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Communication Insights: The Agency Life with D3 Corp

Emma Horne

COMM 495: Fall Internship

Salisbury University
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For as long as I can remember, I have felt to my core that I am a creative-minded person.

Since I was young, I have always enjoyed art, music, movies, reading, writing, and

communicating with others. I like analyzing people and interactions and improving the way I

interact with others. I believe this is what led me into studying communications, because the

field is a combination of all of these creative elements and teaches you how to communicate

messages in the most effective way possible, in the different forms of interpersonal, workplace,

media, and advertising communications. My marketing minor has shown me how much

communications applies to business and how you can still be creative in these fields, so it made

me want to explore this side of communication. I found an outlet for my interests and creativity

by becoming the Historian of Salisbury University’s PRSSA (the Public Relations Student

Society of America) and was able to play a part in being a leader and telling our stories by taking

photos for the club. I went to a PRSSA networking night last spring, and there, I was able to

meet and hear from many professionals in the public relations field. One of those was Heather

Duma, a Marketing Strategist from D3 Corp. I didn’t know it then but talking with her that night

was the reason I got my internship opportunity! I started looking for an internship this summer,

but I had no idea where to look at first. I have felt a constant struggle of never knowing exactly

what I want to do with my life, but I decided that trying an internship that combines both my

major: public relations, and my minor: marketing management, would be a great way to explore

my interests more deeply. Suddenly it clicked! Trying out a marketing agency like D3 would be

a great way to explore all of my interests and grow my communication skills. I contacted Mrs.

Duma and she set me up with a recruiter, and I was lucky enough to secure my Social Media

internship opportunity with D3 Corp! My goal for writing this essay is to showcase all the

opportunities I was given to deepen my abilities in content creation, storytelling, writing, and
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other important skills needed to have a successful career in marketing and business

communication.

In my months with D3 Corp, I feel the most crucial aspect I took from my experience was

the importance of fully understanding the needs and wants a client has and adjusting to this. I

learned that in a marketing agency like D3, they have a huge number of clients that all come to

them for help with very different goals to grow their business and specific messages and stories

that they want to communicate about their business. These clients have different budgets,

different priorities, different messages, that all the D3 employees must understand before

proceeding with their work, so they have to constantly communicate and meet with clients to

discuss and get approval of their work before posting or broadcasting messages and content.

Sometimes clients wanted a silly vibe to their posts and captions, and sometimes they were more

serious and informational. This was essential to know when I was creating posts and captions in

order to get them approved by the client, since no post can be finalized without approval. D3

employs a large marketing department, public relations agents, social media managers, graphic

designers, client success coordinators, photographers, salespeople, accountants, and more, but

they all must get to know the clients that they are working with and understand their goals. I was

surprised by this and had no idea how essential meeting a client’s expectations and vision is for

marketing and communication in general. This is exactly the point of agencies, they listen to

clients and give them exactly what they want, so the client will always come back for help with

their needs! The context of what the client desires to communicate to their audience was always

given to me before working on something, so this was one of the first things I picked up on. The

more I got into the habit of understanding what the client wants instead of doing what I

personally wanted to do, the better my communication skills grew and the more successful I was.
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From my internship, I learned how to communicate and engage effectively with so many

different target audiences, which was an experience that I would never have gotten otherwise.

Learning the complex structure and communication practices of a marketing agency

amazed me. When I first began my internship, I felt very nervous to come in and I didn’t know

what to expect. Samantha Thomas, a Client Success Manager, and the leader of the social media

team took me under her wing and taught me everything I needed to know. She helped me get

settled in the office and adapt to their expectations. I was given a tour and was introduced to

everybody in the office. I spent the first week of my internship training and learning all the new

software the company uses. I got certified to use Sprout Social, which is a very neat software that

made managing social media much easier. Instead of logging in personally to every single

client’s multiple social media platforms, you can access it all from Sprout, create and schedule

out posts that post automatically whenever you set it for, see optimal times to send out posts

based on the day, see and respond to engagement on all platforms, see monthly engagement

reports and data, view and respond to comments and reviews, and much more. D3 also uses a

website called Slack to communicate and message the team and is more secure and efficient than

email. Another website I had to get accustomed to is called PM, where I was able to see all my

work that was assigned to me as well as the instructions, background information, and due dates

for each task. Overwhelmed is an understatement for how I felt the first week learning all these

new and complicated websites! Diving into the agency life was very exciting and shocking, and

their websites and modes of communication took me a while to pick up on until I got into the

routine of things.

What surprised me the most during my internship was how much I underestimated the

power of social media for business communication. I had no idea social media could be so
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complicated, but I also had no idea how truly important and powerful social media is for

businesses to communicate to their consumers in today’s digital age. Social media was suddenly

not just fun and games for me- clients want to see results, and for their engagement to go up, so

you can’t let them down, but you usually cannot predict how a post will do once you send it out.

Once I got settled in with the software, I started off responding to reviews for clients, like saying

a thank you towards positive reviews, and apologizing towards the bad reviews and sending

them to the client so they can see important feedback. After a few weeks in my internship, I got

settled into a daily routine. I would login to all the websites I needed for the day and talk with

my supervisor about the new tasks I needed to complete. Then I would usually start by engaging

with all the accounts that were given to me by responding to all new comments and direct

messages, answering questions, and interacting with posts I was tagged in. I had to get to know

each business account that given to me in case of commonly asked questions that I didn’t know

the answers to. The next thing I usually did was the most time-consuming, but the most fun,

which was working on various monthly social media calendars. A social media calendar involves

scheduling posts and captions (as many as the client asked for per week) for the entire next

month so the client can look at it and approve the posts. The calendars were usually for both

Facebook and Instagram and had to include photos of the business and their product,

highlighting specials they were featuring, holidays, and lots of local Ocean City events. Posts

and captions must cater to the “vibe” that the client wants, whether that be silly or trendy or

serious, and they cannot be repetitive. Over time, I started to pick up so much on how to best

increase engagement, and how much social media and the internet contributes to businesses

nowadays. Social media is used every day by most people across the world. Through my

internship, I came to realize that if companies neglect going digital, they are neglecting the most
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powerful communication tool they could harness and would risk losing lots of potential business

and attention.

During my time at D3, there are a few things that I believe I should have done differently.

One way that I disappointed myself was that I did not step out of my comfort zone enough. I

spent the entirety of my internship working on social media, but I wish that I asked for different

work to try as well. I had always felt interested in the website design work that I saw others at

D3 doing, and I also wanted to try blog writing and graphic design. I always considered it, but

felt too afraid to ask because I didn’t want to overwhelm the staff with having to spend time

training me on new skills or software. I still do wish that I advocated for myself more and asked

to try more of everything so I could expand my skillset and explore my interests and preferences

more. Another thing I wish I differently was to be more positive and energetic on the harder

days. Sometimes if I was having a hard week, I felt a lack of motivation and energy, so I wish

that I put in some more effort on those tough days, because on those tough days my work was

not always something I felt 100% proud of. Despite the ways I disappointed myself, I learned

many important lessons from my first time in a professional workplace that I will take with me in

my future endeavors.

Although I had a great experience in my internship, I am more wary about my career

decisions now. I went into this internship not sure what to expect, just hoping to get a variety of

experiences within the communication and marketing field. Something that I started to struggle

with during my internship is the thought of working an office job for years. During my time in

the office, I always enjoyed the tasks that I was doing, but I had a very hard time sitting in the

same spot all day and looking at a computer for 8 hours. To me, the daily routine in the office

was calm and not stressful which I liked, although completing tasks on a computer felt repetitive
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and made the time pass very slowly. I think that I am energized by hands-on and people-oriented

work, so when I sat at my desk for more than about 5 hours, I would feel some frustration from a

lack of stimulation. Over time, this experience improved a lot because of the connections I made

and me becoming more comfortable chatting with my coworkers. Still, I wonder often if social

media or marketing is a job that I should commit myself to in the long-term in the future. I have

a love-hate relationship with social media, because it is such a wildly effective, creative, and fun

tool to use, but I feel social media has gone too far in today’s age and I see too many people fully

addicted to social media, especially young people. Social media negatively impacts the self-

esteem and attention spans of tons of people and has the potential to become deceptive and not

respect privacy when it comes to advertising and business. Therefore I enjoyed my internship,

but I am not sure how much I want to be involved in social media in the future as a career,

because I have always felt so conflicted about it in the first place and have no idea how it will

evolve and change for the better or worse in the future. Communication and marketing are such

broad fields, so I feel a bit lost on what to pursue and feel like I haven’t found my passion yet. I

want to explore more hands-on and people-oriented professions where I can be a bit more active

make a difference in people’s lives, but I’m not sure where to start. If I do stick with these fields,

I will look for a job where I spend less time in front of a computer. Being a senior in college is a

very powerful position in your life where you can change your life and go down any path you

want, but it is also a difficult and stressful time in my life because of feeling so confused and

lost. Long story short, I can thank my internship for giving me a realistic glimpse into a

professional career and for allowing me to think farther into what I want to pursue and what truly

sparks my interest.
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My favorite aspects about my internship were both the people I met and the interesting

variety of clients I got to make content for. My coworkers at D3 truly made this experience

exceptional for me! Everybody I worked with was so patient, kind, funny, and welcoming- they

always included me and treated me like a part of the team. I specifically got to know Samantha,

Genevieve, Claire, Kat, and Ciara. What meant the most to me was that many of them reached

out to me and checked on me as soon as they heard I got in a bad car accident very early into my

internship. I am proud of myself for getting to know a lot of new coworkers that are not my age

and becoming very comfortable around them over time. I am a little more on the introverted side,

mostly in new places like jobs. I feel that I pushed myself out of my comfort zone in that way

and was able to blossom in the professional world more than I expected, and in doing so I was

able to learn how to best communicate to others in a business. These new connections I made

helped me feel comfortable asking more questions, brainstorming, and helped me be able to have

fun while doing my work. The hardest part of leaving my internship was leaving the new people

I met who became mentors to me, and a large part of my routine and life. Another thing I am

grateful for is the number of amazing clients I was able to do social media work for, especially

some well-known businesses I have been a fan of since I was younger. A few of these include:

Fisher’s Popcorn, Thrasher’s French Fries, Jolly Roger Amusement Parks, Ropewalk, Macky’s,

George’s Bev. Co (who makes Old Bay Vodka). My proudest moment in my internship was

when I found out that the “Chocolate Drizzle” promotional post that I designed for Fisher’s

Popcorn was being shared all over Facebook and was doing very well engagement-wise. It felt

very rewarding to know that I was doing something well and was on the right track with learning

how to make successful social media content, especially for a brand that I am a personal fan of!
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Overall, I’m so grateful for this new learning experience and would not trade the people that I

met or the things they taught me for the world.

A year ago, I would never have believed it if someone told me that I had a chance to

work in social media. I thought it was such a rare and far-fetched goal that only the luckiest of

people get to achieve as a career. Since I was young, I always envisioned myself doing

something creative, and I’m thrilled that the steps I took throughout my college career led me to

an internship at D3 where I was able to have my own creative input. Rather than being

micromanaging, D3 values big ideas and wants both clients and employees to share all their

ideas, which I loved. Whether I grow this career for life or choose to completely change my path,

I am so happy that I got this incredible experience in seeing the ins and outs of a marketing

agency and professional content creation. I got to see how social media actively changes in

businesses, and how an agency like D3 keeps up with changes in this fast-paced industry: for

example, I saw the first incorporation of TikTok in D3’s marketing efforts, and more clients

wanting to jump on the same boat. This fall, I gained experience working with several new

websites like Slack, PM, Canva, and got certifications for Sprout Social and Hubspot. This

internship provided me with many experiences that helped me grow as a creator and writer, as

well as providing me with essential communication skills to use in the world of business and

digital marketing. I feel more equipped than most of my peers to step foot into the professional

world because of all the new things I got to learn firsthand. Working in an agency is a unique and

fast-paced environment that helps so many clients with many different needs, and I am happy to

leave with the things D3 taught me and a skill set that will help me achieve new opportunities in

the future.