The MM Network

[Jake]

Class of 2011.

SMAD major (School of Media Arts & Design) with a concentration in Journalism and minor in Writing & Rhetoric from the WRTC school.

I got into the Journalism concentration and immediately knew I didn't want to do it full time, because to be frank, the money isn't there to support a car habit. Thankfully with SMAD, you end up pretty well-rounded and can take electives within the major, so I took as many web-focused classes as I could and got a grip on web design between the school and my one roommate at the time.

Got an internship with AOL between junior/senior years, working for AOL Jobs, helping with all-things editorial. They liked me and kept me on part-time my senior year. I worked from Carrier Library making DC intern money, sipping lattes. They offered me a full-time gig when I was about to graduate, so I took it.

Immediately after moving up to Fairfax, my boss was like "yo, I'm out" and I ended up running the team for ~6 months. I had a team of 4 full-time writers and a handful of freelancers reporting to me, pitching stories and taking assignments based on our roadmap and weekly/monthly/quarterly needs. My experience was not nearly enough to get me promoted full-time into my old boss's role (Editor) but I learned a lot. Got to plan and run a few social media giveaways (we gave away at least two iPads) and was running our social media platforms on my own (posts, scheduling, reporting, etc).

After about 1.5 years in the Associate Editor role, we got a new department lead (for all of editorial) and I was asked to move to AOL Travel, which also encompassed Mapquest and a travel blog called Gadling. I dropped the "Associate" from my title, made a little more money, and did similar shit as before. I was the go-to for all media use on our editorial properties, from an acquisition and legal standpoint. I was also doing a lot of HTML and CSS work to get posts formatted the way they needed to be, because our “content management system” was pretty bad.

A woman I worked with on AOL Travel left for another position and I took over her job, working with digital marketing agencies to promote travel deals on a CPC (cost per click) basis. It was fun but the products I was working with were not super enticing and clickthrough was kinda low. I discovered I liked “product” a lot more than editorial though, so I started looking around, which took me to CEB.

So now I’m a digital product manager for CEB. We sell research to other companies and do it through about ~70 websites. My team manages the content management system that runs all of those websites as well as some one-offs. I’m now managing a few people and our team handles all things “social” – discussions forums, polling, personalized content, and a mobile app for iOS and Android. I’ve been here almost 3.5 years now.

It’s a fun gig, but I’m getting the itch to move out of the area. So, I’m looking to do similar stuff but… elsewhere. I like improving user experiences, because a lot of them really suck.