Creative Traction

I’m a big fan of interns having both been an intern when I first got out of college and having recently had the pleasure of managing one while working for a local ad agency. However, I don’t believe that interns should be managing a company’s social media as per my reply to Rayanne Langdon on Twitter. You can check out the picture to the left for the rest of our conversation.

Interns don’t have the business experience nor do they have communication experience to be running the social media of a company large or small. More importantly an intern isn’t going to have a strong understanding of the company’s branding, business objectives and goals that they are looking achieve over the long term that need to be taken into consideration when working on strategy planning for social media. There are a few other reason that interns don’t make the best choice for getting into social media:

Time
What happens when you don’t hire the intern on after their 4 months? Do you guys just stop doing social media or try and get another intern after that trial run. Or worse yet, what if the intern isn’t in the office everyday. Who is going to be managing your social media on those off days. Not all internships are full-time Monday to Friday and not getting back to a customer for a few days could be a missed opportunity or come across as you don’t listen.

Personality
If you do hire an intern for 4 months and then don’t hire them on afterwards. You are going to create a social media brand with a split personality. As much as we all try, anyone who does social media is going to inject personality into the brands of the company’s they are managing social media for. It would be not only what they say but also how they say and write back when replying to good and bad comments and opportunities related to your brand. If you keep on changing in and out interns every 4 months. The personality behind your brand is going to change with it and make it that much harder for some people to connect with your brand.

Knowledge Base
When that intern leaves or doesn’t get hired on because you wanted to take the cheap way out of getting into social media. Something else goes with them as well…. the intern is taking with them all the knowledge and past experience with all the connections they made. Even if you try and get them to train the new intern before they leave, they are going to miss something. It happens in any situation when you try and train your replacement. Also the relationships that the intern build may be in jeopardy as well once they leave.

This doesn’t even go into the transparency issue of switching in interns every 3 or 4 months. Are you going to let your community know that you didn’t think it was important enought to hire someone fulltime to help manage your social media. What does it say about your company if you don’t tell them? What does if say if you do? As we know getting into social media isn’t free (post 1 & post 2) and you’ve to pay for the technology and the people along with their time required to get started. Using an intern to get into social media isn’t going to return the kind of results that you want or have seen from other company’s who have been in the space for the last few years.

I think interns are great and can be a very valuable asset for any company looking to tap the knowledge of the next generation growing up. However, I wouldn’t recommend that you hire one to manage your social media.

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