My internship in DAFWA

Sorry guys, I had just found that my first post is not here so I post it again. Luckily I saved a copy of it.

Hi everyone, my name is Ki Yan. This is my first post here to talk about my internship experience in the Department of Agriculture and Food. I have started my internship two weeks ago and I would like to give you a scope of what I am working on now. A new initiative called “Bridging the Yield Gap” was launched early this year by the department to increase gain production. My main task during the internship is to produce a research report that seeks the opportunity to use social media tools in a government project. Unlike most of the Public Relations work experience, the work I am doing is at the beginning stage of a PR strategy, which is research and development. I am really interested in this project because using social media is one of the newest PR and marketing tool, thus it is getting more and more frequent used in PR strategy. I am also keen in studying the implement and the development of “Government 2.0” because I think the trend of having an “open” government is spreading around the world in recent years. The Australian government had announced its Gov 2.0 report earlier this year, through the feedback of the report from the federal government; it is obvious to see the Australian government has a positive attitude towards “Gov 2.0”. Although it is hard to say whether this attitude would remain or not after the election, it is still a good sign to show that the government is aware of the issue.

The other main issue of the task is to find out the possibility of using social media to collaborate with the gain farmers in Western Australia. Consider the ability of accessing the Internet and famers’ attitude towards new Internet technology; the social media strategies that most commercial corporations and government department are using may not be applicable to this case.

At the moment I am researching data about how Australian farmers (especially those in Western Australia) use the Internet and their attitudes towards it. Hopefully I can share some interesting findings with you in my next post.