Freshmen

My first day went extremely well. Don took the time to further elaborate on what it is that I will be doing by assigning me projects and going over them with me. This blog was one of the long term goals to accomplish for the summer.

After he introduced me to the office and gave me a red and black notebook to take notes in, he wanted me to go on twitter and find out what the social networking community have been saying about a new series premiering that Thursday, Tosh.0. Jessie James is a Dead man, and E3 were also to be reviewed on social networking sites. This was an important task because it helped gauge the buzz these new shows and events were generating. I then realized how important the feedback of digital marketing is. If you don’t know how successful you are in your marketing efforts, how will you know where to improve? It was also a fun task to do. I quickly put together the information in a short PowerPoint presentation and seeked further instruction from the big guy.



After the PowerPoint presentation was created Don asked me to come see him in his office. …..Don communicates via Aim and email. This is surprising. At other jobs if I had my aim open all day, it was a sign I was goofing off instead of working. ….
As I sat in his office I was pleased to see that he was in jeans and a cotton long sleeve shirt and had southparkstudios.com playing on his desktop. I was dressed in a tie slacks and shoes. I quickly learned it was fine to be comfortable and dress down….. I digress. Don reviewed my work, complimented me on it and offered how to improve my research skills. He showed me some tricks with PowerPoint, what to look for in twitter comments and what to follow up on and how to search on twitter. He was moving very quick and speaking very fast, my pen and paper was moving just as fast as I took notes.

Don informed me about Stephen Colbert in Iraq. He told me that Colbert was going to be in Iraq and wanted me to do a special project for him about it.
-The project was to look online for military sites and out reach to them- This was a good way to reach the demographic and audience of military personnel. I immediately began working on this as I got back to my desk. I proceeded to explore the internet for military community sites. I was successful in finding a couple and frequently checked in with Don for guidance and ideas.

While I was at my desk, clicking away. Don informed me about a budget meeting I should attend. I went to the meeting with my notebook ready to take notes. My notes were incomprehensible, no coherent sequence of bullet points. Just quotes, stats and other garbled information….. I was very confused….. I was impressed as the seat at the head of the table was left open and Don took position right at the head without hesitation. I wondered if it was left open by chance or by respect. However Don helped facilitate the meeting with help from Megan. Megan works in mobile, she is very intelligent and hard working. (I got a chance to interview her later in that week.) The meeting ended with my note pad full of question marks. I discontinued taking notes, they would have been useless, so I instead took notes of any questions I had from the meeting.

I spoke about the notes and questions briefly with Don but was concerned about finishing my assignment. I continued to work and meet the coworkers around me until the days end. I learned about a number of sites, alexa.com (which I later found out was less accurate than I had hoped), colbertnation.com, imedia.com, dmwmedia.com, 360i, and omniture.com. I was loaded with information from the first day of work and needed time to process and get comfortable with it all. At the end of the day I checked in with Don. He congratulated me on a fine first day of work and then kicked me out his office and sent me home.

-Shariff