Pros
- Paid internships. You learn a lot, get paid a decent hourly amount for a recent grad, and they don't waste your time getting coffee and doing administrative stuff. They really want valuable team members so they will do their best to train you and build you up. You learn a lot very fast and they give you a lot of responsibility early on. If you work hard, you will get promoted. AWESOME for anyone who wants a career in online marketing. - Office Culture. Casual dress, happy hours, paid company lunches, birthday celebrations, and office outings to the park for baseball games, bowling and more. Really social environment but nobody pressures you to be social if you don't want to be. :-) - Major resume booster. Because you learn so much, you can immediately add skills to your resume (google analytics, photoshop, adwords, roi analysis, client relations, and most of all, email marketing). -Awesome coworkers. Most are recent grads and we all had a lot in common. I still keep in touch. I miss working with people my age! -Really good work/life balance. You can adjust hours for rush hour commutes (crucial for this area) and I was never denied a vacation day. -Whereoware is THE DC knowledge base for Silverpop email marketing. I feel confident in what I do now because I worked at whereoware. From conferences and other networking events, I have never met more silverpop experts in one place than at Whereoware. The top mangers there really know their stuff and you will learn a lot from them.
Cons
-As you become more experienced, Whereoware fails to compete with other companies who will pay you more for the same skillset. -It's an agency so it's SUPER sales focused. It's all about getting new work now and worrying about how it's going to get done later. As a marketing manager, you will be forced to deal with high client expectations, and very vague direction from upper management. There's a lot of pressure. I'll never forget the time I was handed a cocktail napkin with a data schema for a new client I was getting. It was written over drinks after the sale had been completed. I was expected to construct, design and execute a massive leads campaign based on a drawing on a cocktail napkin. Roughly 8 months later, when there was an issue with said campaign, my boss asked me if I still had the cocktail napkin to refer back to. True story :-) -Little to no supervision and direction. This is a pro or con depending on how you work. For me, it was a con. It's waaay too easy to go under the radar until you eff up royally on something big and important. Nobody will give you help unless you ask for it. Loudly. And repeatedly. You own that account and everything that goes wrong with it the second they assign it to you. You have to train yourself on each new account you get. 22 year olds fresh out of college manage multiple mid level accounts. If something goes wrong, you WILL be held accountable, regardless of age or experience.