I’m Kate Rosiek, and I’m one of the new Digital Marketing Interns here at Red Shark Digital. I’ll be graduating from ECU in May with a B.S.B.A. in Marketing. I grew up in a tiny town in eastern Kentucky called Paintsville. It had a population of about 2,000 people. I moved to Greenville a little over ten years ago when my Mom got a job at Pitt County Memorial Hospital. I love Greenville, and I think it’s an awesome place to live.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I graduated from High School. When I started at ECU, I was an art major, but I realized that I liked art, but I didn’t want to study art. I took a few years off from school to work and figure out what major I should choose. I was fortunate with the jobs I had, I’ve always worked in places that were related to my interests. I worked at a movie theatre, a video game store, and after that, I worked at a local game and comic book store called Blue Ox Games. Working at Blue Ox helped me realize how passionate I was about marketing.

I initially began at Blue Ox as a sales associate, but I saw how much we could benefit from more extensive marketing management and took on those responsibilities.  I started expanding our social media sites and setting up newsletters. Two years later, our social media pages and marketing campaigns had grown so much that I was working on them full time. I was, and am, proud of the work that I did in my first few years at Blue Ox, but I knew I could do better if I knew more about marketing. It was then that I decided to go back to school and get a degree in marketing.

Going to ECU has been wonderful. I’m glad that I took some time off to get real-world knowledge in marketing before I studied it. The things I learned in class were so much more meaningful because I could relate it back to real-world experience. The things I learned about marketing were invaluable, but my favorite part was the new ideas I could try out at Blue Ox. It was in my first semester at ECU that I got the idea to create a customer loyalty program. It took me months to design, and it was hard work. When the program launched, it increased our sales by about 25% and won an award in Game Trade Magazine.

I’ve learned a great deal about customer relationships and retail marketing in the last few years. Digital marketing is my passion though, so I wanted to get the same first-hand experience in digital marketing that I got at Blue Ox. A little over a year ago, I started live streaming on Twitch.tv and managing my own online community. It’s been incredibly time consuming and even more rewarding. I’ve learned so much about digital marketing, social media management, and user interaction.

I’m proud of the things that I’ve accomplished with live streaming, but I always have a desire to learn more. My desire to learn more is what brought me to Red Shark Digital. I want real-world-experience and to challenge myself and see what I can offer to the industry.  I’m excited to learn about digital marketing and to put my knowledge and experience to work.