Author page: Em-Media

Superbowl 51 will go down as one of the great Super Bowls in NFL history.

While I haven’t heard anyone say the same about this year’s Super Bowl commercials, I can honestly say that I can’t remember a Super Bowl where brands took such divisive stands on cultural and political issues.

I was asked to write a piece on the Super Bowl 51 commercials. So when I arrived at work the morning after the game, I asked the team at EM to give me their top three winners and losers from last night’s advertising sweepstakes.

I thought there would be some sort of consensus. As usual, I was completely wrong. I’ve still declared winners and losers, but I’ve also given some of the dissenting feedback and debate that was heard around our office when each person put their two cents in.

No matter what I write here, I doubt I’m going to be popular tomorrow.

Super Bowl Commercials that Won

The world of business and marketing are in a state of flux. The market, platforms, and rules of engagement and acceptable practice seem to change before you have mastered the last set. There seems to be an insurmountable amount of variables that are outside of our control in a professional world where control seems absolutely necessary.

But in the midst of all this uncertainty, technological advancements, and the rising expectations from customers, clients, employees, and vendors, there is one thing that never changes or goes out of style–good leadership. 

There are a lot of things to take away from last night’s first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but there will be plenty of talking heads and social media debates today to cover those including your Aunt Mildred who will somehow tie your lack of political common sense to your decision to attend college.

But if you find yourself back at work today, concerned mainly with leading your organization’s growth and marketing efforts, still hungover from last night’s political theater of the absurd that is the race for perhaps the most powerful position in the world, I’m going to give you the one takeaway from last night’s debate that will change the course of your marketing efforts for the next four years and beyond. You ready?

“They are waiting for IT.”

I don’t need a list to tell you what will make an intern successful. I don’t need a list to tell you what traits will get my attention, and I certainly don’t need a list to tell you what will make an intern memorable.

There’s one thing, one trait that each great intern has no matter what their background and skillset.

They want to be mentored.

Don’t get me wrong, positive qualities like ambition and a strong resume are nice, but they’re really only helpful when coupled with a desire to learn. Somehow, the desire part of professional development always gets pushed to the bottom of our interview checklist. For me, it is at the top.

I find it much easier to teach skills than I do to find interns that are open to the kind of criticism and critique that it takes to see real growth and achieve their maximum potential.

Here are 5 ways to tell that your intern is really looking for a mentor.

It’s after lunch, and you’ve just returned to your desk. You’re staring at your computer screen with zero motivation to actually do any work. A little office siesta sounds glorious, but that is unlikely to happen. You try to finish the day’s work, but you spend more time staring into space than you do working.

Interns are people too, and they are often really good people.

No, I’m serious.

As I talk to our college interns, I am constantly surprised at what other companies and organizations have their peers doing with what could be such an amazing mutual experience for everyone involved.

Interns are not for getting coffee.

Yes, at times, I will ask my intern to do some things like clean up the files on our shared drive or post a bunch of photos to a Facebook page, but even those are teaching moments.

I rarely ask my interns to do something that would not be in a similar job description if their internship was a paid position. In fact, and I’d like you to sit down for this, I actually shy away from giving them things that don’t give them useful experience because every time I do, I am decreasing the value that I am bringing to the table and therefore decreasing the amount that I can reasonably ask of them.

Let me say this, at Em-Media, we are still developing our program. We’re not even close to where we want to be, but we’re actively working on getting there. We’re doing that through a mixture of our own experiences, feedback from our past and current interns, and a healthy dose of borrowing from those companies and organizations that are already doing it well.  

I’m intentionally putting a lot of effort into developing the Em-Media intern program for a few reasons, the least of which is boosting our bottom line with free labor and my hatred of walking 100 feet to the coffee pot.

Internships should be an equal value exchange just like all of your other healthy relationships. There are some very basic attitudes and foundation pieces to incorporate into your program development to give your company the best shot of making that happen.

How do I create a social media content strategy? If you’re asking this question, then you’ve officially entered the new era of the marketing world. Welcome.

There is no feeling quite so hopeless as having your business page unpublished by Facebook.

Sure, I’ve heard the horror stories, but until you experience it for yourself, those stories feel an awful lot like an inbound boogie-man, invented to keep digital marketers awake at night.

On Friday, May 6th, 2016 the Em-Media Facebook page was unpublished for “unsolicited commercial activity (spam)”. The only problem is that we don’t ever spam. We don’t even send out unsolicited messages from Em-Media’s Facebook page. We’ve been around for twenty years. You don’t get there by spamming your followers and brand evangelists.

Em-Media is growing. It is my pleasure to introduce our new Web and SEO Specialist, ERIC HERSEY. Eric is truly a great guy and brings a skill set that I’ve known we needed to get stronger in for awhile now. The landscape of advertising and marketing is shifting dramatically, and Eric’s detailed personality coupled with his passion for websites and…