This semester I worked my practicum for Digital Bridges, a program in Milledgeville which I was already quite familiar with. From January through May I was employed by Digital Bridges as a public relations student assistant. My duties last semester were diverse and included tending to the social media sites Facebook and Twitter as well as other secretarial duties such as contacting news outlets with press releases which were self-generated as well as created by my managers.
This semester has been much different. I was given main duties such as creating a social media policies page to add to the policies and procedures booklet that is already in use at Digital Bridges, as well as logging, copying and compiling all of our press mentions. In addition, I was asked to attempt to reach over 200 Facebook likes. I created Facebook events and also created a large number of tweets in regards to the Candidate Forums, a series of events that took place at Digital Bridges this semester, which were shown live online as the forums took place. I publicized this event by placing posters around town and distributing handbills to students on campus that informed them of the events.
As for the successfulness of my projects I believe I did very well and succeeded. Since I spent only a little over three hours per week at Digital Bridges, it was crucial that I find another way to keep the social media updated when I was not in the building. For this, I created a Socialoomph.com account that I used to automatically post my tweets to our Twitter page throughout the week. I also created a hootsuite account although I did not get any use out of it. I created tweets not only about the upcoming events such as the Candidate Forums and the city-wide mobile treasure hunt, but also tweeted links to articles found on sites such as Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable, NTEN, Readwriteweb, and Techcrunch that made mentions of technology or programs related in some way to the Milledgeville community. I also reached the goal set my Daniel McDonald of getting our number of likes to over 200. We now have 214. Previously we had about 100. I did this by continuing to suggest the program’s page over Facebook. I created all of the events that occurred this semester as Facebook events and invited all of our friends.
A large task which I took on this semester was logging all of our press mentions into documents as well as making copies of those, which I then turned into PDF’s online. The point of this was to make sure that all of the articles about us that have been published are now able to be published online on the Digital Bridges website to be viewed by those who visit our website. The log was created so that the articles could be cut out of the papers and we would still know the newspaper and date they were published.
My most important task of the semester was thwarted however I did remake it. I did a lot of research on the social media policies of large companies such as IBM and NPR. I constructed a mission statement for Digital Bridges social media use as well as a list of social media policies and procedures. This large document that had been sent by e-mail was lost when the Digital Bridges computer’s documents were cleared. Daniel no longer had the document in his e-mail either. Thus, after 3 weeks of research and drafting, I started over on the policies and procedures document. This time, it was saved to multiple e-mails to avoid the same mishap.
The last duty of my practicum was to distribute posters to various businesses around Milledgeville. I also created a document listing these businesses as well as a contact at most of them. I also took handbills for both shoplocalmilledgeville.com and the Candidate Forums and passed them out to people around campus. The problem with this is that I do not think that all students care as much about the candidates as the people of Milledgeville do. The students are all here for a limited amount of time and many are not registered to vote in Milledgeville if they are registered at all. All in all, I believe I had a productive semester with Digital Bridges. I produced content which was used by the program and I believe I have left my mark due to the creation of social media policies which will, of course, have to be mended once new social media sites come into the picture.
** I do not own the picture posted. It can be found at http://thedigitalbridges.org/
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