Author: lindsayc726

Sadly, today is my last day at Walk West. This morning I started off working on some AdCopy’s. When you google something, at the top of the search results ads come up that have two headers and some text explaining it underneath. I was tasked with creating the two headers and explanations for three different areas of the Walk West company. First, I was able to do some research to see what other companies — who were advertising similar things — had done. It took me some time to think through everything, but I eventually finished that task and was on to the next. I then began to work on helping for clients’ monthly reports. I went through multiple spreadsheets to check to see how many videos they had posted for the client. Today, I was able to meet with different people to talk about their jobs and many other things. I sat down with Kevin, the head of the design department, to talk. We did talk a little about what he does and where he went to college, but we also talked about a lot about random things. Kevin seems to be one of the funny guys in the office and loves giving advice (some of which you should take and some of which you shouldn’t). I was then able to sit down with the founder of Walk West — Brian Onorio. I had been coordinating the internship through Laurie Onorio, who just so happens to be his wife and on a much more important scale the head of governmental affairs. I got a little bit of background on his life and how his childhood led him to where he is today. We ended up talking a lot about social media and he wanted to hear more about my experiences with it. Today for lunch Suki, Luke, and I tried out the food trucks on campus today. Suki’s drive to meet me was about 10 minutes and so, 20 minutes later Suki and Luke arrived. We ate at Queso Monster and it was great! Once I got back into the office, I finished up some things for Candace. Most of the team was in a meeting when I got back, so I had a little bit of down time as well.

This week I learned many things. I learned that there is so much more to social media than meets the eye. I learned that things might not always go to plan, but you roll with it anyways. I learned that communications is not just social media — there’s governmental affairs, design, marketing, client services, and many other areas that you can be involved in. However, I didn’t just learn about business. I also learned that it takes a team to get work done. So here are a few of the things I’ve learned about the people that are the face of this company: Andrew loves Tootsie Rolls — he’s eaten almost 400 in a week and a half. Kevin can talk about literally anything and his goal in life is to be able to buy a cup of $5 coffee every day. Candace went to ECU for college and didn’t apply anywhere but ECU (she didn’t like the writing for applications, but who can blame her). Jen actually went to college for fashion design and is now in marketing. Ann Marie loves apple pie (and yes she can have as much as she wants — pregnancy pass as she calls it). Those are just a few of the people I’ve met during my time at Walk West. Each individual contributes something special to a company, and whether that’s being really good at designing or marketing or simply just being able to eat a lot Tootsie Rolls, it all matters.

Once again, my morning at Walk West kicked off at 10AM. Today was going to be a pretty exciting day — I was going to attend an event today! Today I attended an event for one of their clients: Conservatives for Clean Energy. Although CCE is one of Walk West’s clients, they stay neutral on these political and governmental accounts. During the event, the people at Walk West would be taking pictures, writing, tweeting, and live streaming the event for CCE. I was tasked with Livestream QA. Although, when I was first assigned this task I had to slyly Google what QA stands for. QA is quality assurance. Basically, I would get to watch the livestream and make sure that everything ran smoothly for the people watching on the other end. So at around 11AM after looking

through a schedule of how things were supposed to run today, we all piled in a car and headed down to a club downtown. Although it took some time to find parking in Downtown Raleigh (per usual), we eventually made it inside the building and to the top floor. The venue was beautiful and through the glass walls you could see all around Raleigh. While someone was setting up all the video and camera equipment for the livestream, others were preparing to send out tweets during the presentation, take pictures for those, etc. Once everyone moved inside for the program and the livestream started, my job started. I watched the stream through Facebook with my headphones to check everything, while others listened for good quotes to tweet. The presentation and livestream went smoothly, although there were a few wonky comments on the stream (politics is quite bipolar these days, as you know). It was interesting to watch everyone else do their job and see how an event actually worked out. Walk West is not so much focused on the content of what is happening within the event, they are more about publicizing it. They do not plan the actual event, but help advertise and get the client’s message out. After the event finished, we were actually able to sneak some of the delicious food and sit down and talk about a plethora of topics. After

cramming our faces (not ashamed), we got back into the car and came back to the office. I spent some time looking back on the client’s Twitter and Facebook to see what was posted during the event. If you go look at the Twitter account @cce_nc, you can see some of the things that we put out.

This morning when I came into the office around 10AM, I had a little time to peruse through the WEP posts from other people. It was intriguing to be able to see what everyone else was doing and what they were taking away from their own individual experiences. After that, I started doing some work for monthly reports for their clients. Each month they create a report that shows how many impressions, likes, clicks, etc. that each of their social media platforms (typically Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube) got. Through one of their applications, they can then compare and contrast their numbers from this month to previous months. This is a good way to reevaluate what strategies they’re using and if they need to change anything to improve. For a quick lunch break, I joined Suki and Luke at a cute coffee shop on campus. We got to catch up with each other and learn more about our different internships. After, I got back to the office for some more work. When I got back, most people were busy with individual tasks and did not have anything specific for me to work on. So, with regards to this I decided to do some research on Communications and Marketing programs at colleges. Being that (obviously) I am at a Digital Marketing agency, that also includes communications, I thought this would be a good time to delve further into it. After completing lots of research, I packed up and headed home for the day.

This morning kicked off at around 8:30 AM. Instead of coming in at 10, I came early to attend the 9 AM Monday morning stand-up meeting. Today’s meeting was rather short, due to a fairly busy week for the rest of the office. Important items from last week were brought up and then the floor was open to everyone. Following this, I sat in on two other meetings. These were also team meetings, but broken up into small groups based on a certain area or project. Each person went around and discussed what they would be working on for the week to come. After both of these meetings, I started back up with some more research. Backlinks to a site are when another website (that is not the Walk West) links to the actual Walk West page. Having more backlinks to your website is definitely a positive and can give your company more credit. However, some websites will mention your company, but not include a link to your website. I was assigned the task of googling different terms where Walk West may be mentioned and checking if they linked to the Walk West page. Some of them did not and when this was the case, I contacted either whoever wrote the article or just the website in general. I asked them to include a link to the Walk West website. After a lunch break, I started on a task to prepare for an event launch for a client on Wednesday. I went through a list of people attending and tried to find their twitter handles — personal or for their organization. Later on in the day, I actually received an email back from one of the companies I had reached out to about links. They fixed the link and wanted to write an article about Walk West. I found it super exciting that if I had not been doing that research, they may not have reached out to write an article! I’d say it was a pretty successful day.

Once again my day started at 10am. From the moment I walked into the office today, there were tasks for me to complete. Today I got to see the side to Communications that I had expected to see coming into this internship. This morning I reunited with my good friend Excel. I organized a long list of clients and emails from specific sectors of companies to make their information more accessible. This meant that if Walk West wanted to reach out (for a client) and contact these people, they could easily do so. Once I completed that, I moved on to researching some information for my desk neighbor — Andrew. Andrew just moved to full time at the company after being an intern for a couple months, so probably understands the struggle of being young and new! I had to research SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which basically means how do you rank a video or website higher up when you search something. So on Google, how do you get your website to show up first when someone searches something related to your website. A bit after lunch time we all gathered in a large meeting room to celebrate someone’s last day. There was some delicious cake and cookies to snack on while everyone sat down and took a short break to chat. My aunt and uncle are actually friends with the founder and head of governmental affairs sect of the company, so they had asked them to embarrass me and sing me happy birthday at some point. We then talked about stories about my relatives, football, and other non-work related things. For a little I was quizzed on if I knew people from shows like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Saved by the Bell, and Full House. Since I am significantly younger than most of the people in the office, they find it funny that I have no clue what some things are. After, I scheduled social media posts! I found this particularly interesting; Instead of having to post for clients the day of, they schedule them out to be posted for a certain day and time on specific platforms based upon finding on when is the best time to post. At 3 o’clock Andrew and I watched a webinar on a new “app” or platform they are using where they can see where people are clicking based on heat maps and other typical feature such as polls, etc. After a pretty successful day, I headed home waiting for the next day.