Diary of an Intern #1 - A Digital World

brandonsmith:

In an attempt to spread the light on the future generation of the employment force, I’ve decided to keep a loose diary on my experiences/thoughts of the professional world (namely marketing, advertising, and PR related). This is the first entry.

Internships are a no brainer. Especially if you are still a college student. They provide not just job experience, but also insight into the real world — at all angles.  You see in college, and I say this with first hand knowledge, things are unintentionally shielded from your young virgin eyes. Coursework teaches you the terms and practices, but rarely does it teach you how those terms and practices are actually put to use or how they tend to change on a daily basis.  And that is the biggest problem I wish to point out here.

With technology advancing so rapidly, it is so important to be able to stay in touch with the change.  The world is digital now. However, in my five years of school, I did not take a single course on digital technology. And I’m not just talking about how to use twitter or facebook (a small child can figure that out). I’m talking about how these technologies are changing the world. I’m talking theories and trends and how you can use them to create a community. I’m sure as I say this, many colleges are quickly changing their strategy, but I’m sure many aren’t.  Which is why it is so important for the student to make up for this. Please bookmark all the technology sites, blogs, whatever. Start with Mashable.com. It’s pretty much amazing. Code your own website. It doesn’t have to be amazing. Simpler is better. Check out all new media outlets, and figure out how to utilze them. How do stories become top stories on digg.com? How does a single youtube video, along with the billion other videos, get noticed? I’m not saying there is one single answer for these, but it is something to think about. Traditional advertising is done. The only people who take it seriously are people in advertising. It is important now, to be able to have a two way conversation with your audience. Listen, learn, talk.

Check out these schools, as they are among the best in the digital world:

Boulder Digital Works at CU

VCU Brandcenter

Hyper Island

Utilization is good and communicating with your audience/customers is even better.  But it’s also important to maintain a level of sincerity when using social media as an outlet for your business.  Far too often, companies waste their time creating Twitter accounts, MySpace Facebook (insert hip new site here) pages, etc. without focus.  These things quickly become less enjoyable than the updates from the hundreds of beautiful fembots I currently have following me.

As a consumer, I’m smart enough to realize that the ultimate goal of these marketing efforts is to improve the company’s image trendiness bottom line.  So don’t try to paint your image as anything other than a marketing effort.  And if that effort fails (which it probably will), you can only blame yourself.  Yes, we’re talking to you, greedy corporations of the world.