Finding Opportunity at a Growing Tech Company
Dean’s Intern Matt Rosenberg at Living Social.
This past fall I spent my time as the School of Communication Dean’s Intern for Public Relations and Strategic Communication at LivingSocial. At the bustling tech startup, I served on a team of three other people who also enlisted the support of FleischmanHillard and later on Schwarz MSL. I served many roles during my time including writing content, producing a video series and overseeing the moving of a WordPress blog.
Serving on the public relations team, I sat in and participated at many meetings. Whether they were marketing all-hands meeting lead by our CMO, or a collection of the credit card and social media teams, I was in the front lines of everything. When crisis struck, I sat in the brainstorming sessions and on phone conferences with our PR agency and helped create the responses necessary. This included times where our website was down for almost two straight days.
My first tasks included me writing content for LivingSocial’s blog, which is the company’s direct link to the consumers. Early on, I had to learn the tone and voice of the company, which is much different than the tone that is normally taken in press releases. Most posts required that I do a lot of independent research and confer with other members of LivingSocial that served on different teams.
During my time there, the company was in the process of creating a video series that would complement a holiday contest—called Holiday Hero. The contest has just launched to the public and my duties included working with the videographer and contracted producer closely and crafting the sets that would be used. My input was also solicited for post production, and how the videos would be released to the public. My duties also included building the submission and FAQ pages on LivingSocial’s website, which will be the main vehicle of the contest.
At the tale end of the fall, LivingSocial moved their website to new servers and that included a new design as well as combining the corporate website under the same umbrella as the blog. When the switch was made, a lot of bugs appeared and it had to be scaled back. My boss asked that I come in extra time and contracted me to complete the quality assurance on the new site while it was still in the staging portion of development. I took the lead with communicating with our engineers, designers and the third party agency that completed the move and was tasked with finding and fixing any bugs present in the WordPress site.
The experience taught me a lot, and was a great connection to my course work at American University as a public communications major. It was a very interesting and educational semester, and created a strong background for me to grow and learn more as I move forward with my public relations career.