On October 22, the third day of Mass Comm Week, guest speaker Stacie Chan appeared to discuss her story on how she became the Community Manager for Google News. After graduating from Stanford with a master’s degree in journalism, Stacie was hired onto a start-up business named Patch. Stacie described this job experience as the greatest opportunity to do everything. Having worked up to 80 hours per week, her mind was constantly on her job doing various tasks, one of which was keeping updated on social media. After working tirelessly on what she considered her very own project, she saw it was coming to an end so she stepped away and applied for a position at Google. After going through seven rigorous stages of the application, she was ultimately hired.
So what does a Community Manager for Google News do? Well, her ultimate goal is to create support between Google News and the publishers who are trying to be or are already accepted into Google News. There are three main parts to this:
- Educate. She creates tools for publishers that answers any questions they might have. Instead of email customer support and waiting for responses, they can find the answers through her tools.
- Engage. Another responsibility Stacie has as a Community Manager is reviewing publishers applications. In order to create satisfactory customer service, she must be engaging with the publishers as well as her fellow colleagues.
- Operations. One of the greatest things about working at Google is that there is no one giving you commands to do every day. Stacie described the work atmosphere as the employees come up with creative ideas and operations that they want to see accomplished and be initiative.
In addition to describing her life at Google News, she also shared some great tips about networking. She confirmed that even successful people such as herself think that the phrase “networking” is intimidating and heavier than it should be. Simply put, good networking is just talking to people whose job you would want to have and pick their brains on what it is that they do. Just having a conversation with someone will leave a huge impression that could stick for months later. The topic of networking then led to the discussion of having professors who you are close to and who could possibly help land you a job in the future. “Find a ‘sponsor’, not a ‘mentor’,” Stacie explaining that a sponsor is someone who is willing to stick their neck out for you to get that job interview, not just giving you advice for the future. All in all, a major part of finding a job in the real world is about who you know and the relationships you have.
Hearing Stacie Chan speak was a great opportunity with very informative and useful information. It was a pleasure having her as a guest speaker during this year’s Mass Comm Week.