Sounds like you’re pretty much entirely new to search / paid search. Does this internship require prior experience? Is there a mentor in a senior role or are they hoping to find a cheap hire to do it all?
What are some of the daily tasks and what is the work like?
For a junior role it is generally divided into keyword research (finding long-tail, new terms), optimizition of existing campaigns (checking bids, conversions, impact to other groups) and analysis / reporting.
Is the work ongoing or is the work project-based?
Presumably it is endless work. For a small company SEM may just be a part-time duty as long as there is budget assigned one is never truly done optimizing, growing to campaign.
How is success measured?
Cost of Acquisition measured against the value of the conversion or [hopefully] lifetime value of the customer/ user.
What are the tools of the trade?
There are a variety of tools including bid management programs (ranging from Google / Bing’s interface up to enterprise services like Omniture and Webtrend’s optimization systems), keyword research tools, web analytics and generally lots and lots of use of excel.
How difficult is the work?
Depends on what exactly you’re doing. If you have a very big campaign that you support it’s fairly straightforward, if it’s smaller campaigns and you “own” the success results it’s more strategic. As with anything, growth comes from going beyond doing the job and finding ways to drive more value (in this case a better cost of acquisition).
How easy is it for web editors to make the transition to SEM?
There’s some carry-over skills like knowing how a webpage works, how things are tracked, and what users expect online that’s useful but if you’re going big shop SEM it’s fairly unrelated. If you’ve never bought media before you’ll need to learn the mechanics, terms and measurements quickly.
What are the necessary academic marketing concepts anyone should learn for this field?
Statistics are critical for significant analysis and modeling which larger campaigns do. Writing is another as you’re creating ad copy that needs to capture the maximium clicks with the highest relevancy possible. Too strong and you get bad traffic. Too weak and no one joins in.
One of the areas missing from many of the agencies I hired was user interface understanding – you can’t optimize a campaign on the terms & keyword copy along.
What do they mean by "research, execute and measure link building campaigns including internal links?
This is part organic search which many companies lump in with paid search. To me SEM is only paid but it’s a matter of semantics (take that in mind however as my answers were focused on paid search).
Basically you will be finding sites to partner with from blogs to retailers to whoever to exchange links and build up weight externally as well as looking at the site you’re working on to optimize it internally.