My Summer as a Taykey Intern

This summer, Taykey was lucky to have Kate Witteman join us as an Intern.  Kate worked on a variety of projects, from planning company events to researching infographics and marketing materials.  She was kind enough to write a recap of her summer experience:

Walking into Taykey’s Flatiron office for my first day on the job was a little daunting.  With no previous experience at a start-up or in advertising, the only thing I could have done to prepare was read Taykey’s website closely and cross my fingers—both of which I did. 

The first surprise when the door opened: a room with 11 people in it.  When I had interviewed at the same office two months before, there were half as many employees.  Welcome to the world of a fast-growing start-up.  During the course of my 8-week internship, Taykey opened an office in Chicago and began the process of opening one in L.A. 

I took the first few days at the office to get acquainted with Taykey’s platform. I was inundated with terminology used in the world of online advertising and integral to Taykey’s business.  RFP, skyscraper, CPL, API, leaderboard, topical advertising, stemming, GDN, and many others were being used in the office all around me.  With the help of Taykey’s CTO who happened to be visiting from the company’s Tel Aviv office, I was able to take a crash course in how Taykey’s technology works.  The intern-dumbed-down version goes something like this: Taykey is able to detect emerging topics using information from more than 50,000 online sources like Twitter and Facebook.  It breaks down this information into figures on volume, sentiment, age, and gender using many complex algorithms.   

The plan for my internship had a few main components.  I was to help with recruiting potential hires on LinkedIn, manage Taykey’s social media pages, plan team-building events, and assist in the preparation for a large industry party Taykey will host this fall.  

However, the highlight of my internship was interacting with our technology in order to do research for infographics that Taykey sends to trade publications.  These graphics have been published in All Things D, TechCrunch, Forbes, and others.  It was through the research I did for these projects that I discovered how valuable—and vital—Taykey’s technology is for successful online advertising.  Finding related keywords to social topics can increase the scope of a campaign and display it to new audiences in the most unlikely places.  Taykey’s business of increasing the scope of campaigns and improving their agility is strongly backed by this innovative technology that I, a relatively non-tech-savvy user, could use with ease.     

Working at Taykey was an invaluable experience.  So many important developments happened in the short time I was there.  We opened a new office, Facebook (one of the three platforms Taykey works with) had it’s IPO, and we completely revamped the website (check it out, it’s awesome:www.taykey.com).  The most important lesson I learned at Taykey is that everything truly runs in real-time.  In this digital age, internet trends cannot be ignored.  As our 26-year-old boy wonder CEO (Hi, Amit!) wrote, “It’s about time that digital marketers learn how to be more real.  Well, more real-time.”