the grass is greener on the internet

A few people have pointed out that for a social media intern I have hardly been blogging at all. Well, there’s a few reasons.

1. I moved countries, and stuff. Apart from the challenge of which pairs of shoes to bring, there’s other things like finding a place to live and getting the hang of Singlish. Can lah.
2. I’ve been learning a hell of a lot. It started with 3 days drinking coffee with the lovely ladies of Goodstuph (aka sitting in from brief to pitch on a very cool new account), a whirlwind day at Edelman that began with talking to Armano and ended with trying out for a black belt on their social media training program, several sessions at Qais Consulting getting to grips with all things new media and interactive, and of course getting down and dirty with data for a week at JamiQ.
3. Oh, and then there’s my day job. So I get paid to tweet at work, but there’s plenty of other things to be done too; getting addicted to Google Analytics, negotiating the hazards of what can and cannot be communicated and planning campaigns for upcoming launches. Most recently, that means working with frog design on a design competition called inmode, which is almost a WCI for designers.

I’d love to go into more detail on these later, but in the spirit of talking about learning, I have two people to credit:

Shin Wee – my first line manager and an incredibly intelligent guy. He was a big part of running WCI and he clearly cared a lot about making it a great learning experience. In the short time we worked together he gave me a lot of great advice that I’ll remember for the rest of my career – so congratulations to him on moving to China to become the head of Remote Banking for Standard Chartered there.

Gaurav – my second line manager and the other driving force behind WCI. When we first met we filmed a case study with one shot where we pretended he was teaching me to meditate. The footage was cut but I feel that it’s quite accurate. He freely shares a wealth of experience in digital marketing, agency life and life in general. He’s a bit like a zen master, but a zen master that wields a Darth Maul light sabre. I’m not sure if I can reveal his next move but he’s going on to a very exciting position which will suit him very well.