Earn, Learn, and Intern Follow up
As promised a recap of our event at Michigan State on Wednesday. Adam and I were extremely pleased at the turn out. Many hats go off to the Career Services Team at Michigan State, including John Hill, Paul Jacques, and others. Clearly it was a well received idea in the area as there were several local companies — both big and small — in attendance. What was most impressive was the amount of students that had done research on Netvantage Marketing, and those that had already possessed some experience in the areas of search engine marketing. We came out to find out many students that taken Professor Clay Vorhees ’sclass this spring and had taken the Google Online Marketing Challenge.
This type of experience is great to see, as many faculty are turning towards these types of programs to strengthen and modernize the marketing curriculum. We also talked with some students that had worked with some previous companies gaining online marketing experience. This obviously bodes well for us. We also talked with a good number of students who had done research on us, and seemed to have great attitudes. It will be a busy week next week as we select and interview prospective interns!
Intern Day
Today will be fun day as we are headed over to Michigan State University this afternoon to participate in the Earn, Learn, and Intern event, hosted by the Career Services Network at MSU. It looks like every major company in the Mid-Michigan area is attending, I give Career Services a lot of credit for the work they do, John Hill and his people are on top of it when it come to builidng relationships with local business, both large and small.
We use a good number of interns at Netvantage. MSU is an important resource for us. Our goal is to use the intern program as a pipeline to build our internal talent base. As we grow the business, we will look to retain our top performers for full time positions. It is a great recruiting tool. As for the interns that choose to move on, our goal is to arm them with unique skills that will complement their degree so they have a competitive advantage in their job search. Many of the online marketing skills we teach our interns haven’t quite made the university curriculums yet.
Besides all that, it will be great to be back on campus. I am fortunate in that upon graduating from MSU in 2000 with a Telecommunications degree, I have remained in the Mid Michigan area. I worked for the University for 5 years before taking the “big leap” into the private sector. And with classes starting, and the big footbal game against Calfornia on Saturday night on national television, there will be a great energy on campus.
Back with an update on how the event went tomorrow.
Introduction
Greetings world, and welcome to my blog. My name is Joe Ford and I am the Managing Partner at Netvantage Marketing. I was previously at an Internet consulting company in Lansing, Michigan, where my business partner, Adam Henige was also a Senior Analyst. We worked at great company, with great management and people, but we decided it was time to branch out on our own.
I had known Adam for quite awhile, I actually recruited him from Upstate New York to get his MBA at Michigan State’s Eli Broad Graduate School of Management while I was the Assistant Director of Admissions. He is quite sharp when it comes to web analytics and market research. At Netvantage, we both touch all sides of the business: search engine optimization, paid search management, and web analytics, but his emphasis on web analytics, and mine tends to be on the paid search side. We both equally divide the organic optimization aspect.
At any rate, I look forward to posting on this in the coming months, and I hope you find it beneficial as well.
-
Netvantage Marketing website
