What They Didn’t Teach You in School (Jennifer Davis – Make It Cheaper)

Laura

on 07 Dec 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: Jennifer Davis

Company: Make it Cheaper

Job Role: Content Manager

Follow Jennifer on Twitter: @ensign_jen

What is a usual day for you?

It can really vary. I get in in the morning and check my emails like everybody, and then the first thing I will do is check my Google alerts because I have quite a lot of them set up for business. There are a lot of things that go on like press releases and such like, and we want to be the first to give our opinion on those things. I would also spend time on the planning and content on emails and social media for the following weeks and again during the day writing a lot of content for emails and for the website and uploading it-not on a daily basis but talking to agencies who do some design work for us and html templates- so working with external companies as well. Then when I have updated content and put it out I then will analyse the results and see our successes. I also look after social media here, so I have sent out a few tweets today, we aren’t that heavily into that at the moment, so it is light social media-but I definitely keep an eye on what people are saying, seeing if people do ‘mention’ us -I will try and respond to them straight away and that probably forms an average day for me.

What else do you do with the information you get about the company from social media platforms such as Facebook etc?

I started here a few months ago. Before I started, various people in the company had set up profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and at the moment, we are keeping our accounts ticking over. What I have been doing with Twitter is to broadcast new content and tell people about any interesting news that’s relevant to small businesses. We’ve used Facebook to post our customer testimonials but we haven’t actively driven traffic there – we will be reviewing how we use Facebook and hope to do more with it in the future. Apart from that, we have a business blog on our Business Fit website which we keep regularly updated, we try for a couple of times a week. There’s definitely more we want to do with our social media presence which we’ll be working on in the months to come”

Tell me how you got your role?

I have been here for five months now and I got into this specific role because there is a lady here called Jo-I worked with her in my first ever digital role . We parted ways for a couple of years and it came about they needed a content manager at this company and she put me forward so I was lucky enough to be offered the role here.

How did you get there?

I’m twenty-six at the moment when I left college at eighteen I was actually working in a bank administration role for about four and a half years and that didn’t quite work out for me, I was looking for another job and I was looking for an opportunity and I will admit that I didn’t really know about the digital marketing world at that time, I use the internet every single day and I felt really at home there but I hadn’t even considered getting a job in that industry. What happened is another friend wanted to put me forward for a role that was fully based online, I was lucky enough to get that job which was like the bottom rung of the ladder-work for graduates if you like- and after that the light switch switched on and it was a really fantastic place to start my career in digital-they had every department you could think of. They asked me what was I interested in and I said content- content is definitely something I’m interested in- having been an avid writer in my spare time-they helped me move over into the content team after about six months and I’ve never looked back. Every role I’ve had in the last three years have been a content based role.

Do you use social media a lot personally in your own time?

Definitely. I have a personal blog and I have LinkedIn, which I make a lot of effort to keep updated. I use Twitter quite avidly. Facebook is definitely much more of a personal thing. I use Word Press for my blog which to be honest I try use to talk about work related things because I am aware that people will be looking at it. Twitter is my favorite of the platforms to use.

What do you think will be the next big thing in social media?

To follow on an idea that I heard recently. I watched a presentation by Will Francis (he used to work with Andrew I think at MySpace) and he said that he felt that the future of the Internet was going to be down to immediate sharing of everything all the time. Almost constantly like blogging about our lives, where we are -like 4square and Facebook Places or Twitter where can just update everything all the time. Obviously it needs to be smoothed out but I really do feel like that’s where its going and I feel like we are a lot of the way there. Anything that could help make that way easier and better will probably be the next big thing.

What is the best advice you could give for someone wanting a role in digital and social media?

I think there are a couple of routes into the digital world. If you do come out of school and know what you want to do there are a lot of specific courses and degrees you can do but if you are at a point where you have already moved out of school and have decided this is something you want to move into then I definitely think if you can start somewhere that can help. Starting as an analyst or in a junior role whether that be at an agency or somewhere else is a great place to start because you can start from the bottom and then you can see all around you all the different roles there are going and the ones you could move into which is obviously the route I took, starting from the bottom. It was a really nice way of seeing what I was interested in, choosing a specialty and then really going for it. I think there is room for people who aren’t necessarily degree educated. And that would be my other piece of advice-if you can find a company that really believes in digital and its not a 100% a money spinning channel for them then I think you will find its a really great exciting environment to work in. It has certainly made me happy.

To find out more about Jennifer you can reach her on her linkedin

Last week I interviewed Hayley McCool Smith, a Social Media Editor & Interactive Researcher on T4 at Princess Productions and she told me: