Auburn Grad Finalist For Charlie Sheen's Intern

[AUChizad]

http://www.thewareaglereader.com/2011/03/auburn-grad-caitlin-deforest-finalist-for-charlie-sheens-tigerblood-internship/

Auburn grad Caitlin DeForest finalist for Charlie Sheen’s ‘TigerBlood’ internship
Written by Jeremy HendersonFeatured, News, PeopleMar 24, 2011

Note Auburn piggy bank.

Recent Auburn graduate Caitlin DeForest is on the verge of bleeding tiger blood all over the internet.
The Twitter-happy 22-year-old marketing assistant for Cumulus Broadcasting of Nashville recently found out via email that she’s one of only 250 people to make it to the third round of Charlie Sheen’s online competition for a social media intern.

More than 75,000 people applied.

In just a few short weeks, Sheen, who was just fired from the hit CBS show Two and a Half Men, has risen (at least partially) from the ashes of a public meltdown via Twitter, redefining self-promotion with kooky hashtag mantras like “#tigerblood” — a reference to his claim in a Good Morning America interview that he has “Adonis DNA” and “tiger blood” — and “#winning” that earned him a record 1 million followers in just 25 hours and 17 minutes.

DeForest was one of them.

“I think he’s done great work,” DeForest says. “I think he’s a lot smarter than people give him credit for. I mean everybody’s talking about him.”

Thanks to her Auburn education, DeForest thinks she can help keep them talking.

“Auburn has an amazing public relations and communications department and I had amazing professors who taught me. I think that has something to do this opportunity.”

What’s the next step in the process? Answer — via YouTube video — one of three questions regarding the power and scope of social media. DeForest chose option two: “In your opinion, what is the best company using social media today and why?”

DeForest won’t say which company she’s going with, but did reveal that she received a few ideas from her former public relations professor Robert French, a social networking guru who’s efforts at bringing blogging to the classroom Auburn’s recent distinction as the third most social media savvy university in the country, behind only Stanford and Harvard (where something called Facebook was started).

The deadline for submissions is midnight Friday; DeForest plans on posting her video to YouTube tonight.
She says she’s been too busy to scope out more than a handful of submissions from the competition (which, of course, supposedly includes at least one porn star), and too competitive.

“I don’t want to go to their YouTube videos and give them a bunch of hits, but a lot of people are kind of sitting in front of the wall and answering the question, which is great, and they have good answers, but Robert French would kill me if I did a video like that,” she says. “He’d want me to make it outside and interesting. I want to answer the questions seriously but I don’t want it to be boring.”

After finding out that she’d made the latest cut, DeForest says she “did what any PR major would do — I sent out a press release,” the idea being to leverage her own 15 minutes of self-made fame for a better shot at landing the job. She’s already been interviewed by local Nashville news outlets as well as some syndicated radio talk shows.

“I think… garnering all this media just by myself is going to help my chances.”

That she graduated from a school whose sports teams are the Tigers — and whose football team just won the national championship — can’t hurt either; DeForest says she’s told several interviewers “I already have Tiger’s blood.”

According to the job description posted on Interships.com, the “#TigerBloodIntern is expected to be proactive, monitor the day-to-day activities on the major social media platforms, prepare for exciting online projects and increase Charlie’s base of followers.”

Sheen currently has more than 3,156,649 followers on Twitter.

Will DeForest try to sneak a “#WarEagle” into their Twitter feeds if she get’s the job?

“Oh, of course,” she says. “But I wouldn’t sneak it in. I would just do it.”