Trabajo trabajo trabajo

Work duties of the day

• I did the clipping perfectly this morning and finally have the art of news tracking for clients down in minutes!
• Two translations (it really is helping my Spanish!)
• Brenda, my boss, sent me an Excel file and explained that I'd be researching for one of our clients, Mobilis. Mobilis manufactures kitchen supplies and furniture in La Plata, Argentina- an area in Buenos Aires but outside of the main city, and designs rooms as well. My project was to compile a list of websites (with no previous experience of this industry or area) to advertise these products on, and find prominent webpages to provide coverage for Mobilis. Once again, how would I start this in English? I don't know anything about kitchen installations and architecture in English...now in Spanish? My first thought was to look at Mobilis's Facebook friends and see what I could find Googling them and analyzing the content on their profiles. It worked well, because it led my research to finding over 30 sites!
• After this, I started the groundwork for social media plans for three of our clients- Mobilis, NetApp, and IGT (International Game Techonology- for video games). All of them have Facebook and Twitter profiles made, but Entercomm wants to analyze how the competitors use social media. The main issue with the language barrier and international internship: I'm not familiar with these organizations, what their presence is in Buenos Aires and who their competitors are. I researched some background information on how they are in the US (especially NetApp & IGT) on Yahoo Finance to have a point of comparison, and proceeded to search for competitors. On the Excel sheet, I recorded the links to social media, what the organization posts and how many friends or followers they have.
• In Argentina and a lot of Latin America, many companies with Facebooks have accounts where you add them as friends and not fan pages. Some incredibly large companies have less than 100 friends, and it made me realize what a bubble I'm in as an American, as a journalism student and as someone who keeps up with company news. It's unheard of at this point for your business to not have an active Facebook page where customers can interact, but that's still developing here. I'm interested in seeing how this continues through my time here, because according to Clarín, Argentina is one of the countries with the most residents registering for Facebook in the last month. My competitive mindset also makes me glad that our clients are able to surpass our competitors in terms of friends and followers :).

Lunch conversations (conversaciones durante el almuerzo)

Lunch is a big deal at Entercomm. At 1 p.m. on the dot every day, everyone who didn't bring food orders delivery and around 2 or 2:30, we go downstairs, sit outside by the unused pool and eat for an hour. Even when we finish eating early, this is strictly social time. It's where I learn a lot about their culture and my co-workers ask a lot about the US, so it's a good tradeoff. It's also fun being the only intern because I represent an influence of not only Mizzou and Chicago, but the US to them--so I enjoy that these conversations are meaningful.

• Tuesday they asked me where I live at school, and because they didn't seem to understand the concept of a sorority, I told them I lived in a house with a group of 100 girls. They brought that up again today and asked if this system fights a lot like they portray it in the movies. I explained that it's exaggerated....haha!
• They also asked if all the popular people at school are the ones who play soccer and cheerleading like American television shows tell it, which made me laugh for multiple reasons. I think the co-worker that asked, Martin, meant to say "fooball," but he heard "fútbol" as soccer and assumed that was what they meant. I told him this was an exaggeration as well!
• I explained how Columbia is a college town with only 100,000 residents, and they wondered what we did on the weekends. Being at Mizzou with such an active Greek community and being involved in activities that determine my schedule, I had a hard time answering what a typical weekend is like. Definitely something to think about!

Catedral

Since I work pretty late hours, I don't have as much time to roam the city during the day, so I took a new way home to go explore Catedral and Plaza de Mayo again. I actually made it into Catedral not only to see the art museum and stations, but for one of the masses. It was absolutely beautiful and awesome to know that I can just go here whenever I want!

BREAKING NEWS: Stacey's vida es un chiste (life is a joke)

Stacey was informed yesterday that her second internship fell through, and assigned to a new TV station. Her first project is to complete a documentary (with a camera of lower quality than she is used to) and she went to the station today to meet the group. The director had her play name games in Spanish with a group of people who were taking theater classes during the day, and she became acquainted with them. If that's not funny enough, she later discovered that this documentary would cover how this group of individuals are people from jail who receive passes during the day to take improvisational theater classes. Criminals. That are still in jail.

Do this to the girl who has already had her wallet stolen and issues with keys. It sounds like a cool cultural experience and Elizabeth and I hope to go watch her film the theater practices someday! I'm excited for this weekend because I'll FINALLY have time to explore, tango and more!