New Week, New Task, New Intern

This entry was originally written on January 20, 2010
Well, it is week two of my internship and I spent the majority of my week continuing to research Detroit-based blogs and learning about the importance of social bookmarking for search engine optimization (SEO).

Monday, I continued to struggle to find blogs on family or youth. I added a few more blogs to the list but still only have a handful of contacts. It is frustrating but I continue to seek out interesting blogs. Luckily Tuesday produced a breakthrough with the discovery of blogrolls (a roll call of blogs the poster follows).  Next week I plan on going back to the Web site’s I already visited and checking their blogrolls to see if I can garner any leads that way.

Tuesday was crowed at our offices. Not only were Lisa, Bill, Nick, and I there, but we also have a new intern, Monique. Since Jodie was in Lansing that day, we had just enough desks for everyone to be in the same room as opposed to having the interns work in the conference room. Our day began with Bill assigning me to help Lisa find Detroit Food & Wine blogs. After a couple hours and about a dozen contacts to our networking list, we broke for lunch.

Returning from lunch, Bill gave us a lesson on social bookmarking and how it relates to SEO. Having used delicious before I was familiar with the concept and got straight to work setting up accounts on various social bookmarking sites and crafting descriptions and tags for doDetroit. I left that day with about half the work completed and a richer understanding of SEO.

Finishing up my social bookmarking task by lunch, I spent the rest of the day researching social news Web sites. While I had heard of sites like Digg and StumbleUpon prior to my internship, I never truly understood how they worked and the import role they play in directing Web site traffic to various Web sites. After spending a few hours discovering the a few of these types of sites I got a feel for how each one accepts submissions, ranks, and sorts each page suggestion.

So far I am enjoying my internship. While Bill jokes that some of our tasks are tedious—researching, social bookmarking, etc.—I actually am learning a lot about marketing in a real world setting. The tasks the other interns and I are accomplishing going to help publicize doDetroit as well as gather a wide range of content that we want to add to the Web site and the soon to be launched doDetroit TV.

Tune in next week for the ongoing saga of Gill v. Active Detroit Family and Youth Blogs.

--Gill