It’s no secret that social networks are the center of consumers’ online worlds. They’re where consumers spend the majority of their online time. Many believe that the social networks are here to stay, and companies need to learn how to make the best of this.

If you are a company today, people are out there talking about your brand. If you don’t listen to them, you’re not only ignoring valuable feedback, you’re damaging potentially positive relationships.

To see why it’s extremely important to listen, look at what happens when a company blatantly does the opposite. Intel, for example, freaked out when protestors of conflict minerals flooded their Facebook wall with comments. Instead of interacting, they ended up reacting, and deleted all of the comments. It ended up being a huge social media mistake that did two terrible things at the same time — it made them look like the bad guys, and it gave the issue even more publicity than it had before.

To start listening to what’s being said about you online, there are some great, free sites that exist to help you search the social web:

• Setting up Google Alerts is an easy way to be notified every day of anything that comes up on the search engine about your brand.
• Addictomatic is a great way to get a quick high-level overview of what’s going on.

Once you see what areas are getting the most activity, you can delve deeper with these next four:

• For searching through blogs, try either BlogPulse or IceRocket 
• For searching discussion forums, check out Boardtracker
• To scour the comments of all of the web’s blogs, check out CoComment 

Even more important than listening to your customers is doing something with what you hear. Use all of this unsolicited praise and/or criticism to improve everything — whether it be the company’s product or future communications. And always speak back in real-time — vocal consumers are speaking out for a reason, and, more than anything, they want to know that they’re being heard.

...according to my dad, anyway. Freshman year, I wouldn’t have agreed with that statement at all (back then, UT was the number one party school in the nation, and I’d like to think I played a pivotal role in helping us earn that prestigious title). Despite the distractions of Austin, we are taught a "work hard, play hard" mentality. So although an internship didn’t top the list back then, it does now that I’m a senior.

One thing I know for sure is that interning is like going to Vegas — you have to do it sometime, and you want something to brag about when you get home. Interning at Springbox, I get quite a few bragging rights.

Just a few of the perks:

• It meets my top requirement: I get to wear sandals.
  
• Cookies. I’ve worked 90 days, and in that time I’ve received 35 emails with subjects along the lines of “Cookies at my desk — get them before they’re gone!” That’s a new set of cookies to select from more than a third of the time I’m here. Trips to Grandma’s house don’t even see that kind of ratio
  
• Somebody catches you looking up pictures of that one girl from that one class on Facebook? Just say it’s “market research for a social media campaign” and you’re in the clear.
  

But all fun and games, it is not. Some of the "harder parts" include the following: 

• When I talk about it outside of the office, people are always getting “Springbox” confused with “Springboks,” the mascot of the national rugby team of South Africa (an easy mistake to make).
  
• One word: binding. Some days, my nickname here is “Kinko's” — but hey, somebody’s gotta do it. 
• It’s tough keeping up with all of the “adult” pop-culture references. I asked “who’s Farah Fawcett?” and almost got slapped.
  

So the low points are few and far between. Overall, my internship here has been better than I ever anticipated it would be. Being at a smaller agency gives you the chance to jump in on all types of projects — one minute I may be working on an analytics report for Premiere Global, and the next I’m helping out with social media strategy for Absolute Software. I’ve been able to learn an incredible amount about building relationships with clients, site development and how to manage budgets and project timelines. I’ve gotten to work with SEO/SEM, social media, analytics, email and video — and I don’t even think that covers half of it.

My dad was right after all. An internship is definitely one of the more important parts of the college experience. If you’re lucky, it gives you a chance to take everything you’ve learned in the classroom and apply it to real-world situations. And it’s especially great if you get to work at an agency full of extremely bright and talented people, which is exactly what I’ve gotten to do here at Springbox.

So even though I had to let UT slip to second in the partying category this year, I’d say the sacrifice has been well worth it.