Pros and Cons of Social Media

 ----------------------posted on behalf of Vivian Lee----------

30th of May marked the last day of my internship with ACRES. It has been a great learning platform - from running a major fundraising event to launching a critical PR campaign. I have learnt how effective social media platform can be to charitable organisations like ACRES - free and easy.

Despite the benefits the social media platform can provide, the company must also take note of the risks. If one never utilized it effectively, it can cause the reputation of the company to go down. Should a company starts to use the social media such as having a face book page or twitter account, it must be committed to updating it regularly to maintain a good relationship with its stakeholders. Also, one must take precaution when replying or posting any comments because any bad or unpleasant comment on the net can be pass on to millions of people in just a short period of time.

Insights of this interesting page: http://mondobeat.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/social-media-pros-cons/ - Using social media can be very time intensive and who knows, you can attract the wrong crowd of people who might works against your organisation. Thus, a company should think twice before integrating social media into one of their communication tools.

All in all, it has been a great placement with ACRES, nice and helpful supervisor and colleagues, my interested field of work (animals-related), at the same time applying the skills I had learnt throughout my course of studies.

Cheers!

Internship with ACRES

 ----Posted on Behalf of Vivian Lee--------------------

I'm currently having my internship placement with an animal welfare organization - ACRES (Animal Concerns Research and Education Society). I'm actually quite glad to be working in this organization because I love animals and that makes my internship even more exciting. Of course I'm in the communications department. I'm helping out in their Gala Dinner 2011, celebrating their TENTH birthday, which is happening next week!!! So excited but as event day is drawing nearer, we are all very busy right now. Not to mention, I'm actually working with my classmate which actually makes this internship more fun because we get to discuss projects together and proposed ideas to the supervisor. 

Because we are a non-for-profit organization, finding sponsors is one of our main challenge. Not many companies will be willing to sponsor (in other words, give their products away for free although is free advertisement for them). Nonetheless, this is all about building relationships again. 

Other than celebrating their ten years of actions for the animals, it is also a fundraising event for them to build an on site veterinary clinic for the rescued animals. It will be a pretty cool experience because it is an in-house PR department which differs from how a PR consultancy works. Currently, we've finished the planning stage, and now we are just tying up the loose ends, doing collaterals for the people who signed up for the Gala Dinner and making the event happen!

Till then!

Vivien 

14536913

Curtin Singapore