Hi everyone! My name is Jessica Tredota and I am currently a third year, soon to be a fourth-year student here at Chapman University.

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During this past semester, I had the opportunity to be a Public Relations and Marketing Intern for Ajenda PR. This agency specializes in media relations, marketing, and event planning with an emphasis on social media for various restaurants. As an intern, I was assigned two clients: Newport’s Fly N Fish and Irvine’s Gulliver’s Restaurant. For these clients, my main responsibility was to create social media content for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and to manage these accounts to increase engagement.

It was really exciting to work on tasks for these restaurants as I had a better understanding of the target audience — I have been living in Southern California for a few years and knew what type of voice and what type of content would be appealing to 20-30-year-old Newport and Irvine residents. During my sophomore year, I took an Introduction to Strategic and Corporate Communication (SCC 100) course. I learned about the 10 steps of a social marketing plan, which has been incredibly beneficial for this aspect of my internship, as the third step in a marketing plan is to describe your target audience. Everything you do after narrowing your target audience is to create content which is appealing and relatable to them. When I first started at Ajenda PR, they provided me with a fact sheet for each client, so that I understood their brand and who I was going to try to target.

As I became more experienced at my internship, I would get additional tasks assigned to me. One of my favorites was when I had to create a pitch for some of our clients to be included in a round-up for National Whiskey Day. For this assignment, I had to create short, playful, and spunky descriptions of whiskey-based cocktails that would then be sent out to media outlets. However, before I was able to send out the pitch to writers, I needed to get approval from my supervisors. During the process, I also conducted research through the form of coverage sweeps to see what media outlets and writers created similar articles in years prior. Through this assignment, I learned that you need to be proactive and consistently contacting writers, or anyone for that matter, as one email is not enough. It takes time and dedication to get yourselves or your client out into the public.

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Some of the other tasks that I was responsible for were weekly marketing reports, press clippings, and graphic design projects on Canva. Although it was initially challenging to manage my time between my course assignments and my internship tasks, I quickly found my groove, and it was a great learning experience that I will take with me for all my future endeavors!