What They Didn’t Teach You in School (Laura Fields – Firetrap)

Laura

on 09 Nov 2011

Hi, I’m Laura and these are my interviews with some of the best people working within digital and social media. I only finished school a few years ago and what I found out since leaving was the amount of opportunity within the digital communications world. I wrote a blog post addressing ‘how I wasn’t made aware of pursuing a career in digital and social media’, which is why I am on a mission to do these interviews. I want to make young people more knowledgeable about career options and hopefully these will leave them feeling inspired and excited by what can be achieved. Also, hopefully someone within the education sector will read these to help with career advice.

Name: Laura Fields

Company: Firetrap

Job Role: Online Marketing Coordinator

Follow Laura on Twitter: @eeeeekyfields

What is a usual day for you?

I’ll come in and see what is planned for the week, what offers we have got on, what promotions, how the sales are going, what we need to push – and then we can put that into social media as well. We push certain projects if we have competitions, and then if there is anything we can put on Facebook or Twitter and put anything on in the blog that links to that.

How did you get into your role?

I started at ASOS where I spent 2 years in buying. I then did some freelance work and work experience for 6 months, then I worked at Ben Sherman and also worked for two of Peter Jones’ (Dragons Den) companies and I then I saw the Firetrap position and got the job.

How essential is social media for your role?

Well before I started we didn’t really do a lot with it. Then when I joined they focused on it a bit more and as time goes on its getting bigger and bigger – so I’m putting more and more effort into it. It is quite a small department and can be quite tricky to keep on top of, but it is getting more important that we do it.

How would you say social media has impacted Firetrap as a brand?

It’s brand exposure at the end of the day and it improves sales figures and means more people go to our site as well. Social media really links well with the ecommerce side of the site and it’s good because we can talk about events we have got going on, getting people down into our stores as well and then that increases sales at the end of the day.

What social media tools do you use on a regular basis?

Facebook and Twitter. We have a few things going on YouTube and you have the blog on the site. Our biggest social platform is Facebook. We build Facebook tabs to promote competitions to get more people to ‘like us’.

What is your best social media campaign?

We worked with V festival and that worked really well for us. We ran a competition where we posted a link on the V festival page and from that we had a 10,000 sign ups and saw an increase in Facebook by 1,000 likes a day. So working with partners really does help. Its gets us followers and brand exposure. We also did a project for Deadly the Gnome – our brand mascot. That is just a bit of fun and gets people interacting. It has it own Facebook page where people upload and like pictures and using it on Twitter. It just gets a lot of people talking about it.

What is the best advice to get a role like yours?

Work experience is so important. Go out and gain as much as experience as you can by working for different companies. Then it will show you what you really want to do.

To find out more about Laura Fields you can reach her on her linkedin page.

Last week I interviewed Poppy Dinsey, founder of What I Wore Today and she told me: