Pizza Hut hunts college student for Summer of Twitter

Pizza Hut in the US is hunting for a college student to spend the summer months as a member of the PR team in charge of tweeting about new developments at the restaurant chain.

The company is advertising for students to apply for the 10-12 week long "twinternship", based in its headquarters in Dallas.

Duties include:

• Sharing insights and experiences via social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
• Attending marketing meetings, ad shoots and other events; monitoring social media for happenings that may be of interest to loyal Pizza Hut fans
• Working on PR programmes.

The internship is paid, although the job ad does not reveal the salary.

Applicants are expected to prove that they have knowledge of social media and, if shortlisted, will be required to "submit a portfolio of social media know-how".

With Twitter-use growing exponentially in 2009, brands are trying to work out how to best use the service to promote themselves, and monitor what is being said about them online.

Earlier this month Amazon experienced the power of the Twittersphere when rumours spread far and wide that it had adopted an anti-gay policy by removing thousands of books from its main search and best-seller rankings.

It emerged that there was no such policy and that the problem had been caused by a classification error, but not before hundreds of thousands of mentions of the term "amazonfail" had spread across the World Wide Web.