For my internship I got selected to do social media community management at G-Star RAW headquarters located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. My position was part of the media team that then belonged to marketing.
G-Star RAW is a Dutch denim brand that was created in 1989 in Amsterdam. They specialize in making raw denim, that is untreated and unwashed denim. Besides jeans, they also produce other types of clothing, varying from shoes to sunglasses. The brand has put a lot of emphasis on sustainability and continuously works towards more sustainable global fashion industry. In 2014 they announced “RAW for Oceans” collaboration which was world’s first denim collection that was made out of recycled plastic collected from the ocean.The brand is represented around the world as they have over 6,500 selling points. Their headquarters is located in Amsterdam however they also have five more regional offices around the world.
I found my internship through Graduateland.com, which is an online career portal. After discovering the position, I applied and got invited for an interview. Before going in for an interview, my search was not completely set on social media, however during the meeting I realized that my knowledge, both from university and personal experience would very well meet the requirements they are looking for. Couple of days later I got confirmed for the position via phone.
Since G-Star works within a corporate structure, my daily list of tasks was quite fixed. This included doing community management for all G-Star’s global social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and even LinkedIn. To be more specific, community management involved responding to incoming comments, liking comments, engaging with tagged brand content and responding to private messages. Thus, my job was to keep track of all social media communication that involved the brand, which also meant checking the hashtags and what people are saying about the brand in general. Often this was also negative, which required me to find efficient solutions and come up with a way how to communicate any type of message in the most efficient way. Naturally in these situations I had to follow the so-called communication matrixes, which showed in which cases I have to contact who.
Besides community management, my duty was to also create weekly social media performance result reports where my research and statistical skills helped me a lot. Every week I kept track on each post’s social key performance indicators such as reach, engagement, link clicks and image clicks. Throughout my internship I also learned how to work with Google Analytics, which shows how many people have ended up buying a certain product that was linked through a specific social media post on any platform. Most often this was done to check how many people have clicked on a product pin on Pinterest and then whether they have bought the product. As a result, I had to present the report to my team each week and also share it with others who were not so deeply involved with the brand’s social channels. This weekly system also made me realize the importance of my work and embrace the fact that even as an intern my work was valued.
As part of my internship research, I looked into how two-way communication can influence brand loyalty in social media marketing and does this differ concerning the type of social media.The idea to research brand loyalty came as a result of a discussion with G-Star RAW, where it was learned that the organization is yet in the process of building a stronger consumer loyalty via social media as well. Within the six months that I was part of the team, the denim brand had rapidly increased the extent to which they engage in community management across platforms as a result of a strategic change. I ended up collecting data from all G-Star RAW employees of the headquarters using internal networking site. This also increased the value of my data and made the results of analysis highly attractive also for my manager and other collogues.
There are pros and cons when working in a strong corporate environment. One the one hand this internship really provided me insights how “real” work is done behind a global brand such as G-Star. Besides social media, I also got to see how other marketing functions such as public relations and branding look like. Moreover, to actually see how large the team is who is deciding the message that the brand sends out to the world. Thus, I was also required to be up to date with the latest information in order to know what to communicate back to the audience on social media. On the other hand, in a corporate structure as I mentioned the tasks remained same for most of the time. This means that people who work in those environments have to be very fond of what they are doing as I learned that every person is mostly expected to do just their part in the business. It does provide stable work but there is less flexibility.
Throughout my internship at G-Star I met very lovely people who made my want to consider working in the industry in the future. The tasks I had taught me a lot and made me get out of my comfort zone. As an intern I would have never expected that I get to communicate with big name celebrities such as Jaden Smith who the brand was collaborating with at the time, and exchange emails with Hearst and Conde Nast publications delivering media assets to Glamour and Vogue.