June 1-8: Acclimation Complete

Here we are at the end of June! How time flies!!! I have been living in Sammamish, WA for seven weeks and one day now. This month has been absolutely packed with new experiences, adventures, and ideas! Here part 1 of 4 of the past four weeks (since my last post). I take an awful lot of notes.

June 1-8

The first week of June was a busy one around the office! I was a bit disheartened to learn that a client I had been doing a lot of work for decided to end their services with us. It was probably for the best, as they were not a good fit for what we do at Nology. But as quickly as they left, we acquired some brand new clients! Now, I had to become a mini expert on some new topics like baseball, the high-end car market, and the elder care industry. Three things I knew squat about.

My manager, Megan, took some vacation around this time to visit Germany. This meant I had to bother someone else every five minutes. This wonderful woman was another Community Manager named Abby. Approachable, friendly, and highly skilled in listening platforms, Abby taught me much in this week. She explained to me how our process for Facebook and Twitter analytics reporting worked, as well as provided guidance for what makes a good post. I was happy to become more comfortable with people in the office, and enjoyed feeling brave enough to ask anybody for help when I needed it. I sure do ask a lot of questions.

I spent a good portion of the week wrapped up in Excel Spreadsheets and Pages documents. As tedious as it sounds, I can honestly say it's a task I enjoy. I like being able to explain how a client's outreach has grown over the course of a week. I like to observe the trends. Do we get more followers by posting video? Or do we get more responses when we ask a question? Stuff like that. Different clients' audiences respond better to different things. One of our clients, a nonprofit organization headed up by a professional baseball player, gets a lot of feed back when given the chance to ask a question to the baseball star. Another client, a car dealership, gets a lot of fan response when we post information in our Miss Washington Wednesday series. Some clients have phenomenal Facebook response. Others do better on Twitter. Different people are moved by different things.

I got to test my skills --- and my patience --- by updating a logo for one of our clients' Facebook pictures. I learned about Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign last semester, but it was a very basic overview and I still struggle a bit with them. However, after a bit of playing, I changed the logo and it was made public on their Facebook page. Very cool, to look at a page and think "I had a hand in that." But here in this first week of June, things were just starting for me, as I would come to know that I would have a hand in a lot of the content that went public for our clients.

I also learned about a new tool that exists to help brands create engaging Facebook fan pages. It allows you to manage multiple social media accounts on one page, much like CoTweet does for Twitter. Today, I am not sure if this platform is all it was cracked up to be, but I was very impressed when I first saw the demonstration. I think they are in the beginning stages of something great, but I don't know if Nology can benefit from what they currently offer.

The ideal package would be something that allows the management of multiple accounts on multiple social media platforms, completes high quality searching (like some other deep search programs that already exist but hopefully much more user friendly), gives a plethora of options on how to organize the results of those deep searches, automatically tracks feedback information so analytics would be nothing more than a simple click of an "export" button, allows for the scheduling of posts, and gives the user control over the media that is attached with that post.

Is there anything out there like that? If so, Nology could really benefit from that, so please get in touch with me.

Overall, this week was about really getting settled in and building up my confidence. Two really, really important things.