Kym is asked to get social during her McConnells work experience
Media studies student Kym Ellis was able to turn her favourite pastime into valuable research when she completed an assignment on social media as part of her work experience.
Kym, who is in the second year of her course at the University of Derby, spent the best part of four weeks working with us to gain experience of life at a full service agency, sharing her time between our design studio, recruitment, PR, media buying and account handling departments.
Like many of her peers, Kym is an avid user of Twitter and Facebook in her spare time but graciously accepted the task of getting online during office hours to talk us through how she uses the web as a social medium.
She also put together a document of the latest research detailing the numbers of subscribers to both services and the big names who have launched themselves into the Web 2.0 world.
She then fed this information back to us as part of our social media monitoring.
Kym said: “McConnells were the only Derby agency which was in a position to offer me work experience and so I was grateful that they gave me the opportunity.
“Not only did I find it useful to see what each department did, it was really interesting to find out how the internet has changed life for everyone – and how social media is going to change it in the future.
“I don’t know anyone in my age group who doesn’t use the internet socially so I was able to talk about what aspects of it I find useful and what I’m not interested in.”
Gary de Roeck, creative director at McConnells, said: “We have Twitter feeds on our website but understanding how it is used as part of Twitterers’ daily lives is a vital part of the story.
“While no self-respecting media firm can afford not to use social media as part of their communications strategy, a company that does not adapt its approach to suit the medium will undermine its credibility.
“Kym’s generation is completely at ease with Web 2.0 and is already driving it forward, so to us it made perfect sense to find out how she and her peers use social media. Her information gave us excellent feedback which we will utilize not only for our own site but for ours clients’ social media activity too.”
