Confirmed At BLUE!
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009This is a really late post but I’ve completed my probation period at BLUE and am now a full-fledged, confirmed full-time employee of the company.
Needless to say, I’m pretty happy about this because I think BLUE is a great place to start my career and the analytical, structured nature of the firm is exactly what I need to nurture the left side of my brain. Not that I’m illogical by any means, but being in an enironment where I’m forced to think through things step by step and get to the point in a concise manner is good training for me. Especially coming from a school like SMU that has the tendency to reward fluff.
For the past three and a half months I’ve been straddling a 50% search engine optimisation (SEO) role and 50% social media. I’m really finding this to be a great match because having lived in the ’social media’ world for the last 1.5 years before employment, I didn’t know much about the SEO side of things. Now that I’ve been exposed to it, I think the two are very natural marriage partners and being able to combine both is definitely a big big strength that I have developed. I’ve applied the SEO stuff I’ve picked up at work to my own blog and I’ve already begun to see results, and that’s very fulfilling.
On the social media side I’ve had the opportunity to be exposed to some pretty nifty tools for listening and having access to all these real world data that I would never dream of having with just my blog. Seeing a Google Analytics account with traffic and data in the thousands was really a big eye-opener for me. I’m really proud of getting the BLUE blog up and running, as well as managing all fifteen of our social media presences. I’ve had to put together documents for internal “training” and again I’m finding it really useful to take what I know and delivering it in a way that is easily digestible to someone who might have little to no knowledge of social media.
What I’m liking most is the way work is handled. When projects come in I’m generally left to my own devices (after some initial training for SEO), but when I hit a brickwall, there’s always support of the people I’m working with to help me break through the wall. As far as mentoring goes I find this has been a nice balance because I can spend a couple of hours knocking a problem around, but yet know I have ready feedback to tell me if I’m knocking it around in the right way or not.
Thanks to everyone who’s been supportive of me getting a job at BLUE and I hope to have more stuff to share as my working life develops in the months and years to come.
Tags: blue, mentoring, projects, SEO, social media
