remainder of the internship.

Week 9 consisted of my supervisor being out of town so I did not have many assignments to work on, besides working on the twitter posts and the weekly LinkedIn updates. I added the finishing touches to the presentation that I was supposed to give to FourDesign and started on my research presentation for the NIMML meeting at the end of the month (sort-of signifying my work done with the organization, as well as teaching the members about marketing and how it plays a role with their group). This presentation will be made this upcoming week on November 20th, 2015.

Weeks 10 and 11 were more busy and consisted of working on some new tasks, while balancing the recurring tasks. The first task of importance was the meeting with the FourDesign graphic design firm. My presentation to the group went really well and I was able to express NIMML’s viewpoint and message in a concise way. With the help of my supervisor, as well as the co-directors of the organization, I was able to get a new project started, and that is the creation an informative video about NIMML. As of right now, we are still in the process of hashing out the legal contracts, as well as the price for this project. Within a few weeks, we should have the legal paperwork finished and this project will begin. While waiting, I have started on a rough script of what the video should entail. This project should be completed by the end of spring semester 2016, the latest.

The second new task that I was assigned was my part in making the Scientific Annual Report with the lab manager. I have been given the task of writing up the ‘Education and Outreach’ section for this report. Although it seemed like a daunting task at first, after looking at an old report published by NIMML, I was able to get an idea of how to format it. I have already started working on my outline for it and will show it to my supervisor so she can edit and add details. In general, the Education and Outreach section talks about NIMML’s team and whom it consists of (and where they come from); this includes a blurb about the graduate students and undergraduate students (and what schools and programs they represent). This section will end by highlighting the new computational modeling book that NIMML has published and will encourage readers of the report to purchase it. The deadline for the outline of this section is the end of November.

The third major task of these past few weeks was to analyze the Twitter data from the month of October and see where the organization is in terms of engagement rate and audience outreach. After going through the different tabs in Twitter Analytics, I was able to get a rough consumer persona for this organization. The majority of our visitors and views on Twitter are male (about 59%) and have interests in science news and biology. 58% of them are from the United States, and more specifically, 18% of them are from Virginia (this mostly takes into account the members of the organization that are following the NIMML page). Aside from this knowledge, I was able to get some random information about these followers as well, that their household income is between $75,000-$99,999, and the majority of these users hold a Visa credit card. Apart from these figures, I was able to look at the different tweet charts and noticed that our engagement rate had decreased down to 1.2%, yet our link clicks and retweets had increased over the month. A key piece of information that I learned from all of this analysis was that our viewers tend to interact with tweets that are focused on the topics of Machine Learning/ Real Time Data and Precision Medicine. I was able to take this information to the director and for the rest of this month, we have decided to focus the majority of our tweets on these topics to see how this affects our engagement rate and to see if our Twitter analysis was correct.

Throughout this week, I was also maintaining a presence on LinkedIn. However, I have seemed to have hit a bit of a roadblock in terms of finding a way to integrate the two types of social media (Twitter and LinkedIn). After spending a few hours on the Internet trying to find a proper way, I was still not able to come up with a concise answer so it will be something I will try to focus on this upcoming week. One idea I had was to engage followers by asking a question, and for them to continue the conversation on our LinkedIn page. I am not sure how successful of an idea this would be and if it will actually work. If I am able to not come up with any other ideas, then it will be something I will try and see what happens. On another note, one feature of LinkedIn that I have been enjoying is the weekly announcements email, which I have been utilizing for the past 2-3 weeks. It seems to increase our engagement on LinkedIn, which is good.

According to a chapter on Audio and Video Drive Action, in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, a video is a great way to communicate with a customer. The examples that the author mentioned were B2B, and could be applied when thinking about NIMML. According to David Meerman Scott, a video is a fun way to provide the information, rather than shoving it down to a consumer (in a speech style, dry way). It provides examples of what the organization is known for, while adding an interesting element, which in turn can enhance a business’s reputation. Knowing this information, it was critical to make sure that NIMML had an updated video introducing the organization. This visual media will provide a great, fresh impression for the organization and will hopefully in turn lead to an increase in consumers for the organization (and/or donors who would like to fund research).

These past few weeks have been a blur and I have had a lot on my plate. Now as week 8 is ending, I have some spare time and will be providing an update with what I’ve been working on.

During this time, I have been able to start on two new projects, as well as continue updating my old ones. The first idea I was able to implement this week was Wikipedia. After one of my meetings with my supervisor, I was able to start up a Wikipedia account for the organization. As stated in my last post, based off of what I read in my marketing book by David Meerman Scott, I thought it would be a good idea to implement within NIMML. Although it’s effects are not noticed quickly (as compared to social media like Twitter), it is something worth having in the long run. Instead of creating a Wikipedia page on the organization, we decided to add relevant and current information on research topics that the organization focuses on. For example, I was able to add some extra information about the protein NLRX1, with citations from NIMML’s papers to add credibility. This information, which was added, was not written by me, but rather by a research assistant whom was very knowledgeable about this information. She wrote me a quick summary, and I was able to edit the page and add it in.

The second project that I started this week was graphic design. After attending various meetings with the organization heads, I came to the conclusion that graphic design was an area of expertise in which the group was lacking. Although there is a graphic design person within VBI, there are not enough resources available to NIMML through him. Therefore, I took it upon myself to see if there are other outlets that we could use to obtain some new graphics for NIMML. I knew the best place to look would be on campus, since Virginia Tech is known for it’s architecture, as well as technology. After a few minutes of digging, I was able to get to Virginia Tech’s Graphic Design, School of Visual Arts Page. After reaching the contact mentioned on the page, I was able to get a response within minutes, and was told to contact FourDesign, a design firm on campus, made specifically to work on projects for other organizations in the area. Long story short, I was able to get in touch with the director of the firm and we have set up a meeting on November 2nd, at 11 am. My supervisor and the co-directors of NIMML will also be attending this meeting alongside me, so that they can share what they would like to see from the design firm. For this meeting, I am also preparing a presentation to give a brief overview of the organization, so that the firm has something to work with.  

According to a visual design chapter in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, art is “more important” than science, and that is something that I agree with to some extent. The main goal of my marketing campaign for NIMML is to make the research conducted here, reach more people and to make it relatable to the audience. A visual is something that can reach a large group and is something that can be understood by a wide variety of people. Therefore, if the organization is lacking behind in visuals, it will be hard to disseminate information about the organization, effectively. I am hoping this meeting is fruitful and we are able to get better visual aids to be used in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as in publications and the website. 

The updates for the other projects are as follows. LinkedIn has been slowing down in terms of views, but I have gone in and added some more articles throughout the weeks so interaction with that should pick up. Twitter has gained a lot of followers during these past few weeks. I was able to implement a new idea (more on that next week, after I get some feedback) and it seems to be working well. Our followers have increased, as well as our interaction with them.