BandATech Solutions: Digital Marketing Intern
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to intern with BandATech Solutions for the Winter 2020 semester. This opportunity allowed me to apply the skills I had been accumulating in writing online to practice in a team setting. I participated in Discovery meetings, wireframe builds, creating and redesigning websites, and observed several client meetings. I now have a better idea of the process that goes into creating websites for clients in a professional capacity.
One of my favorite parts of the internship was writing articles for their Solutions Magazine and assisting in generating ideas for social media content creation. I had created social media content for my own online identities in the past, but was unaware of the depth and variety necessary to create a solid campaign.
ROIs on Digital Media Management
One of the first articles I wrote for BandATech was on ROIs of Digital Media Management. I knew that digital media management, or DMM, was one of the services that BandATech provides (it is what I was there for), but I didn’t know a lot about the field. Writing this article required that I examine what it is that the field is about, which helped me realize that a lot of the things I loved in my writing for the web class were these tasks. This is an excerpt outlining why DMM is important for a small business.
Digital media management provides the opportunity to access what is being said about your product or service, and looks at what is relevant to promoting it further. A digital manager looks at reports and analyzes the data to determine how best to reach your audience, whether that is through social media or billboards. This person ensures that social media posts and online content are created according to brand identity and aimed at the target audience. Posts are scheduled and managed in advance so they can be posted during peak audience hours, even if your business is busy at that time. The multiple posts on multiple platforms that they schedule increase brand authority, showing a more consistent identity to your audience. On top of that, it creates a solid brand reputation as they monitor comments and feedback, and respond to them in a consistent tone and time. This also improves overall customer support, as it offers a pathway for your customers and clients to communicate with your brand. Finally, digital media management allows you to develop an improved understanding of your audience through in-depth analytics that let you know who is purchasing your product, and what they are looking for when they visit your brand online. All of these refine the brand experience that your customers encounter, and result in a better experience for your audience.
Personas
One of my assignments was to create a creative proposal for a client who sells water testing kits.
As part of my proposal I created personas for the types of users who are visiting the website we were redesigning.
It was a lot of fun to envision the type of customer and their motivating concerns.
Windows 7: End of Life
One of my favorite articles to research was on the end of the support cycle for Windows 7. I found the security aspects of the software support to be fascinating, and so I am including a brief section here on the security vulnerabilities that can occur when you are using windows software that no longer is being supported.
After windows stops offering patches, updates, and support for an operating system it can seem like a trivial issue to update over cost. However, in 2017, there were several vulnerabilities that were taken advantage of by cyber criminals that left companies reeling. The wannacry ransomware attack in May, and the Petya malware attack in June of that year resulted in emergency patches being released by Microsoft even after the end of life cycle. The wannacry worm had self-propagating capabilities; a single computer on a network could spread it to all the computers also connected to the network. Petya also spreads in this same way, as well as using file-shares and trojans to steal credentials, then encrypts the computer’s entire hard drive. These bugs utilized Eternalblue, a leaked NSA hacking tool that is still being used by cyber criminals to create different malware and ransomware. With this known risk out there, it is important to ensure that your network is secure, as having a single vulnerable computer on the network can result in total loss of the rest, including their data.
Solutions Magazine: Summer 2020
At the end of my internship I had the opportunity to create a mock version of the Summer 2020 edition of Solutions Magazine.
I worked with the Digital Marketing team’s writer to plan and create mock up content for the upcoming magazine, including articles on video marketing and the City of Holland’s Mayor, Nathan Bocks.