Skills Learned
At the start of my internship with StarTalk Radio, both Jeff and I set goals for myself. I had aimed to develop professional relationships, gain real world experience in marketing, learn new techniques for reaching my audience and most importantly, become an effective social media marketer. While my goals remained broad, Jeff had a far more specific list in his "Objectives" section of my intern information sheet, and it wasn't until I had finished my time as an intern that I realized I had gone far above the goals I had set for myself by honing the 5 basic skills Jeff had laid out for me at the start.
I became incredibly proficient at scrubbing through old audio content to find SoundBites, and even more effective at knowing the right time to release topical content. I reformatted my file management systems to include widespread tagging to search and find files more easily, as well as making it easier for others to work their way through my library of created soundbites. I learned the importance of keywording, tagging, and meta-tagging and their synergy with each other to maximize search engine optimization (primarily Google). I learned how to extrapolate the data collected by SoundCloud and apply it to our own tracking and spreadsheets in order to develop specific tagging plans and optimize release time for our audience. And most importantly, and widely applicable; I learned to effectively write concise and thoughtful copy that can draw a viewers attention without completely falling into the category of click-bait.
In my time at StarTalk Radio as an intern, I was able to develop my social media, digital media, and marketing skills faster than that I had ever thought possible while also helping their organization grow. In the first month of my time there I effectively doubled their play-count on the weekly StarTalk SoundBite segments for which I was in charge, and shortly after that I created the "Talking Sci-Fi with Stewie (Seth MacFarlane)" segment which quickly garnered over 500,000 plays, breaking their record for most played upload. I was able to stabilize their play count for weekly segments to around 300,000 and develop new strategies for how and when content would be released. While I am writing this as though my time with StarTalk is a thing of the past, it is not. Jeff had offered me a permanent position as the lead SoundCloud manager which would solidify my current duties and also allow me to come up with future plans for new directions which we could take StarTalk to expand our reach. I could not be more appreciative of the opportunity I was presented with, and will be continuing to work with StarTalk for the foreseeable future.