Introduction
Hello. I am Yuta Shiina, a student intern at VoicePing involved marketing-related work. I joined VoicePing in October 2022, when the fall semester of my sophomore year began. In this blog, I would like to write about why I interned at VoicePing, what I experienced, and learned. I hope it will be helpful for those who are considering internships at VoicePing or other startup companies.
Growth Through Interning at VoicePing
In my three years of high school, I studied hard for university entrance exams. Even after entering university, I put effort into my studies. However, I was worried that if I just continued studying, I would not have enough skill sets for work after college. Seeing how many friends grew while doing internships influenced me to want the same for myself. I wanted to grow as an individual and contribute to the further growth of a company. Although my major is a Bachelor of Arts, I have always been interested in the latest technology. Besides studying blockchain and AI, I have also taken part in business contests and entrepreneurship clubs. When searching for a company to intern at, I focused on keywords such as “virtual office” and “startup”, and found VoicePing.
What I Learned Through Social Media Marketing
The thing I worked on for the longest time through my internship was running VoicePing’s social media. VoicePing is currently on three social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Initially, I was only in charge of Twitter. VoicePing’s virtual office uses the latest technology for its functions like voice translation, attendance management, as well as invoicing and calendar linkage. For more people to find us and our useful functions, I used videos and illustrations along with a limited caption of 140 words conveying the wonders of VoicePing. Besides feature introductions, I also covered a wide range of content, including VoicePing app updates; blog articles about virtual offices, remote work, and speech translation; and interview articles of us taking part in events and of companies that use VoicePing.
To introduce articles and press releases on our social media, I mentioned important parts of the content and formatted the text so that it matched the nature of the original article. Since the release of ChatGTP, there has been much talk about how it is good for summarizing sentences. I have also joined ChatGPT Plus and use it on a daily-basis, but I feel that summaries written by humans with creativity and through trail and error are more engaging.
After working on Twitter for a while, my company entrusted me with the VoicePing’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Although there is no character limit on LinkedIn, the posts are in English, so I had to think carefully about my sentences. I knew that if my posts sounded odd, it would lower people’s trust in VoicePing. Although there is room for improvement, I think my English writing skills have improved because of my efforts in referring to other articles to make my sentences as natural as possible.
Overall, social media marketing was a rewarding job because I gained the ability to write easy-to-understand sentences in both Japanese and English, and contributed to the growth of VoicePing’s likes and followers.
VoicePing's Work Environment
Before I talk about other work I have done, I would like to talk a little about VoicePing’s working environment. There are many members from overseas—mainly engineers—so we use English in meetings and for internal communication. In fact, the two members whom I have been directly involved with, are from South Korea and Vietnam. Although VoicePing is a small start-up company, it is very international. I am planning to study abroad at the University of Edinburgh in England this summer, so it was a precious experience to be in such an environment before studying abroad. The VoicePing team also goes into the office when face-to-face meetings are required, but everyone often works remotely. This allowed me to work between my classes for school, which helped with the balance between work and school. Since all team members connect to the VoicePing virtual workspace while we work remotely, it was easy for me to communicate with everyone and I could ask my boss for help when I needed it. Although it varies for all members, I was in the office once a week, and had interaction with coworkers outside of work through the dinners we had.
YouTube Marketing
Another responsibility that I had was marketing on YouTube. My job was to find YouTubers in both Japanese and English who could introduce VoicePing, contact them, and work with them on the videos. I went through a lot of trial and error to find out what YouTubers could best introduce a so-called BtoB service like VoicePing, but in the end, I worked work with two people with no issues and uploaded YouTube content. Since this internship was basically my first time working in the “real-world”, I had to learn basic business skills such as writing professional emails. I made some mistakes throughout the process, but thanks to my team members, I was able to accomplish what I did. What felt especially rewarding was directly meeting with YouTubers. After creating an agenda by myself, I had one-on-one meetings with them. Even though I was a student intern, I handled important meetings by myself, which I think was a good experience that could have only been possible at a start-up company.
Lastly
Besides social media and YouTube marketing, I experienced a variety of other jobs, including writing manuals and press releases in English. There are still many things that I need to improve on, such as implementing the PDCA cycle, but I gained critical thinking skills, improved my English and business skills through my internship at an international and fast-paced working environment. I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the people inside and outside the company who have helped me. I will continue my university life, study abroad program, and career with the skills I have gained through VoicePing while striving for even more self-development. Thank you very much.
Keio University Department of Economics
Yuta Shiina
We are hiring!!!
VoicePing is currently looking for AI engineers and web development engineers. If you want to work with cutting-edge language models (ChatGPT, GPT3.5 Turbo…etc), high-performance speech recognition (Whisper…etc), create translation models, or design, develop, and operate complex, high-performance web development applications, please contact us casually. Please contact us casually.