I can’t believe how fast this trip has gone. This past week was my second to last week in Prague. Since my big Shoe Care video project ended and I no longer am responsible for the community management, I had significantly less work this week. I actually cycled back to a project I worked on for like my first and second week here, which was a social media audit of our client, Bata. Back then I went through all of the company’s social media accounts, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube, and made suggestions for them based on research I had done on what was popular with the platforms. This time around I just focused on Pinterest and Youtube. I went back to the notes and presentation I had made then, which I never actually got to share, and edited it based on what I had learned since I had been at the company. There were some things that I suggested at first that I found out later they had already tried, and it didn’t work or that they were doing but just sporadically, so I hadn’t noticed. Some of the things I focused on for their Pinterest account were posting vertical images to better adapt to the high percentage of mobile users, adding more keywords to post and board descriptions and titles because the platform functions more like a search engine than a social media, and deleting or combining some boards to simplify their page. For their Youtube, I suggested creating video content specifically for that platform like style tip videos, how they design shoes, and tours of stores or production. I also focused on rearranging their home page to align better with the trends by adding a channel trailer video and changing the page display settings to show the videos in multiple playlists at once. I presented my findings to one of the people in the client team, Tereza, as the other one, Alex, was on vacation, and she really liked most of what I had suggested. She told me that I could start making some of the smaller changes, like rearranging the Youtube page and adding keywords to Pinterest, and then we could see what Alex at the client said when I present it to him. After that meeting on Wednesday morning, I made some of those changes that she approved which I think make the pages look much better!

The other thing that I worked on this week was something that Alex had asked my boss, Tamas, to look into. One of the markets that Bata is in, Bangladesh, had asked him to find a way to see how many people who follow their Facebook page are actually going to the stores. Tamas asked myself and the graphic designers, which we just call the creatives or the creative team, to come up with a few different ways that they could achieve this solution. I came up with the idea to implement a customer satisfaction survey for one to two months that would be very short, only three to four questions, but one of them would be “Do you follow Bata Bangladesh on Facebook?”. People would be asked to take this as they are leaving the store and they wouldn’t know that the point of the survey was to measure Facebook followers in stores, which would keep the survey-takers honest. I compiled these concepts into a presentation and we will present them to Alex when he gets back from vacation next week.

This weekend my family flew to Dublin and I met them there to visit the city. We were able to see the Kilmainham Gaol museum, which was an old jail that became a national monument because so many Irish revolutionary leaders were imprisoned and often killed there. We also saw St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christchurch, which were both beautiful. We did a tour of the Guinness Brewery, which was very interesting because there were so many different parts like a walkthrough of the brewing process, a tutorial on how to pour a pint of Guinness, and even an exhibit on all the advertisements they had used since their start. My favorite part of Guinness though was the 365 degree top floor where there was a view of the whole city. We also traveled a bit outside of Dublin to Malahide Castle, a castle and estate that belonged to the Talbot family for over 800 years before being converted into a museum. I am going back to Prague on Sunday night, but then my family will be following me there on Monday to stay for a week, which will be lots of fun and I have already planned out what they’re going to do!

I don’t really notice much difference between what is considered a successful employee in the Czech Republic and what we consider it in America. I think that Czech people really value loyalty and accuracy in an employee, which I would say is pretty similar to America. It seems like the most successful people at my company are the ones who have learned from their mistakes and take extra time to double check their work to make sure everything is right. In my company, I would say that success is almost more defined by the employee’s relationship with their client since this is a marketing agency and each account manager has to keep their client’s business to be successful. We tend to judge our success by whether or not the client reacted well to a presentation or concept we introduced. I think that these same behaviors are valued in America, especially in another marketing agency. I’m hoping my last week won’t be too boring with my general lack of work! Until next time!