Yesterday I had to go to Access Control - AGAIN - to hopefully receive my ID. I went to AC around 8:30am, expecting a line, but surprisingly I got right in with number I92. I had to speak to Loretta again and I could tell that she was a little hesitant to work with me since I had so many problems before. I was practically crossing my fingers in hoping that I didn't have any problems this time. Guess I should have crossed them a little bit harder.
Loretta pulls up my file and just says, "oh that's weird." Oh gosh, here we go again. I just sigh and say "what's wrong with my file now?" She expained to me that while they now had my location status correct - Disney World instead of WDI (Walt Disney Imagineering) and Disneyland - they now had my start date incorrect and had me starting on the 21st of June. The implications of this? I cannot get into the parks until Friday and I also will not be paid when I am supposed to be paid for traditions. Loretta went back to speak to her manager and after about 10 minutes comes back out, prints my ID and tells me to not even try to get into the parks because it will not work until Friday. Thankfully I have an "A" on the back of my ID, which means cast member discount. Staci had an "N" when hers first got printed, so she had to go back a third time as well to get that fixed.
Staci and I were talking a few nights ago and while Disney has top-notch marketing, entertainment, and operations, it seems as though the technical end of Disney is somewhat lacking. I'm not saying that they are the worst by any means, but I think that there are still a lot of kinks in the system that should have been worked out by now. I think the structure of some of the departments make it difficult to get a straight answer or solution to a problem.
Anyway, so I finally make it back to Celebration to start working and I begin my meet & greets with Sharon, who is a Social Media Community Manager for the multicultural markets. She is not only an advisor for those, but also helps with DDA, which is a program for about 100 minority students and allows them to come to Disney for one weekend and explore their career interests. Steve Harvey and other African American celebrities hand pick these students from essays that they write. She talked to me a lot of the segmentation of the market due to government restrictions, interests, etc. I will hopefully be chatting with her more about reaching the Domestic Hispanic segment, as well as our international markets.
The next meet & greet that I had was with Cynthia, the Digital Marketing Director, who I will be working directly with. She outlined a lot of my work and what will be expected of me, which was really helpful, since so far, my job duties have been pretty vague. I will essentially we working with a lot of data and metrics, but am also encouraged to be open about different opportunities I would like to be involved in. I mentioned to her that the social listening piece of digital marketing was especially interesting to me, so Cynthia is going to be including me in bi-weekly reports and hopefully I can be more involved in the future about optimizing the data.
I then checked in with Kim, my leader, who apologized for not being able to chat with me too much because of meetings & prior commitments, but wanted to take me out to lunch! I was beyond excited and at 12:30 we headed out and went to Mulligan's, which is right down the street from our offices. Mulligan's is essentially a bar, but the food there was amazing and most people don't realize that they serve lunch there. I got a turkey and cheese sandwhich with their famous "Pot-o-Gold" soup which is like a loaded baked potato soup. It was so delicious!
We got back around 1:15 and I then had another meet & greet with John, who is part of the Test & Learn team. Test & Learn's main duty is to explore new platforms that Disney could potentially be involved in and test whether they would work full-scale. When I got in, we talked a lot about my background and from then on we didn't really talk much about his job, but mostly about college football, british accents, and other random factoids from our lives. It was nice to just sit down and talk with someone.
My next meet & greet was with Jenn who is an Associate Marketing Manager and works primarily with special offers and discounts. It was really fun talking to her because she is also a dog person, so it was great to talk about Wrinkles and her dogs Nutmeg and Tank for a while. She explained that I will be working with Julia, who will be in charge with more of the strategy side, but I'm hoping that I can working with Jenn some more because her energy is honestly amazing.
I then had a meeting with Kama, who taught me how to use a campaign database system and she was really helpful. She also gave me awesome tips for the parks and hopefully I can utitilize those in the coming weeks!
My final meeting of the day was at 5pm and was basically just a status update on the Disney Parks & Disney Interactive. It was my first time entering a conference call on my own and after three failed attempts, I finally got connected!
Here is my office number & name plate:
One of the best things about working in Celebration is that they give you free food all the time! Here are some new Peep Rainbow Pops that we got to try:
A funny thing happened today - in the Disney parking lot, I found not one, but TWO people with some sort of Husker emblem on their car. It made me so excited to know that there are some fellow Husker fans among me :)
Further, there is a Panera Bread right on our property, so Staci and I decided to go to Panera for dinner and I got a super delicious sandwich and a chocolate cookie that was still warm!
Today I have two meetings and six meet & greets, one is even with the Senior Vice President!
