Week of 10/26: “I just want to post ‘you’re all so wrong’ on the contest picture.”

So this week was a lot of tabling at my internship. On Monday, I worked a table with Katie to try to get people to take an online campus dining survey. Obviously, the lack of motivation that comes with the approaching end of a semester coupled with people never wanting to be bothered made this task tedious. However, we did our best to raise awareness of the survey and handed out at least 200-300 slips with the survey information out to students as they came to the commons to eat. We will be working on this again next week, so we are trying to figure out incentives to get surveys completed on the spot.

On Tuesday, I went in briefly to take pictures to post on Instagram for Chocolate day. I also tried some of the things they had out. Who can say no to chocolate cheesecake bars? No one.

On Wednesday, we didn’t actually have a table, but Katie and I handed out information slips about the Halloween costume contest that Campus Dining hosted on Thursday. This was a lot easier to talk to people about than trying to get them to take a survey. We combined methods of exposure by personally handing slips to people as they walked in/out of the Husky and Commons as well as leaving slips on the tables of the main on-campus dining locations. Overall, it went pretty well. In the end, there were 15 contestants for the costume contest, which really isn’t too bad!

Today I went in and helped Ashley set up some decorations for the Halloween theme in the commons. I also made posts with the halloween themed desserts that they are having in there today. *Note: I don’t always mention in the posts, but I am almost always Instagramming or Tweeting something on the Campus Dining account when I am at the internship and even when I’m not. I love helping with their social media!!*

10/8/14- “Have either of you ever heard of a popcorn ball?”

For today, I went to my internship once I was out of my only class for the day. Kasey was not there today, so I got to work with her assistant, Ashley. It was a pretty easy day. A few of us brainstormed ideas for baskets that parents could buy for their students for certain occasions/months.We had a lot of ideas rolling with that and that lasted for about 45 minutes.

Then I went around to the on campus dining places to replace the Sierra Mist stickers on the soda fountains. While I was doing that I went to the stations I set up at each place for the speaker drawing. So far, things seem to be going good with that. Students have til Friday to enter to win a free pair of Dre Beats! Hopefully there are more entries than there were with the Jambox speakers.

Finally, we wanted to do another social media giveaway for homecoming weekend (which is this weekend). Using Instagram, I asked followers to Instagram a picture showing their husky pride to be entered to win a pizza prize pack (2 free pizzas, a pack of Pepsi, and cookies) as our way to celebrate homecoming. I haven’t checked the account lately, but hopefully there will be some good entries! It always tends to be a bit more difficult to get activity from students when they’re being asked to do something (even taking a picture that they’ll probably take anyway) compared to asking them to simply ‘like’ or ‘favorite’ something. We’ll see how this goes! I’m picking the winner on Friday.

10/3/14- “They said they were going to email me back that day… That day has passed and still no email!”

For my internship on Wednesday and Friday, I just continued doing the Twitter giveaways scheduled for that week. On Friday, I also talked to Kasey about my ideas for the breast cancer month event ideas I had. It sounds like we will be doing a few of them which I’m pretty excited about! We also discussed the Sabra truck that will be coming to our campus in a couple of weeks. Finally, we talked about what I am doing next week, which is another on campus giveaway as well as a social media giveaway for homecoming. Should be a fun week! I also talked to her about missing a day later this month to go on a NYC trip for the art history class I’m taking. She nicely said it wasn’t a big deal if I couldn’t come in that day and they would get by without me hahaha

9/29/14- “Thankfully, we did not contact them yet.”

So today for my lovely internship, I got to start another week long social networking campaign! As I mentioned before, we are trying to build up our number of Twitter followers, so the giveaways are being done through the campus dining Twitter account.

Today I went down to Starbucks to some pictures there to use for the post. The original plan was to use Java City, but Kasey said that we had some Starbucks stuff that we could make into a gift package to use to give away to the winner, so we went with Starbucks instead. Once I got the pictures, I worked on making the post. Make fun all you want, but I think that composing a 140 character tweet is absolutely a skill and something to be proud of. Especially since pictures apparently count as some of the characters in the tweet!! What the heck is that!? Anyway, I managed to make the tweet without any leftover characters to spare. Upon posting the tweet, I took a screenshot and posted that to the Instagram account so that the people who follow that account are aware that we are doing a twitter giveaway. It’s been a few hours and the tweet already has over 40 retweets and 40 favorites, not to shabby! Followers retweeting/favoriting the tweet is how they are entered to win the prizes for this campaign, since the winner comes from the list of those people.

After that, I brainstormed some ideas for things that we can do for the ‘pink out’ in the Commons that take place for a day in October. I think I have some pretty good ideas and I’m excited to share them with Kasey! Tomorrow I am picking the winner of todays giveaway and posting the next giveaway on the campus dining twitter.

9/26/14- “Hi, I’m the Pepsi intern!”

So today was not a terribly long day at the internship! I went in to see that Kasey was the only one from our area there today, she was about to get on a phone call when I walked in. The first thing she asked me to do was to go through the slips for the Jolly Rancher jar guessing game from the carnival event on wednesday. There were more entry slips guessing the number of jolly ranchers for the chance to win the jar than there were for the chance for people to win a pair of Jambox speakers (the giveaway I did last week)… the priorities of people these days concerns me sometimes. Anyway, I found the winner after looking through about 150 slips of paper.

Next, Kasey asked me to go up to Roongos to check prices of some of the products they sell there. I was given an inventory list with the many products and their suggested retail prices. So I got to go around checking the prices, marking down if the price they were currently selling items at did not match what the current suggested retail price is. Is it weird that I kind of liked doing it? I’m not a huge numbers guy or anything, but I thought it was interesting to see the differences in some of the suggested prices compared to what they were being sold for. Maybe because I typically don’t take a second glance at the prices of snacks when I go to buy them because I’m usually just worried about eating whatever it is that I’m buying.

Anyway, after I went through the whole packet, I took the number with the differences I had to the woman (super nice lady) who is in charge of Roongos so that she knows what products they would have to adjust the prices for. Then I went back to the office at the Commons to give the packet to Kasey. After that she told me I was good to go for the day!

Next week I will be doing another social media campaign to hopefully boost the number of followers on the campus dining Twitter account!

9/19 & 9/22- “Their number was out of service…”

So friday was not a very eventful day. All I did when I went in was discuss the details for the carnival event we are doing this wednesday and then I collected the boxes with the entry slips for the speaker giveaway. There only ended up being about 70 entries for the speaker drawing, even though someone put their name in a box literally over 20 times… so technically there were about 90 entries. That kid didn’t win by the way. I took out all of his entries but the one and he lost so hah!

Today I came in and picked the winner from the speaker contest and gave him the speakers. I have to admit I was really jealous hahah they are Jambox speakers… I want a set so bad! Anyway, after that I went around the Commons during the busiest period at lunch and took pictures at the stations to post on the Instagram account. People looked at me like I was crazy, they probably thought I was there to eat but was walking around randomly taking pictures.

Then I talked to Kasey about what we can do next week since we have some great prizes to still giveaway. We decided that I would run another social media giveaway week. The last one was focused on Instagram and ended up helping us gain almost 100 followers! This time we are focusing more on the campus dining Twitter account in hopes that the week of giveaways will help us boost our number of followers. So all of next week we will be giving away prizes through people who follow our Twitter account and interact with whatever that day’s giveaway is. To end the week, the winner for friday will win an Amazon Kindle. I’ll go into more detail about this in next week’s posts.

Finally, we talked about an upcoming event that I am pretty excited about. The Sabra Tour (yes, Sabra who makes amazing dips) is coming to our campus in October! So I was talking about the ideas I had for how we can promote it on social media, and as always, how we can squeeze in a giveaway!

The semester is still young and there is a lot to work on! I can’t wait to see what else I get to do with this internship!

9/16/14- “It smells like peaches!”

So today was probably the busiest day that I have had at my internship thus far. When I got in to the offices, we started setting up everything for the Peach Festival that was taking place in the Commons. Basically, it was a bunch of foods that incorporated  farm fresh peaches from the Dries Orchards. Needless to say, it smelled amazing while we set up, there were so many desserts, some peach tea, and even some entrees that incorporated peaches. My main role in this, other than helping set up, was blow up everyone’s Instagram feeds with Peach Fest posts! I had a lot of fun doing that.

After that, I set up a table with the Aramark intern to give away some free samples of Smartfood popcorn and Cheeze-Its. During this time, I also posted a lot to the Instagram account. It definitely worked because some of the traffic that came to the table mentioned seeing the post, which of course made me feel great!

I feel like this experience so far has given me focus on what I want to do for a career. Obviously I would like to go into public relations, but I really think I would be happy with doing social media for a company (especially retail as I mentioned in my last post). I enjoy getting to be creative with what we post on the account, doing the contests and giveaways. I know that it’s not always fun, a big part of social media for a company is crisis pr. I think I could handle those situations, like right now with the UO situation, they are making statements on social media apologizing about the Kent State sweatshirt, and yeah they’re getting a lot of hate back, but at least they are trying to repair the damage that their sweatshirt caused. There are companies who choose not to address things in times of crisis, but I feel like the longer they wait to address it, the more damage is done in the long run.

I am glad that this internship has already helped guide me with future choices just from being exposed to the situations there! Who knows, by the end of my internship I may want nothing to do with social media, but at least I will be taking away knowledge that will be valuable to me later down the line.

9/8/14- “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission!”

So today was the first day of a week long social media campaign I am doing for my internship. Although I am a Pepsi intern, I do a lot of stuff that also helps promote campus dining at Bloomsburg University as a part of my internship. The whole point of this campaign is to build up the Instagram account for Bloomsburg University Dining. So every day this week we will be doing some small giveaways through using Instagram to not only promote the giveaway, but also as the way for students to enter the contest each day. Let me elaborate by explaining what I did today. Today’s giveaway was 2 pizzas and sodas from the Italian Kitchen for Monday Night Football. So I went down to the IK and took some pictures of pizza for the Instagram post, then I added the comment below the picture basically saying that people have to like the post as their way to be entered to win and posted it on the Bloomsburg University Dining account (we also shared the post to Twitter). Along with social media, I also created a flyer to hang up in all of the dining locations on campus. Throughout the day the account gained about 30 followers and the post itself got a grand total of 97 likes, not bad at all for the first day! The contest ended at 5pm, so we randomly selected one of the people who liked the post as our winner. Once we selected out person, I posted a screenshot of their ‘like’ in the notifications and tagged them in the post letting her know that she won (since you can’t actually message people on Instagram). I left my email in the post so that the winner could email me about the details to get her prize. I met up with her around 6 to giver her the voucher for the pizzas and sodas and to take her picture for my internship presentation that I will submit at the end of the semester. As I mentioned, this is a week long campaign, so I will get to do this for the rest of the week (with different prize giveaways, of course).

I seriously love doing things with social media, it is definitely an area that I would like to work in for a career! I am definitely looking forward to working on this campaign for the rest of the week!!!

9/5/14- “This is what you do for your internship? Jealous.”

My task for friday was to do some on campus promotion for Pepsi through some more giveaways. When I went in, I talked to my supervisor, Kasey, briefly and she told me what she wanted me to do for the day. Basically, I had a box of giveaways from Pepsi which consisted of frisbees, pens, mini footballs, and chap stick. Along with the giveaways, she said that I should set up a beanbag toss game to try to get students to play. It was a hot and sunny day on friday, so I was allowed to set up outside. The place I ended up choosing was in the sun but it was a higher traffic area which I thought was more important. Throughout the day I got pretty many people to play at least one round; it’s not easy to get people to play games on campus when they’re understandably more worried about getting to class or going to get food. Nonetheless, I made the most of it and talked to students as they passed by, tossing footballs to people and asking anyone who took one of the prizes on the table to tell others that I was out there with free stuff. I was out there for about 2 and a half hours when I finally ran out of almost all of my prizes to give away, all I had left was some of the chap sticks. Before I decided to fully clean up for the day, I went to take the table I had set up back to the office and planned on relocating to a shady area with the bean bag toss game to try to get a few more people to play while there was still the lunch rush around the dining halls. After I was done trying to get people to play the game for the day, I went back to the office and talked to my supervisor about some of the ideas that I have for this semester. She seemed pleased with most of them and we are actually going to be doing one of them this coming week! It will be a social media campaign to try to attract followers to the campus dining Instagram account by doing some great giveaways each day of the week leading to a pretty big prize giveaway on friday! I couldn’t feel more blessed to have this internship that let’s me work on all of these promotions and projects!

This Week on Twitter…

Images from Google Images

My Twitter feed has been pretty busy this week– here are some of the topics that were trending!

This week’s episode of Game of Thrones caused a huge buzz in social media. This is the second episode of the fourth season is easily the biggest episode that has come since the ‘Red Wedding’ episode of season three. If you were not able to watch the episode when it aired, the live tweeting that people were doing could have easily ruined the episode for you. All-in-all the episode was pretty epic for anyone who is invested in the show. I wrote a recap for BUnow that you can read! Here’s the link– http://bunow.com/68153-game-of-thrones-s4-ep2-recap

Another topic that has been popping up on my feed, and randomly enough, my friend was talking about last night, is how Miley Cyrus has been canceling shows on her current tour. News outlets have also been buzzing with this information but with minimal details other than what they can gather from Miley’s tweets. All that is really known is that Miley has had to cancel her shows because she is sick enough to land herself in the hospital– get well soon!

Finally (and I know this is not really a trending topic) I want to give a shout out to my favorite morning show, Elvis Duran and the Morning Show! I listen to them religiously and they are one of the main ways that I keep up with what is going on in our country… culturally anyway. I follow the Morning Show’s Twitter account as well as most of the people behind the show and they are constantly Tweeting! If you are looking for a way to keep up with what is going on in pop culture, stay up to speed with ‘what’s trending’ or just to get a good laugh, I highly recommend listening to Elvis Duran and the Morning Show. They also have a replay channel on iHeart Radio in case you miss the show while it is on the air.