By Teresa Buzzoni and Izzy Newirth
When I started as an intern at Hill Communications during the second semester of my freshman year, I was one of four freshman who entered the firm. Since then, I have watched the firm grow, adding three new clients, and expanding accounts to include more team members, which has increased the wealth of experiences and minds working together to develop communications strategies for all of the clients who come to Hill Communications for help developing their brands and social strategies.
I have had the pleasure of working on three accounts with Hill Communications thus far. Previously, my experiences with Hill Communications included creating campaigns for a yoga studio shutting down at the beginning of the national quarantine and a Healthy Living social media campaign on Syracuse University’s campus through the Lerner’s Center of Public Health. This semester, I worked with an incredible team of my peers to generate a campaign for a tech start-up, Squip, that handles realms of online gaming that none of us had much experience with before starting.
For my friend and teammate Izzy, this is her first experience with Hill Communications. She decided to join this semester because she was craving the opportunity to gain more experience in the world of public relations. As a Bandier major, she has had some but not many chances to learn about public relations in her classes, outside of the music industry. Joining Hill Communications has given her incredible opportunities that go beyond the organization and will prove vital to the rest of her career path. Through connections made at Hill Communications, she was able to be introduced to and work on social media for an indie singer/songwriter, Olivia Lurrie.
With Squip, we were challenged countless times. Squip was new to all of us. Their ultra-customized and specific demographic was one that most of us were unfamiliar with. This pushed us as a team to do a lot of research on the world of gaming and sports to understand the wants and needs of their target consumer. We dove into the Twitch threads and fan accounts of games like World of Warcraft, Mega Man, Street Fighter and Resident Evil. We researched the world of UFC, its fans and key fighters. Understanding all of the research that can be necessary to create a single well-landing post has taught us to use data to drive our strategy. As a team, we worked to pitch ideas ranging from knowing the campus community to finding Twitch influencers to celebrating Women’s history month to our supervisors and the client.
We learned quickly how to create graphics surrounding Squip’s products (as shown in the graphic below).
Looking back on the first drafts of our graphics, we elevated our work through collaborative team critiques. One of the challenges that we faced was understanding the approval process for posts involving partner brands. For a post to be released on the Squip social media accounts, it needed to be approved by both the client and the partners. Therefore, our team had to generate content ideas weeks ahead to ensure it would be ready by the holiday or relevant time.
While working on the Squip account, we were pushed to think outside the box as well.The majority of our work has been focused on social media content creation, but our team also looked to expand our goals through pitching materials for Squip. I suggested pitching the Squip brand to smaller organizations or local media outlets such as the Daily Orange. Similarly, we developed a brand guideline for Squip as well as a fact sheet and media list. Creating these initiatives allowed us to take a deep dive into the aspects of the company, while going above and beyond for our client when challenged with a limited set of goals. Overall, this account proved to be an excellent learning opportunity for our team as we applied the skills that we have learned in the classroom to real life.