If you've been to our site, you may have spoken to someone on the team via our IM tool. I guess through the late 90s and even early 00s so many people have had negative e-commerce IM experiences with robots, that the first question is "are you a real person?" Happily, I can respond that if you speak to someone on our site, you'll always be speaking to a real person. I'm personally on IM several hours a day, and I really enjoy it. I learn a ton from speaking with first-time users of our site, and returning customers and I think it's a great way to develop relationships with people. Everyone on the team spends time on IM, it's important that everyone thinks about what questions and needs our customers have, and for that always to be on our minds. So yes, you are talking to real people, not just there to help, also their to listen and learn. 

 You can see that when someone starts an IM, someone on our team gets a IM in their gchat and away we go. 

We should state that we didn't build our IM client internally. It's a product of the awesome start-up team at Snap a Bug and we're really thankful they built it so we didn't have to as we probably have enough requests to keep us busy for a while ;)

The thing we do know with internships is that they've either been crazily successful for us or been complete flops. I'll give the example where it's been completely awesome. Our graphic designer, Alec. He started as an intern last summer. He had just graduated and was in this office gig which he absolutely hated. He's a bit of a free spirit. He moonlighted for us, got caught up in the vision and now he's the master of all UI on www.blank-label.com. Our Lead Artist. He's got equity in the company and is currently in Shanghai working with Danny, our Lead Evangelist, and I over the summer. 

In the cases it hasn't worked, it's because what the person ends up doing is fairly different to what we thought they'd be doing at the start. And a lot of people can't handle this. When Alec first came on board, he thought he'd purely been working in AI and PSD (Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop), he didn't think he'd be learning JavaScript, he didn't think he'd be project managing free-lance coders, he definitely didn't expect to be working out of Shanghai. It takes a certain type of person to understand that start-ups move quickly, they pivot, and you need to roll with the punches. 

 Not quite the view that Alec, Danny and I wake up to every morning but you get the idea. Image by Ya Ya

So who is our Community Outreach Intern. At the core, there is Blogosphere and Social Media. That's pretty much all we know. Everything else is a detail and will be figured out along the way. As the title suggests, it's Outreach, so we're looking to get reach to the community we care about, the New Male (more on that in a later post) and engage with them through the Blogosphere and Social Media. You'll probably get some nice tips from Danny, our buzz-generating rock star who got us in New York Times, MSNBC, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, The Next Web all whilst still at school full-time (he's now with us full-time). 

We also know we're looking for a Community Ambassador full-time to the core team in the fall. We don't do trials without the hope of successes and we don't let awesome people get away. If you've been following us for a while or you've spent quite a bit of time on the site, and you get the vision and you like the way we've been progressing, shoot us an email at learn@blank-label.com with i) what you're working on right now, why you'd make the switch to us, ii) your favorite e-commerce experience, iii) the last book you read and the most recent movie you've seen, iv) your blog or twitter handle.

Enjoy!