My Internship Experience At Social Fire Media

I took a leap when accepting the digital marketing internship position at Social Fire Media, a small digital marketing agency in the Greater Philadelphia Area. I have lived in the suburbs of Connecticut most of my life, and to me ‘the city’ has always meant NYC. I am very unfamiliar with Philadelphia, besides the fact that I attend Penn State University where half the student body is from Philadelphia. I’ve learned this often means an hour plus outside of the city… But nonetheless my impression of Philadelphia was not necessarily positive due to the cliche nature it holds at Penn State.

I studied abroad in Aix-en-Provence, France for the Fall 2014 semester. Getting on a plane and jetting off to a foreign city for several months was a very large leap I took. Surprisingly, moving to Philadelphia and starting my life as the digital marketing intern at Social Fire Media was a similar leap. New city, new people, new culture. I had lots of exploring to do and lots of unknown expectations.

Now that my 12 weeks have come to an end I can honestly say the new city has become home, the new people have become family and the new culture has been embraced. Yes, I do love cheesesteaks now and even have used the term ‘hoagie’.

The whole point of this leap was to further my experience and pursue my passion of marketing. Marketing is a funny thing because every aspect in our world is affected by it. It surrounds us, whether driving on the highway and seeing billboards, or talking to someone and learning their ‘brand’ (aka who they are), or running errands and choosing what brand to purchase. People don’t even have the mental capacity to take in all the information thrown at us, so there is a reason we pick up on what we do.

In my three years of being a marketing major at Penn State this is verbatim what my courses and academic experiences have taught me. Diving into the real world of a marketing agency this summer at Social Fire Media only emphasized these teachings, and more. In order to break through the information overload that humans experience on a daily basis, strong marketing efforts are necessary. The difficult part to overcome is spending the money in order to better sell your brand to in turn make more money.

This is where a marketing agency like Social Fire Media comes into play. It’s about taking the leap to pursue the ROI of good marketing. This can be done many ways such as social media content, so keeping current, interesting posts on social media platforms in order to engage consumers with your brand. Also, social media advertising is huge. Do you know anyone that doesn’t log into either Facebook or Twitter every day? OK more realistically, do you know anyone that logs in any less than five times a day? And these are just TWO platforms, Instagram and Snapchat are growing dramatically. People are spending large amounts of time on social media so there’s really no better place to show an advertisement. Even bigger than this is Google. Google is the go to for any product or service. You need to get your product or service seen. Along with all of this comes the foundation of strong graphic design and a killer website.

This seems overwhelming and that is why entrusting in a marketing expert is greatly beneficial. There are endless aspects to marketing and it’s awesome to experiment with what will truly benefit a business. Specialization and expertise is key because you are always dealing with a budget. It doesn’t make sense for a business providing IT support, for example, to be wasting time with their marketing efforts because that is not their specialization. Outsourcing marketing needs allows the business to concentrate on the specialization of what they do, while still gain the leads and publicity that are found through marketing. Social Fire Media was able to exemplify exactly how this works. Optimizing all of the aspects of marketing is where SFM excels.

With barely three years under their belt, SFM’s attitude, work ethic, talent and all around culture is truly inspiring. Matt and Brendan took the leap three years back and pursued their dream with confidence to start their own company and spread the benefits of digital marketing to over 60 clients they’ve been able to successfully serve. This number is only growing. Nick took the leap and believed in the cause with Matt and Brendan, while pursuing his passion for graphic design and web development. I could not be happier to have taken this leap to join the team, along with my sidekick intern Mary Kate. Learning from these experts, having the opportunity to explore so much on my own, and contribute to the team has gone above and beyond any expectations I could have had.

Overall, taking the leap to expand beyond what you know is essential for optimizing positive results. The ROI comes in many forms, such as finding a city you love, working a job that you enjoy, or developing leads through advertising and branding your company.