Photo by adpowers via Flickr

Summer interns are one of the greatest traditions of capitalism.  Each summer, notoriously ambitious interns join companies eager to make an impact and deliver results.  For the Social Media Strategist, interns can provide a fresh perspective to companies looking to embrace Social Media.

At the dawn of E-Commerce (way back in the 1990s), GE executives gathered for a now infamous strategic session called DestroyYourBusiness.com.  Realizing the threat facing GE from the thousands of start-ups thinking differently, Jack Welch had his managers pretend to be one of the many Dotcoms trying to destroy GE’s existing business models.  This exercise helped GE’s leadership think about how the internet could quickly exploit a company’s weaknesses.

Here’s an adaptation of GE’s classic management idea for a meaningful 12-week summer internship.  Not only will your interns love the challenging and exciting assignment, this can also provide your company with fresh strategic thinking.

Weeks 1-2 – Industry and Competitor Assessment (2 weeks)

• Objective – Develop a detailed understanding of industry adoption of Social Media through assessing competitors
• Tasks for the Intern
  • Analyze the competition and document the best uses of social media
  • Support findings with external validation of competitors’ strategies from secondary sources
  • Develop a ratings scale to score industry players on dimensions like traffic, customer conversations, revenue impact, and scalability
  • Interview managers to develop 5 orthodoxies, or “The Ways Our Industry Always Does Things” that could be overturned by Social Media

Weeks 3-5 – Discover Customer Needs, Problems, and Frustrations

• Objective – Act like a Social Media Market Research consultant to study what conversations are occurring on the web about your brand
• Tasks for the Intern
  • Identify the top sites where consumers are talking about your products or services as well as your brand
  • Compile a database of customer quotes about their problems and how they are using products and services from your industry to solve them
  • Categorize the quotes into topic areas for a qualitative analysis
  • Create findings from categorized quotes to identify customer needs that could be met through Social Media technology

Weeks 6-10 – How would a Start-Up Disrupt the Industry Business Model?

• Objective – Take the role of an entrepreneur and create a business plan ready for a Venture Capitalist that could radically alter the industry
• Tasks for the Intern
  • Identify the vulnerabilities of the current business model used by your company and competitors
  • Develop a hypothetical business plan that a start-up could present to a VC that would radically change the industry business model
  • Analyze 5 start-ups that are already pursuing this model and what the company should learn from their early results

Weeks 11-12 – Create a 12 Week and 12 Month Plan for the Organization

• Objective – Highlight quick changes that can be made to lead the organization to a long-term change
• Tasks for the Intern
  • Identify hypotheses that could be tested through experimentation and prototyping
  • Test these hypotheses by building an implementation plan for quick-fixes that could be made in 12 weeks
  • Brainstorm longer-term ideas that could be implemented in 12 months with knowledge gained from the 12-week experiment

I think this could be a very interesting business school project or paper.  Thoughts on how to adopt this for the classroom?