I began interning for BizCo Studio (previously SSM Creative Collective) in May of 2021 as part of my graduate curriculum at UNCW. Before I started, I had no experience in the field of branding and social media management or the writing associated with those fields. This internship called on me to draw more from my writing background than I thought, as the work was the furthest from anything I had done before as an English major. Writing copy for various accounts required that I write with a different voice for different audiences. Understanding my audience as well as recognizing and replicating an established brand voice was something that studying English had indirectly prepared me for.
When I wrote for The Second Glass, I needed to write with a playful, alliterative attitude. This is because we were emulating the restaurant owner while running her socials. When I wrote for Bring it Downtown, a Wilmington city social media account, the copy needed to be welcoming and informative. Each account had nuances and tone that aligned with their brand values. As an intern, I sometimes needed to figure out the brand voice just from the previous copy myself, but as an English student, I was able to pick up on those nuances faster.
I think the strongest example of my writing comes from the longer-form blogs that I wrote for our business’s website. For these blogs, I had to come up with a topic related to the digital media and marketing field, research the topic, and create a piece with a clear, distilled message. Understanding my audience was key; cutting down jargon, simplifying sentence structure, and getting to the message more directly were priorities now that I did not often think about as a literary student. Blog writing surprised me in how much it made me reconsider my writing style. Overall, this internship called on a skill I have been practicing for years while also pushing that skill into new territories.
