Day 13: Meet & Greets and Meetings Galore!

Today was definitely the craziest day at Disney, while it is only day 4, I have a lot of prep work that needs to be done!

First, I decorated my office in a ton of Husker and Gopher stuff! I forgot to take pictures, but I will take some on Monday since I am not in the office until then. Let's just say that people will know where I am from and who I root for :)

Second, I had my first meeting of the day with the Florida Residents marketing team. Most of the meetings that I have been to focus primarily on the Domestic market segment, which essentially means all of the United States, besides Florida residents. Hearing their tactics and strategies to reach Floridians was really very interesting and a lot of their tactics are based off of consumer insights. As I am hoping to learn more about Consumer Insights in the future, this meeting was very interesting to me.

After the meeting, I had a meet & greet with Jessica who was the leader of the previous meeting and works primarily with promotions/special offers for Florida residents. She was really nice and helped me understand the segmentation of Florida residents, as well as the marketing tactics that are typically used. I learned that campaigns and promotional offers can range from simple to very complicated and integrated.

After Jessica I had to meet with Melissa, an angel sent from heaven, and she was helping me figure out the payroll situation that still has yet to be resolved. She has helped me so much with this situation and I don't think I could ever get it figured out without her. I will have to get her a little something for all of her help because she has honestly made all the difference in this situation. Unfortunately she will be going on vacation for two weeks until July 1st, so I hope that everything will be fixed by the time she gets back.

It was then almost 12:45 and I had yet to have lunch before I had a meeting at 1pm. I spoke quickly with Kim and she said that I could skip the meeting and have lunch, which was a complete relief for me. During my lunch break I tried to get payroll figured out more, but it was to no avail, so I just used my lunch break for surfing the internet and being on Facebook.

My next meeting was a weekly meeting with the entire Digital Marketing team and I got to see a lot of people face to face and even got to meet our Executive Vice President, Christie and she was really very nice. I'm sure that you're seeing a trend that everyone atDisney is very nice and really helpful. It is the best working atmospheres I have ever been in so far In the meeting we discussed the new process for which we successfully strategize, implement, and review campaigns. I'm SO glad that they went over this with everyone because it was helpful for me to be able to pull all the pieces of information I've learned over the next few days and apply them to this plan to understand it more.

After that meeting, I had to run up to the 5th floor again and meet with Randi who is the Associate Marketing Manger for EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Holidays. She was very helpful with outlining what she does and how I can most effectively support her in her role. She was really interested in using new technologies to promote Flower & Garden and Food & Wine for EPCOT, so I tried to reassure her that new technologies would hopefully be available by Spring 2014.

I had to leave Randi's meeting a bit early in order to be early to my next meet & greet, which was with the Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing, Scott. Kim met with me briefly before and she asked what questions I was going to ask and after I told her some of my ideas, she looked at me with  a blank stare and that was basically my cue to ask her if she had any recommendations. After I wrote down some of her questions, which were better than my original ones anyway, I made my way to the back of the floor to meet with Scott. Once Scott came out, I was still pretty nervous, but once we sat down, we talked pretty casually, had a few laughs, and I learned a lot! The best thing I learned is that he is truly passionate about Digital Marketing and he strives to share that passion with others. He is also a straight shooter, so he told me what he values in employees and what he does not like about employees. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but I could tell that he was telling me things for my benefit.

Finally, I had a meet & greet with Katie, who is the non-promotional messaging manager for the resorts. She first gave me some great hurricane preparedness advice, which was to keep some spare cash in case the ATMs do not work, to fill up on gas, and to essentially have a sever weather preparedness kit. After some of those Florida weather conversations, we moved on to talk about the different benefits that Disney resorts offer and how they differ from off-site hotels. As in all my meetings, it was very enlightening to hear how they market towards different segments and what tactics they use to be the most successful. She then started to talk about the Art of Animation resort where they have different themed rooms and how they were the new thing in WDW resorts. She asked if I had been in them, and I said that I had only seen them online, but expressed a lot of interest in seeing them in person. Her eyes lit up and mentioned that she was taking another Professional Intern on a tour of them next Friday and that I was more than welcome to come along! I can't even tell you how excited I was, so hopefully everything works out to the point where I can tag along to that one :)

Tomorrow I get to sleep in as I am not working, but I am planning on visiting the office as tomorrow we get free Monsters University Student ID's made! I will be "working" on Saturday by going to Magic Kingdom for the first time and completing a scavenger hunt that the Digital Marketing team has set up for me.

There should be a lot of updates and fun posts about the parks in the coming weeks as Staci and I are planning on visiting each of the four parks in four weekends. Magic Kingdom is over this weekend, EPCOT next Saturday & Sunday, and so on. I am SO excited to finally take full advantage of my cast member benefits, now only if I can could get paid ;)

Day 12: More Meet & Greets!

Yesterday I was so tired from work that I ended up passing out at 7:30pm and therefore did not have time to do my blog last night! I will try to be more proactive with updating, as I know a lot of you enjoy the daily updates on my life/this internship.

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!