After imposing myself on Anna as a houseguest, I thought I’d test the limits of friendship by asking her to also be part of the How’d You Get There? project. She has a great job and a pretty unconventional story, so if she wasn’t the perfect candidate for this project, who was? Thankfully, she complied with my request and I was able to visit the offices of Carmichael Lynch Spong, the advertising and PR agency in downtown Minneapolis where she works in PR as a Social Media Specialist.
In Anna’s role as Social Media Specialist, she advises companies on how to further their business using social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, mobile apps…any digital medium where people can share information). As Anna’s friend, I am particularly happy that she’s landed this job. She has always been ahead of the technology/media curve. In fact, Anna was the one who bounded into my dorm room sophomore year to introduce me to this thing called The Facebook. (Back then, it was The Facebook, but has since lost its definite article.) So, along with the fact that she’s able to use her wealth of skills as a writer, editor, researcher, analyst and generally social person, this job seems like a natural fit.
Also – let it be known that if one is looking for undeniably ‘cool’ office spaces, Advertising and PR is where it’s at. Start-ups can be pretty fun too. But whereas start-ups offices resemble an environ Tom Hanks’s character in Big would have created, those of ad agencies (from what I’ve seen) are grown-up cool. In Carmichael’s lobby, Eames-inspired chairs sit next to a wooden swing. Stacks of indie art magazines line shelves behind a foosball table. There’s Wi-Fi on the roof-deck. Heck, there’s a roof-deck! Clearly there’s a premium on creativity here. And when I ask Anna what attracted her to this agency specifically, she says that it reminded her of Williams; they have the whole work hard, play hard thing going on. She tells me that at Carmichael, they don’t “take themselves too seriously, just like Williams”.
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