#imm750

[digital-xs-blog]

Intern life: what did I take from this?

When you are an international student nothing comes easily to your hands. You have to work hard to earn it and, so, every little battle won makes you feel so good. During the last year, I improved a lot my English skills. My main language is Portuguese and I was encouraged during my program at Centennial College to keep getting better. It made a great deal to have the confidence from my teachers that I was doing well on my second language to keep on going.

And this reflected in my internship. When I got the chance to run the social media campaign for Oh That Trump! App that meant a lot of responsibility. I was dealing directly with the presidents of the company, so I couldn't fail. But I have the confidence that I could do a good job in me. I knew with my past experiences plus what I worked hard over the last months, I could do it.

The result was a lot of compliments coming from the CEO of the company. He was happy with what I was doing, it meant I was going in the right direction and there was no mistakes in grammar and such that I had to correct (I was taking good care about that).

So what I take from that? I am ready. Like a video game, I passed the internship phase, which was like a trial for real world with enough energy to move to the next level. I have the confidence and I was tested already. I know I still have a lot to work on, but life is like this. You have to always keep learning. 

[benlamdesigns-blog]

Week 10 – Home Stretch

The Olympics continued to roll on in the second and final week of Games.  As Canada continues to perform well (tying the most number of medals in a single games), the content creation and flow from our digital team have been extensive.  As part of our daily recaps, I design and create infographics and graphics for a variety of different areas, including:

• Daily medal tracker, tallying how many and what types of medals were won that day • Medal recap, listing who has won medals in which events • Fun facts, highlighting any records being broken or significant history on the line • Medal moments, highlighting athlete performances when they win • Summary graphics for anticipated medals coming up

At this point, our digital team has become a well-oiled machine, with each individual becoming a specialist within their specific areas.  This has allowed our content turnarounds to be quick and efficient, which have also allowed us to engage on our social and digital platforms much quicker.  We are driving the online conversations at a rapid pace and the results have been tremendous.  Our growth on all social media networks have exceeded our expectations, and our numbers continue to surpass those from Sochi 2014 Olympics, which was previously the most successful Games.  The recognition our digital team continues to receive from management and outside parties have been tremendous, and a big boost in our confidence to know we are doing our part to support our Canadian athletes.  A recap from Facebook Media showed Team Canada was performing in the top 10 for all Olympic social platforms across the board, and was number 3 behind Team USA and Great Britain.  Given the relatively smaller size of our teams compared with USA and Great Britain, these findings drew further praise from our executives.

Even though I am exhausted at this point, I am not ready for this experience to end.  It has truly been an amazing learning experience and a turning point for my career!

[digital-xs-blog]

Intern life: my mantra to work in digital media is 'Listen, breath and start!'

And so my adventure at Digital Howard has finished. During the last months, I had a lot of fun while learning from top minds of the digital media in Toronto and this experience for sure makes a difference for my career. I am sure now I want to work as a content strategist and social media is a great path. I like the medium and I understand how to use in my favor – the company I am representing to be more specific – more than ever.

I also learned that I feel a little overwhelmed with so many projects happening at the same time. I like more to dedicate my attention to one project and complete it. I don't know how Daniel and Jarred, the CEOs of the company, do it! Their heads are around so many things at the same time. But I guess experience helps with that.

Digital Howard is a growing digital company with projects currently in Augmented Reality and transmedia. Those two subjects are very much aligned to what I've done in school during the last year for my program at Centennial College, in Interactive Media Management. My senior project was around AR and I love putting pop culture references in everything I present to make people relate to the subject in an easier way. So it was amazing to spend my summer putting in practice things I've been learning in a cool environment.

The Oh That Trump project was my baby for the past weeks and I had to leave it with the company now that I am graduating and starting new challenges. I put a great amount of effort on it and my bosses were happy to see that.

One of the things I am going to carry from this experience is the power videos have. Only after making videos we started having a conversation and growing followers. Also, how understanding your audience is important. Take some time to read, research, see what the followers of similar brands like will make a difference. You will feel more prepared to start tweeting with this previous knowledge in mind. A kind of mantra would be: Listen, breath and start!

Now, new challenges are lining up for me and I know I can always look back, because I left an open door at Digital Howard.

[benlamdesigns-blog]

Week 9 – First week of Olympic Games

What a busy, busy, busy week it has been!  The Olympics officially started on Friday with the Opening Ceremonies in Rio.  Not only was the world tuned into their TVs, but also online on their social media.  Our digital team was working hard to continually post pre-created and live content on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as the teams were being announced and entered the stadium.  Specifically, I helped design a majority of the pre-created content but also designed graphics on mini facts as they became live. We were all tuned into our personal social media channels as well to help share posts by Team Canada’s accounts.  The engagement on all channels were extremely strong and we saw a major bump in traffic towards all our channels and website.  We even received recognition from the board members and executives from the COC for the work that our digital team produced!

Needless to say, our team has continued to work around the clock since the Opening Ceremonies.  Whenever there are any potential medal moments, our whole team is all-hands-on-deck, with everyone helping out wherever they can.  Since Team Canada is off to its best start in Canadian Olympic history (by winning medals each of the days so far), our nights have extended late in order to create assets for these moments.  Fortunately, we are able to work from home at nights and weekends as they are fairly flexible.  My role as the “infographics guy” has continued as I have grown more comfortable and efficient with the process.  One of the latest posts containing my infographic about Canadian swimmer Penny Oleksiak went viral after her gold medal victory.  Within 10 mins of posting, it had reached over 20K likes and 5K shares!  Within 24 hours, it had generated: • Facebook: 87K likes, 23K shares, 2K comments • Instagram: 22K likes, 500+ comments • Twitter: 6K likes, 5K RTs

[digital-xs-blog]

Intern life: the power of video content

At Digital Howard, we are working in several projects at the same time. Two of them are involving Augmented Reality. As an interactive media student, I know a lot about AR, how it works, what it is, and many ways we can use. But most of the planet's population does not know what these two letters combined mean. So just using AR on your application description doesn't ring a bell for many people.

Pokemon Go, the game recently launched that became an addiction all over the world, is helping to popularize the term. But still to make users understand what an Augmented Reality mean is not yet an easy task. That is when video comes along.

An image can be more powerful than 1000 words and video is really handy when it comes to illustrate new technologies. So as part of our strategy for the app Oh That Trump – an app that satirizes Donald Trump's infamous quotes – we decided to use video component.

This week we shot a quick video, with our cellphones, demonstrating the app. In other words, we showed the user experience of it. By pointing your phone at the Trump image (which can be a sticker or a tattoo), you'll see him saying all his “trumpisms”.

When we posted the video to the social media channels, the engagement was clearly felt. We got likes and retweets. And for social engagement was so much easier. I have been working on connecting with influencers and other Anti-Trump accounts and the video was just what we needed.

It was hard to connect with them by just using words, like AR Anti Trump app. When they saw what we were talking about “materialized” in a video format, then the conversation started to flow.

More videos are coming and, hopefully, more engagement.

[benlamdesigns-blog]

Week 8 – And it begins

This week, I continued working on my Fun Facts infographic series, which were shared on our social platforms, website and app.  The response has been extremely positive, as our fans and athletes love getting to know interesting facts about Team Canada.  As the lead on the project, I’ve enjoyed getting the creative freedom to produce these assets.  Of course, with the freedom comes the responsibility to ensure that our branding is consistent and appropriately themed for the Olympics.  Overtime, I have slowly transitioned into the “Infographics Guy”, given my design background.  While there are other interns who understand how to use Photoshop and Illustrator, I have more experience within graphic design, and thus have taken on many of the visual projects.

As the Olympics opening ceremony gets underway this Friday, we are officially “all hands on deck”, meaning being on standby 24/7 and jumping in on anything that needs attention.  While this is definitely a high-pressure situation, there is great excitement mixed in with the stress of timely production.  We had a practice run-through during Canada Women’s first soccer match against Australia.  Given that the first goal was scored in a record breaking time of 20 seconds into the game, we needed content to post about the stat.  I created a quick infographic (of course) and we had journalists write a brief story, while providing some history of the stat.  These were then shared on our digital and social channels within minutes of live action.  It was a preview of the workflow required, with multiple conversation threads occurring across our team members and with external sources (e.g. photographers, media) to ensure every detail was covered.  The result was a success – we had the strongest engagement on our website and social channels of the year!  Now the goal is to continue to keep up the momentum throughout the games.

[digital-xs-blog]

Intern life: using your ear while working with social media

And suddenly I am running a social media campaign as part of my internship at Digital Howard. By myself, I have been creating the strategy and copy, and managing the social engagement with the supervision of the president and the CEO of the company.

Oh That Trump are Augmented Reality tattoos made to mock Donald Trump, who is running for President of the United States, and is known for saying a lot of racist, sexist and just horrible stuff. When you point your phone to the temporary tattoo, you'll see an AR version of Trump saying all his “Trumpisms”. This project is more about showing Digital Howard as a cutting edge media company, is intended to create awareness more than drive sales. With that in mind, I feel less pressured to bring profit to the company during my internship, but, still, very motivated. It is a key piece for their portfolio so it is important for me.

This week, I organized the content calendar and wrote the copy for Tweets and Facebook status. Oh, of course, before that I set up the social media channels, by opening the accounts and making sure the brand visual identity was the same across all platforms.

In one week, I learn a lot.

1. It is tough to run a social media campaign by yourself. Even though is not a huge campaign, there is a lot of organization and communication with the higher management – which takes time to get approval and go back to you.

2. AR marketing made cheap. New technology might require a different marketing to create a buzz, but I have zero budget for that. Haha I would love to make a great video, produced professionally, but it costs money. So the solution will be make a simpler video showing how the product works and send to the right people. As part of the strategy, we have a list of social influencers we want to connect.

3. Growing your social following takes time when you are a totally unknown brand. We are a merchandising brand trying to connect with Anti Trump followers. They are not very comfortable with us selling things. So we've been trying different types of tweets to see what works – creates an engagement. Some tweets are more about the brand, others are just purely against Trump, retweeting news and videos.

In Social media, you gotta try what works – different times, different messages, different platforms – until you find the sweet spot. And the cool part is that the feedback is made of real people. It talks back to you. And I am listening.

[benlamdesigns-blog]

Week 7 – Getting used to our empty office

This week, a large portion of our digital team departed for Rio, leaving our office quite empty.  As part of the “home” team, our job is to ensure that we provide the real-time content and support for our “missions” team.  This includes everything from screen-grabs to quick Photoshop edits and mockups.  In preparation for this transition, our team implemented an office messenger a few months ago.  Much like Asana, the use of threads and message chains have allowed us to minimize the emails being sent back and forth, and have made real-time communications overseas much simpler and effective.

In terms of my responsibilities, I wrapped up the Snapchat geofilters and have sent them for approval.  We are now starting a “Fun Facts” infographic series to continue to build the momentum for our audience engagement going into the Games.  As part of our team’s objectives, we are aiming to pump out more content on a regular basis in order to build our social media followers.  This has resulted in branching out the topics we would normally cover and coming up with creative and fun “series”.

Other projects this week included designing brochures to be handed out in our Canada Olympics House in Rio and designing infographics for our corporate partners.  These infographics are somewhat challenging since we often have to abide by rigid branding and design guidelines without compromising the needs and wants of our partners.  We try our best to find the best balance possible.

From a UX perspective, we performed more usability testing for the Team Canada app.  The app has officially launched in the Google Play and Apple Store, however, we are continuing to test out all the kinks before we promote it.