From the very start of this apprenticeship, every week has proved a learning opportunity and spending the last two days at my first industry event has made this no exception. The chance to meet and listen to experienced industry professionals provided a whole new understanding of how it all really works. An unparalleled insight like this has left me with much greater confidence in my own abilities when it comes to achieving role responsibilities. Mostly however, it’s shown me why we do what we do here at Soaring (and as clichéd as it is) – it’s the people!
The Association of British Professional Conference Organisers (ABPCO) held their AGM and Excellence Awards in Harrogate across Thursday and today. As they are our client, we’re tasked with creating content on their behalf to be published online and off. There was plenty to do across the two days as they put on a superb event; lots of activities and stunning destinations. There was never any issue finding appropriate photo and video moments and the order-of-events was matched online sending out plenty of tweets.
Beforehand, I was shown how we keep track of client’s social stats. For each, we look at a range of platform analytics and watch for changes month on month as well as how they are comparing to their competitors. A measurement I’d not seen before was a ‘klout’ score, a number between 1 and 100 that indicates how influential someone’s presence is online. Several factors are used to calculate scores but being active on multiple platforms helps and a good ratio of posts vs post responses should improve scores too.
College for the week covered design laws; copyrights, patents and IP as well as the newer concept of creative commons. After starting off dry, making sure we understood definitions for (an awful lot of) legal terms, learning the history, evolution and impacts of these laws was surprisingly thought-provoking. From it, I feel as if I have a solid understanding of how to navigate the vast landscape of design law and believe there will ample chance to apply it at work in future.