Life on the #IamSocial Graduate Scheme
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News
When a company’s job application asks for an Instagram video, a tweet and your LinkedIn profile … it’s clear they aren’t messing about when they say they are social. That was how our life on the #IamSocial Graduate Scheme began. With the application process now a mere distant memory, Alex and I are coming into our fourth week in the business … and, boy, have we been busy!
Alex and I on “awkward accidental matching t-shirt” day
So, what is the #IAmSocial Graduate Scheme?
It’s an opportunity to learn all there is to know about agency life, and more importantly, We Are Social life. We spend three months rotating through all seven departments in the business, before starting our permanent roles as Account Executives in Client Services. So far, it certainly doesn’t feel like any ordinary graduate scheme; with first day cupcake deliveries, company quiz nights and charity runs, there has always been something going on … they’re even taking us skiing!
After a first week full of inductions, introductions, handshakes and excessive snacking, we began our rotations. Alex started life with the adidas team and I joined the creatives. Over the next few months, we will take it in turns to blog about what we have been up to during our graduate scheme journey, so stay tuned folks!
So, what do creatives do?
This is where the big ideas happen! When a client comes to the business with a problem or goal, the account and strategy teams work hard to define the objectives based on the target audience and develop clear insights from which ideas can stem. It is then presented to the team in the form of a creative brief, and this is where the process of creating a campaign begins, from that first spark of an idea right through to a cross-channel social activation.
I’ve had the opportunity to witness (and try to help out!) at every stage of the process. To help visualise the ideas and present it to the client, we drew scamps – visual mock-ups that show how the idea works in different media channels – for example Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, digital billboards and so on. These scamps became part of a ‘deck’ (that’s a presentation to you non-agency folk!). All in all, its been a busy two weeks of learning, ideas generating and foosball matches!
During the graduate scheme, we are also getting the opportunity to visit some of the social media giants, including Facebook, Twitter and Google. So far we’ve been to the Twitter offices to learn how to optimise campaigns on the platform, use analytics tools and most importantly, bag some freebies!
That’s it for my time in creative, I’m on to coding with the Dev team and promoting Tweets with the paid media team; wish me luck! Next, you’ll be hearing from my Serbian partner in crime, Alex. Here are some of our parting thoughts…
The five things we’ve learnt so far
- On average, there are 6,000 Tweets sent every second which adds up to almost 500 million tweets a day! We love this awesome tweet-visualisation tool that shows what the population of Britain are mostly tweeting about at different times of day … predominantly commuting and alcohol
- You can create a surprising amount of content in-house with just a camera, some helping hands, a bit of creativity…. and 500 boxes of tissues!
- The importance of timesheets – this one is drilled in daily. But without them it would be impossible to keep track of client budgets, something that will be of a lot more importance to us when we start our permanent roles.
- It is also almost impossible to avoid gaining the We Are Social new starter 10lbs with a birthday almost every day, pizza meetings, beer o’clock Fridays and free breakfast … all we can do is thank god for running club!
- And finally, try not to panic when getting into first week tricky situations…
