Jäps Internship

JalkapalloInEnglish project

Several months before the start of my studies, I started my YouTube project, called JalkapalloInEnglish. Jalkapallo translates, as "football" in Finnish. The idea of the project was to interview Finnish football managers in English. The project boosted my knowledge of football management, as I was preparing the questions, creating and editing videos, and seeking a way to promote them on social media. That gave me experience in video production to a certain extent. What is more important, I have got a chance to learn from experienced sports management professionals who agreed to be my guests for the video interviews.
One of the interviews happened to be with Jari Kurittu. Jari became the sports director of the football club JäPS from Järvenpää, Finland in 2018. Later the same year, I was looking for an internship to complete the course for my degree at the University of Jyväskylä. Jari agreed to take me to JäPS for the following summer! As he knew me from the perspective of making video production, we agreed that my role would be to create visual content for the social media channels of the club's first team. Primary, I was performing in the role of social media intern, creating, editing, and posting the content for Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube.

Social Media Intern

Prior to this internship, my experience in social media marketing was relatively limited. I have had experience creating different social media posts. But my knowledge was never good enough to make it professional. I had no proper education in digital marketing. The only link I would have was my bachelor thesis about spectators' engagement. For the most, my knowledge was in identifying different groups of spectators to produce engaging digital content. The internship was giving me a real-life opportunity to examine my assumptions about spectators' engagement. In particular, social media is probably one of the best tools to receive feedback on any assumptions related to engagement in the form of likes, comments, and shares. Thus, this internship was partially linked to my bachelor thesis conclusions.

The Key Implications

Within my internship, I have created a bunch of different content. The most successful, in terms of engagement, content I created was a 15 seconds video in which two players had simulated a conflict that turned out to be a joke. Yet, from an educational perspective, the video interview shared below was probably the best learning experience I got from the internship at JäPS. Overall, it took me two full working days to produce it. Evaluating statistically, the views of the video were surprisingly low. The video gathered slightly above 500 views only. Analyzing my work after the internship, I came up with several conclusions: