Social Media/PR Internships

For the most part, anyone who has met me in person quickly comes to know that I love all things Disney. I spent the spring semester of 2010 working at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida on the Disney College Program. It was an experience I absolutely loved and I fully intend on going back to Orlando after I graduate and doing another internship. This second time around though, I plan on doing what is called a Professional Internship.

Professional Internships at Disney are internships that rather than a College Program internship where you could be working at an attraction like It's A Small World, you can work in actual business departments of the Parks and Resorts segment of the Walt Disney Company. The list of internship positions available for the Fall 2011 semester went up today and I am practically drooling over some of the amazing communication positions available.

Out of all of the communication positions 6 specifically list PR or public affairs and about 3 mention social media in the title. My particular favorite is the "Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings & Honeymoons Social Media & Marketing Intern." I am positive that all of these positions, but especially the Fairytale weddings position, will  have incredibly competitive application pools.

The reason I am posting about these internships is to show that large companies like Disney are increasingly starting to use social media to connect with the public. These internship postings say to me that my interest in social media in relation to PR is justified. Hopefully this social media in PR class will give me an advantage if and when I apply for internships similar to the ones posted right now. At least, I can hope it will.

-M

In case anyone would like to go look at the list of Communication related Disney Professional Internships the link can be found here.

Barbie Tweets?

Did anyone know that Barbie has a Twitter? She does. And turns out her former boyfriend Ken has one too.

They even tweet each other!

While browsing Yahoo! news today I came across an article about Ken's mission to win Barbie back by Valentines day. I thought it was interesting and made a guess that Mattel had probably set up some sort of account on at least one of the major social media websites for Barbie. Through a little Twitter search I discovered that in addition to the Facebook page mentioned in the Yahoo article, both Ken and Barbie have Twitter accounts.

While both Barbie and Ken seem to have fairly active accounts with 1,359 and 324 tweets respectively I am curious as to who Mattel is seeking to connect with by using Twitter. I would think Mattel would want Barbie to connect with the audience that primarily plays with her, little girls. I will be the first to admit I am not really into Twitter and as such I have no idea what the primary age of the users is. However I really can't believe that the little 6 year old girls who I imagine play with Barbie are on Twitter.

So that again leads to the question of who is Mattel seeking to connect with? The general public? Adults who have the ability to purchase a Barbie for the children in their lives? That is my guess, but I would love to hear other thoughts too. Who do you think Mattel is trying to reach?

-M

Update: Barbie said yes! So it's official, Barbie and Ken are back together. Mattel even made special commemorative dolls to mark the occasion. I found them in Walmart recently.

 The front and back of the box.

Well Hello There!

I always feel that when starting a blog, its a good idea to introduce yourself. I'm sure everyone likes to know a bit about the person behind the computer screen.

My name is Marion and I am currently a Senior at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. I am majoring in Communication with a concentration in Advertising, Public Relations, and Media Arts. This blog is a product of a class that I am enrolled in this semester called "Social Media for PR." I will be posting several times a week with at least one of the posts discussing the readings from the class. We have 2 books that we are using for this class are Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff and Engage by Brian Solis.

At first I had a hard time deciding what this blog should be about but I recently decided that it should be focused on something that I am actually interested in. Something I am definitely interested in is the Entertainment and Lifestyle industries. By this I mean obvious things like films and music but also things like amusement parks and toys. Things that entertain us and are fun. This blog will look at these industries and examine how they use social media to communicate with and engage the public.

-M