Ready, set go!

Hi everyone, I’m Jordan and I recently wrapped up my first week interning at GO Communications in Malaysia!

When I first began my degree and read that I was required to complete an internship I was immediately dreading the day where I would have to start looking. However, as I was nearing closer and closer to D-day I began to get excited as it meant I could finally take the knowledge and skills gained at university and apply them in the real world. I also knew that an internship would teach me even more skills and insights into the industry, which I knew would benefit me in the future.

Rocking up to my first day at GO I didn’t know what to expect but the one thing I did not expect to happen was to walk head first into a crisis.

As it was my first day my team decided it was best for me to focus on the tasks that they couldn’t complete due to the crisis. As I had no understanding of the client and the state of Malaysian politics (it’s a very complicated and sensitive topic here) I could understand why they decided this. Although I was disappointed I took this as my opportunity to prove myself to my team.

Most of my tasks for the first two days revolved around research and content creation/ ideas. The digital team at GO Communications have a wide mix of clients coming from fashion, travel, health and property industries, which meant I had to tailor the content to suit their individual needs.

At uni, we are always told to research, research, and research! This kept running through my head whenever I began thinking of content ideas. By spending the morning researching, I was able to see the type of messages and audiences each brand had; allowing me to crate content ideas to reflect this. I presented my ideas to my team who gave me some good feedback and decided to take on board some of my ideas to propose to the client!

Come mid-week I was still living in a bubble away from the crisis as I was still on content creation and research. However, late one night I received a message from my team lead asking me to come in early the following morning  as another story had broken and required constant media monitoring and hourly updates to the client. I had never done media monitoring before and was quite nervous as I had looked into the crisis to understand what my team was dealing with and was overwhelmed.

A quick run-down for you all, without divulging into company details; one of GO’s clients was linked to a political scandal which made both national and international news (you can see why it was chaotic), which resulted in constant media monitoring and damage control.

This was the one task that I found to be very stressful and daunting as the information was coming in fast and in some cases I had to translate articles from Malay and Chinese to English to determine if it was relevant enough to the client. Lastly, I was required to highlight articles of important where I had to identify out of all the articles found for each hour and highlight them for the client to read first. By the end of the day I was pleased with how I dealt with the situation and was beyond grateful for the two crisis simulations at uni as they prepared me on how to handle stressful, high pressure situations in a timely and efficient manner.

By the end of the week I was feeling more like a part of the team and was then given my biggest task which was to write an article for one of GO’s clients, a property developer; who is currently promoting three new and very luxurious complexes. The brief I was given was to follow the ideas of home, space and growth – with my team giving me creative control of the direction of the article. I began researching the company to get an idea of their audience (here we go again with the importance of research!). My focus for the article was to show how your living space can help promote your personal growth. I had a two hour time frame to complete the first draft, when completed I submitted it for review and waiting in anticipation for feedback. Thankfully by the end of the day my team leader called me over and said she loved the article and asked me to write two more which will be presented to the client for their monthly content calendars, yay!

By the end of the week the crisis had settled down and it was back to regular scheduling within our team. I was then given my next task which was to complete the GO Communications content calendars for July and August – my Friday was spent researching content and creating an outline for each month which was to be continued in week two!

My first week really opened my eyes into the industry as it can change at the drop of hat, no one day is the same! One day you will be researching, creating content, writing articles and the next you could be spending hours monitoring all online media channels!

I think this has been what made my first week here at GO fly by. I cannot wait to get back into it for week two.

Until next time!