Week Five - Researching and Releases

WVU Business Incubator Conference Room

As Week Five comes to an end, I really think I've learned a lot so far. I've learned the basic essentials for many typical documents in a variety of businesses.

These documents have made me take into account the audience that will read them (some for professionals, some for the average Internet browser) as well as the tone we are trying to portray (very professional, but like a helpful parent).

For this week, it was much more relaxed, and I appreciate that. Dusy knows I will be heading to Las Vegas this weekend, and he has given me more time to work on projects, and the deadlines have been more lax. This week, I worked on writing a press release for SustainU, a graduate tenant of the Business Incbuator.

The tenant spoke at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. This is good exposure for the company, as it will be posted on the front page of the WVU Business Incubator website. The first thing I need to think about is the audience - the people who will be reading this are probably Morgantown residents or attend WVU. But, it needs to be universal, as this will probably be sent out to multiple news sources (probably the DA, too. Eek). Most of my work up until this point has been listening to the lecture, researching the company and contacting people. Now, I need to put this whole document together! I really like writing press releases because you can be creative with them, so this is definitely a nice break from straight document work.

Hopefully he likes what I can produce - this will definitely look great on the front page, and it'll keep me on my toes.

Week Four - Patents and Paper

Entrance to WVU Business Incubator

I continued my work with the social media project. This time, however, I searched the web for patents.  I looked at major social networking sites to see which patents they were listed under. For example, Twitter and WordPress are both listed under (42) Use of internet for engaging in internet publishing. I basically compiled a bunch to see where this network would fall.

It was really interesting looking through the giants of social media (Facebook, Twitter, WordPress). I sometimes forget that much of this information is public, and we can, free of charge, look up who has patents and what their use is.

Not only is this helpful with my internship, but this helps me elsewhere. Being a journalist, I am constantly scouring the internet for information, and this is yet another resource I'll have to file away to use when necessary.

When I was searching for all these patents, I had to print them out after I found ones that matched. Well, I sent about 20 documents to the printer. When I went over there, I realized only two printed, and Matt had to fix the printer for me.When I said everyone here wears many different hats, I wasn't joking. Matt = graphic designer, website designer, technology, printer fixer.

The other document I spent a lot of time on this week was a service agreement for one of their tenants: Scientific Arts. This is basically drafting a document the tenant can give to clients that says what the type of work will be, arrange payment and deadlines.

This is such a basic document that any business at some point needs. It's fantastic I am getting to work on these things. This new skill set is so diverse, and I've already worked with a number of different documents. I can't wait to try some more.

My photo is also now on their website. Yep, pretty embarrassing. But, I'm definitely a part of the group now.