Getting a Minor in Google Studies

My third and last agency placement, Anvil Media, has been a whirlwind. As you probably noted by my lack of blogging, things have been busy. I'm already in my second week at Anvil and last week of COLAB!

In the face of the fun, crunch time madness of planning our Columbia Sportswear pitch for this Friday, there has still been time to learn a slew of new things at this agency placement.

Anvil does search engine optimization and social media marketing--two things I'm not even going to try and pretend I didn't Google before COLAB started. This is new territory for me, but it feels good to be this challenged. Anvil has a very lean business structure. Every person in their 12-person team has basically a comparable title to each other which translates to everyone having their own projects, doing their own research, their own analysis and their own pitching. It's really neat to see everyone work together in such a simplified environment. There are even weekly sessions where the entire team gets together and talks simply about cool stuff they've found that week (blogs, conferences, innovations, etc.). The thought being, this keeps everyone in the loop with not only one another, but also with industry happenings.

Don't let the tech-talk fool you though. The people at Anvil are a pretty is lively bunch. The other day, the office playlist took a romping tour of Dragonforce followed by some Gangster's Paradise. Crazy kids, I tell ya.

My basic takeaways from the SEO world so far pertain to client interaction. In my mind, that is really where Anvil earns their money. They take mass amounts of data and statistics and charts and boil it into a very approachable report and recommendations for a client to immediately put into action. Yes, most of their tools are platforms like Google Analytics, Google adWords, etc. that anyone can access, but Anvil's power rests in their expertise of the tools and their ability to immediately get the SEO ball rolling for a company that would normally be dwarfed by that much data.

It's almost as if what Anvil is offering their client base is 1 part concepts/actions and 3 parts education on what they should be doing. I suppose that is the nature of a company dancing in such relatively new territory. The machine of SEO work is moving pretty rapidly, but I can tell just from my short time here, Anvil has a solid grasp on the industry.

Oh, and one of the other big perks of working at Anvil Media; Heather Schwartz, COLAB Class of '08, is employed here. Heather has been a fantastic resource to have around when I think of random Wet Paint questions. And not to mention she's also just a really rad person. Woo hoo, for COLAB alums!