My CDE Experience

Working on a single project with a single focus can be intense sometimes. The sole goal is for me right now is to create and deliver (4) amazing webinars on the subject of QR codes, how they might be making a comeback and bridge the gap between online and offline in 2019 and beyond. With that goal, I've studied and researched for hours and hours on the topic of QR codes. I know a lot about QR codes, maybe too much. This webinar preparation reminds me of my early days as a budding musician. I'd be excited to learn a new song and I would play a recording of that song on a loop to listen to over and over. Each time I listened to that song and studied it, it became a little less exciting and a little less fun. Around the time you have that new tune rehearsed well enough to perform in front of an audience, a paying audience, you kind of hate it. All that time and effort, practice and study, but if I had to listen to that song one more time... Here's the trick though, I'd p...

After writing and re-writing my Chatbot adventure, today I had to demo the prototype I created to the rest of the TechStak team. You can track to workflow below or play with the actual bot right here:  Provider Chatbot  Refresh your window to reset the Bot and your adventure! I received great feedback on this bot, everybody liked it! It can be scary sometimes to be an intern and not have much experience in these fields and then be asked to create something of business quality and present it to business grade people. I'm new at using this technology. I'm teaching myself how to use it and I'm doing okay. I'm kind of excited to create more of these chatbots and explore more of this powerful Drift technology. I learned a lot about User Experience in school, but to create a user experience utilizing chatbots is challenging and amazing; chalazing!?!

I had the opportunity to take on another company in my internship this summer. Yesterday I officially met Nicol at TechStak and it was great! Nicol describes TechStak as the Angie's List of tech providers. They certify tech providers to ensure a certain standard of quality and competence and on a job seeker side, they verify the qualifications and skills of the applicants. My task this summer, will be to become a specialist in  Drift  Conversational Marketing (play with the chat in the lower right corner, you think it's a person, but it's NOT, well... most likely not). We are using the Chat-Bot functionality to aid in on-boarding new clients, from both sides and ease the burden of human staff by automating and filtering with Drift. Drift's design software makes it pretty intuitive and there are plenty of easy to understand videos to get you started. Now that I've got my Drift pitch out of the way, it's on to mapping out and creating some workflows. Imagine w...

With the webinar series being my major focus, I spent most of today's time diving deep into 'Use Cases' for implementing QR codes in 2019. There is a distinct pattern to QR adoption by marketeers from 2011 to the present day. Initially, QR was hailed as the next big thing, a revolutionary new way to interact with the people at large. Many advertisers added QR to promotions, advertisements and events to utilize this new point and 'snap' ability (I've decided to popularize the term 'snap' to indicate capturing a QR code with your phone and successfully being presented with whatever that code is linked to). With a setup like that, why is it you don't 'snap' a QR everyday? It's all about the apps baby. Having to download a specific app to use the QR code killed the QR code. Event marketeers were getting complaints from festivals directors about having lower than usual attendance and then they take a hit from the other side, the ticket holders...

Today started out with my focus on building off my previous scaffolding with the Takeaway Video and fleshing it out into a full-blown, researched, in-depth webinar on the benefits of QR codes in today's digital landscape. What better way to generate content than a classic phone interview with some experts. After outlining my interview questions, I found a quiet space in a corner of Spark-East and prepped for my first call. It's called coincidence for a reason, as I set up to start my phone interview, my interviewee Tina, called me first! I'd left a message with her the day before, but never expected to hear from her so soon. I started the conversation, excited to talk all about the benefits of QR codes in today's digital marketing. Within the first 3 questions, I got the impression that Tina wasn't as impressed with QR as I was led to believe. So when I asked, "do you use QR codes yourself currently or with your clients?" Tina quickly said, "No, no ...

At Spark East for another great session with Gavin and ShopWindow. Today started off a bit different, we were locked out of the building! Through no one's fault, circumstances led to our second session being held at the cafe next door. Good music, good food and an understanding staff made it a fine substitute for a Spark workspace. To start this session, we recapped our individual progress in our assigned Shop Window courses. I'm becoming more and more familiar with the usage of their technology. Gavin has given me access to virtual replica of ShopWindow, to learn, create and explore in. Once I have sufficient experience, I'm going to create a series of Webinars introducing new customers to the benefits of ShopWindow and helping current clients with any issues they may be experiencing. In addition, I've been tasked with contacting Template Designers, to start the process of integrating templates into the ShopWindow webpage builder tool. After Nate took us through so...

Hello and welcome to the blog of my Center for Digital Engagement through, Ann Arbor Spark and Eastern Michigan University, internship. I'll come up with a different name for all that in future posts, shorter, definitely shorter. Day 1: I was assigned to ShopWindow.io along with my partner, Nate. We had our first meeting at Spark East, out in Ypsilanti. Prior to Day 1, I'd met Gavin, CEO of ShopWindow, at TechWalk a week before and it was a great. I was able to introduce myself and get to know what ShopWindow was all about. This was my first time meeting Nate, he was great! We gathered around a conference table and started talks about what type of project we wanted to take on, as part of our internship. After discussing our interests and desires, we settled in and started plotting out our specific plans to accomplish these projects. I was enrolled in the companies various on-line courses, to understand the workings of Shop Window inside and out. Then we had a chanc...