Internship Journal Weeks Jan 30-31 & Feb 6-7

The past couple weeks were quite different in comparison to each other.  The second week of my internship (30-31) I was in the office by myself... Kim entrusted me with a key to the shop and left me with plenty of work to keep myself busy!  He was spending the week in Germany partially to spend time with his family, and partially to attend a food trade show to get new ideas for using chocolate, marketing, etc.  During those couple days, I spent a lot of my time doing what I love MOST.... cold calls.  (If you know me well, you'll know that I spent an entire summer doing cold calls door-to-door for a printing company, and didn't see much come out of it besides sweaty clothes and a thicker skin!)  Anyway, they weren't totally cold because I at least had the people's names to contact, but most were editors of big magazine and newspaper publications and didn't have time for little people like me!  It wasn't too bad, but I spent the time trying to find out if the writers were doing special features for Easter or the Queen's Diamond Jubilee so we can start PR targeted toward them asap.

Apparently, I finished that incredibly quickly and started running out of things to do so I started doing my SECOND favorite thing in London... blogging. (<- This one's for you, Jen and Mark!)  Demarquette has a Wordpress blog, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter to keep up with all of the ridiculous social networking that is now essential in PR and marketing.  Blogging is a great way to market to freelance food writers that are passionate about what they eat and love to share their opinions with others.  Kim is giving me a lot of freedom on the blog, as well as the responsibility to keep it updated to make sure people have something new to read on a semi-regular basis.  I love writing, especially if it's something I'm passionate about, and chocolate is not far from that!  This is where week two filters into week three...

The third week, Kim and I collaborated a lot on continuing to write the blog, as well as preparing a monthly newsletter for subscribers (check out what I've been working on!).  As we all know, Valentine's Day is upon us and it is very important that we market it as much as possible to have as little excess inventory left over at the end of things.  In order to do that, we wrote a few blog posts, then cross-linked it to our facebook and Twitter pages to get people thinking about us during the holiday.  When people think about Valentine's Day, we want them to think, "Demarquette!"

In the same way, we wanted to push certain products for Valentine's Day sales so we developed different promotions and features in the newsletter in order to accomplish that.  It's interesting to work with Kim because he handles literally every part of PR and marketing there is in the business, along with online sales and keeping the website up-to-date.  He has a lot on his plate, so sometimes things like the newsletter get pushed aside or rushed and aren't done as well as they could be.  That's where I come in!  We both look over each other's writing a lot to make sure it's grammatically correct, sounds enticing and makes people want to shop with us!

As for cultural experiences.. I really haven't had many.  I'm actually surprised how fast-paced my company is, considering its tiny size in comparison to a lot of others that I've talked to.  The fact that there are only a few people working for the company makes it tough to take time off, so they have a huge responsibility in keeping it going.