Jelly Follow-Up

I recently had the opportunity to attend an interview with a local marketing agency, Jelly Marketing. It was an eye-opening experience that definitely made me take a step out of my comfort zone. Opportunities like the one I was given don’t come around very often, so I tried my best to absorb as much knowledge from the experts who interviewed me as I could. The initial atmosphere of the building was infectious, bright, and colourful, just like their logo.

I’m going to write about something a little different today, so for my followers that are here purely for my crocheting and knitting updates, there might not be as much here that interests you as there is usually. This post will be acting as a follow-up to the interview I had earlier this week. So if you want to read some shameless self-promotion and what I have learned from my experiences in the land of marketing, as well as see a new crochet technique I finally learned, here you go.

During my interview, I was told about how the current Social Media Coordinator followed-up after his interview. I was starting to feel hopeless and that I had some serious shoes to fill. His follow-up was so creative, extremely skillful, and technical. I would consider myself to be “above average” in regard to computer skills, but not nearly to the caliber of this guy.

I let my thoughts ferment for about a day and a half as I tried desperately to think of something to do for my follow-up. I was so worried that I wouldn’t be able to create something flashy and fancy to really capture the company’s attention. Finally it dawned on me; I should do something that highlights my strengths as a future marketing professional. Duh.

What are my strengths? That was the next difficult question.

I’ve chosen to highlight just a few of my many strengths. (See? Shameless self-promotion.) I love interacting with people, whether it is online through social media platforms or in person. Humans are social creatures and with the way our world has developed, it is commonplace for people to converse directly with businesses. Allowing these people to speak to businesses, I wholeheartedly believe, increases the amount of loyalty they feel towards said businesses.

I know a few business owners and I enjoy talking to them about their public relations experiences and what they think of the whole process. The overall response has been, “I’m too busy to respond to the public’s emails, comments, inquiries, etc.,” AKA, “I don’t want to talk to the public.”

I don’t blame them. Owning a business is seriously busy business. While I’m sure that managing their brand identity, brand personality, and their public relations is on the forefront of their minds, they certainly don’t have the time to manage these and many other business related activities themselves.

That’s where I want to be, right in the middle, between the public and the business. I want to answer their customers’ questions and put their minds at ease. I want to represent businesses and maintain their reputations online and in person. I want to help make things easier for everyone.

Throughout my relatively brief time communicating through social media platforms, blogging, and in person at trade shows and markets, I have noticed that there are several different ways to write and speak. Each method of communication can handle a different “voice”. For example, Facebook requires a more professional tone of voice. Instagram and Twitter are much more informal and can handle emojis and plenty of hashtags (of course depending on the type of business). Blogging and speaking in person are pretty similar. Both are natural, free-flowing, and unconstrained by character limits.

Could you even imagine working at a trade show and having to limit yourself to 144 characters when speaking with passersby?

Managing different speaking and writing styles is not something that can easily be taught. I am fortunate enough to be able to switch back and forth between these methods easily and can manipulate each one to my benefit. I have always excelled in writing and communication through type. Being able to take on different voices and messages is imperative when managing public relations. Customers want to hear from the business, not the marketer. I think I can be that hidden marketer.

I would argue that I have a fairly good grasp on the English language, grammatical rules, proper syntax, and punctuation. As I mentioned previously, I really enjoy writing and communicating through written words. Seeing as writing is a huge part of marketing and public relations, it would be a huge benefit to your company to have someone that is already skilled in the area.

My last major strength I’d like to highlight is my creativity. I love designing, creating, transforming, incorporating, and doing whatever I can to make something new and interesting. I love the challenge that creativity provides. As frustrating as creativity (or a lack thereof) can be, the reward at the end is so empowering that it literally makes you an addict.

I try to show my creativity in as many ways as I can. I get bored extremely easily, so I have to switch things up pretty regularly so I don’t waste away in the confines of my house. I cycle between knitting, crocheting, baking, and writing the most. With my business courses I have been able to let some of my creativity run wild when designing ads and brand identities for case studies and clients/companies. Providing a company with something that truly defines and represents them is so rewarding.

I am excited to jump into this field of work. When I was just about to graduate from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do or even try. My teeny tiny knitting business had just started and it was all in fun. I can’t think of any other adjective than the word fun. It took me a solid two years to realize that the most thrilling part of the business for me was actually posting online, developing advertising campaigns, and speaking to my customers. Finding out that the part of operating a business I enjoyed the most was an actual job brought me close to tears. I felt like I finally found what I was meant to do and it just so happened that it was what I was naturally good at doing.

So I crocheted the company’s logo. I wanted to do something that incorporated my creativity and my interest in blogging and writing. Every blog needs some pictures that relate to the content and the overall theme of the blog. Crochet + Marketing Interview = Crocheted Logos.

Here is Jelly Marketing’s logo that I took directly off of their Instagram account. I have been dying to try the C2C (corner to corner) method of creating crocheted squares, so I thought I would try to make the company logo out of yarn. Typically you would make at least nine of these squares depending on how big you want your finished blanket to be. I am just going to stick with the one for now. Sorry guys.

I tried using my “free handing” skills and “eye-balling it” to create the logo on some graph paper. That did not work whatsoever. I then realized that most photo editing programs have an effect called “Pixelize” that allows you to transform a picture into chunky pixels. I used GIMP, which is a free to download version essentially of Photoshop. Here is the link for the painfully easy tutorial I used. FYI: I made my squares roughly 5px by 5px to keep as much detail in the logo as possible.

I needed to graph out the pixels so I actually had some numbers to deal with. I used a website called MakePixelArt.com to quickly and easily fill in boxes of colour to create my official pattern.

The next step was to transfer the “pixelized” logo onto some graph paper. I wanted to carefully cross off each box as I completed it in my crocheted square to prevent any minor mental breakdowns caused by not following the pattern accordingly. I’ve dealt with enough of these in the past with trying new crochet patterns that I have learned it is way better to take your time and be a little extra cautious the first time around to save the giant tangled knot of yarn that will end up being thrown out, as well as my own mental well-being.

Can we just take a second to admire my atrocious printing? I thought I was being all organized and fancy by colour coding my graph, but it just looks like ten different people helped me write down the letters.

I am seriously so thankful keyboards exist.

Check out those horribly inconsistent B’s.

I followed the amazing tutorials by Repeat Crafter Me. I watched her two video tutorials on basic increases and decreases, as well as C2C colour changes. They were super easy to follow and were extremely helpful. Making the entire square took about 5 hours, which isn’t too bad for a 19×20 graph (my first one at that).

I think I might have done something strange with my colour changes as I had about 100 ends to weave in (not joking) even though I only used 5 different colours. This picture only shows about half of my ends. The other side of the square had about twice as much. Maybe a graphgan master will be able to let me know what I did wrong by commenting on this post!

Here is the square after about 2 hours of weaving in ends.

And here is the final product! I wanted to include a white border around each colour to better match the actual graphic logo. I used a modified chain stitch which is an embroidery technique that looks really similar to chaining in crochet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you think? Pretty similar?

After four days of brainstorming, stress, and finally getting to work, I really enjoyed this endeavour. I was given the chance to thoughtfully reflect on my skills and abilities, which isn’t something people do often. l taught myself a few new things in crochet and on my computer. All together, this project took me about 15 hours: learning how to use the software, getting organized, actually making the logo, and finally writing this post.

I truly believe that I would be valuable to this company to be hired as an intern. My previous experience in marketing will reduce how much time the company will need to spend teaching and instructing. Hands-on experience is always better than textbook experience.

I’d like to thank everyone, once again, for reading what I write. Being able to share my work with a like minded and interested audience on a regular basis is so amazingly unfathomable to me; I am forever grateful.