viadeo linkedin pearltrees   flagfr flagen

Internship at Home'n'go

Home'n'go Object: second year internship
Duration: from 21.01.2013 to 27.05.2013
Subject: Community Management

  • writing blog articles (3 per week) about real estate
  • choosing the blog's design and implementing it, including changes in source code
  • replying to visitors' comments
  • customer relationship by email and User Voice
  • managing Facebook and Twitter accounts
  • emailing
  • writing a user guild of Home'n'Go website
  • participation on real estate forums

For my second internship, I decided to join Home'n'go, a start-up which grouped for free the ads from real estate portals (PàP, SeLoger.com ...) and adds statistics (demography, local taxes...) and environmental (transport, shops...) data, especially from Open Data. Opening an account for free gave you access to a private space to manage your favourite ads and activate unique alerts.

Blog

During all my internship at Home'n'go, I took care of the Home'n'go blog. The first month, as I was still in school, I worked the equivalent of one day a week, which I used to write two articles. While in full-time, I wrote three articles per week.
Usually, Monday I was posting an article about a service or a start-up which could be interesting for our target, Wednesday an article about a legal precision, and Friday an article more generic about real estate. These articles and their regularity taught me to select my sources, to synthesize the content and to be very rigorous and precise about the information to give.

I also chose the new Wordpress template for the blog which needed a real makeover, especially as the website itself was going to be remade. I gave the template to the designers, also coming from SUP'Internet, who then gave me back a mock-up which I integrated. I had to do a lot of direct modifications in the code in order to customize the aspect of the blog as best as possible, so that it corresponded more to our expectations.

Finally, I replied to all comments made by guests. The blog was well ranked in search engines, especially on few requests often searched, which attracted quite a lot of visitors, who often asked questions.

Customer relationship

The customer relationship I did for Home'n'go was more than only about the blog. The team also forwarded to me all emails sent to the contact email address which concerned a question or a problem about the website, thus I replied directly to the user. I was receiving about two up to three emails per day.

Another important aspect of the customer relationship management concerned the User Voice platform. It's a plug-in which was added to the website and allowed users to easily send a message about a suggestion to improve the website or a problem they encountered. I replying to each of these messages, reporting the bugs in our internal tool and selecting suggestions which seemed interesting to me.

At last, I had to take care of all social media used by the company, mainly Facebook and Twitter. Therefore I used two Twitter accounts: the official one, and another one which was used to watch some expressions and give a direct link to the search results on the Home'n'go website to the Twitter users who were seeking housing.

Content Management

In addition to the blog, I also designed and sent the first emailing of the start-up, mostly to announce that we had, since a few days, more than three million real estate ads. I also announced the arrival of new colleagues and the possibility to create a unique alert grouping all the ads of all the portals, corresponding to the selected criteria.

Since the website had a new design, I wrote a new "How it works", a page which helped new users to understand how the website worked.

To finish, on a daily basis, I had to watch two online forums about real estate in order to step in when I had the answer to a question from a user. The goal was to improve the SEO and help Home'n'go to be known and recognized.