Incorporating Editorial Tactics into Leadership Values

As the blog intern at Go Dash Dot, I am responsible for generating content that is engaging and different for our readers. Since beginning my internship, my primary focus has been finding influencers, who fit our current audience, to collaborate on upcoming posts and promotions. While reaching out to several influencers on Instagram, I had the idea to create an editorial calendar, which would help me inform the rest of our team about my progress on certain posts, and it would allow all of our future social media posts to be organized in one spreadsheet. I also hope this calendar will serve as a form of accountability, other than constant email chains, to show my supervisors that I was actively working on content. In a way, I am serving as my own editor for the blog because there is no other full time employee actively working on the blog content, other than the CEO who reads my work before publication. After creating an initial draft of the calendar, I sent it to my supervisors for feedback and was met with positive comments and only a few revisions. I worked to expand the sheet to include weekly promotions that are internal and collaborated, to show analytics at the beginning of each week, to list our current social media ambassadors, and to update our Instagram post layout. As my supervisors went through the sheet, they commented on how different aspects like the analytics section and the company calendar were organizational tools that they had not ever considered incorporating in their master sheet. Even though my internship is remote, I felt that being able to contribute in such a way for the overall improvement of the company’s weekly organization made me feel present with the rest of the team, and it allowed me to strengthen my own knowledge in what a company needs to analyze each week and what categories are most essential when planning future content. I also felt like creating the calendar allowed the other interns a better look at how the company operates, because we now have access to the sheet at all times. As a company entirely based in web commerce and social media exposure, I believe that the calendar will allow us to have an edge on other companies as we are now even more organized and can plan content weeks in advance without toggling among multiple sheets or tabs.