“Thursday. Just remember third day. Monday, one day. Tuesday, two day. Wednesday, Wait? What day? THURSDAY!”-Joey Tribbiani! A great way to remember that Thursday is what day? The Third Day!!

Do you know what eCommerce is? It’s just electronic-commerce shortened like electronic mail. So guess what it is now? [pause] Yes! It is the buying of selling of products/services through the internet. If you didn’t get it right you fail the test, and I order you to buy me lunch someday in the future. So Admerasia wants to get in on this eCommerce thing. Yeah at first, I was wondering why? But here are a couple of reasons:

1. Try something new and have fun doing so.
2. Make extra money and possibly profit from it.
3. If we can do it ourselves it’s possible we can do it for a potential client in the future.

In the upcoming months we hope to start stocking up on certain items that we can start selling to people through our website, therefore creating more internet traffic. New product ideas are sprouting up all around the company, to help spread the Admerasia brand. The online store will contain a random amount of items, from prepaid credit cards to custom built flash drives.

Now the company wants me to document this process, and create some sort of movie by the end of it. So this blog will start to host videos as well now!!! Exciting, isn’t it? I’ve got a tiny bit of experience making using iMovie. Here is one of my past works, that to be completely honest was a total mess:

Whatever, don’t judge me. I promise my video documentary will be much better than that. Kwan OUT!

Yes, my title does rhyme and does refer to me. At a football pep rally last autumn, I was introduced as The Asian Sensation, mainly because they really couldn’t think of anything better.

Ya know there are loads of Asians in America nowadays. On the first of this month, statistics were released that state the Asian American population increased by 434,000 to become 5% of the nation’s entire population, and are now totalling 15.2 million! Exciting, right? That may be the first time I’ve given actual percentages and statistics (US Census). “Oh, here’s a fun fact: You made out with your sister, man!!” Haha!! Please appreciate the Eurotrip quote, it’s the funniest part of the entire blog entry. The actual fact I wanted to present is that in 2005, the average income per household is highest in Asian households than in any other racial group. Okay why the heck am I throwing out this data? Well for one, it helps my blog stay a little more on track since I tend to just rant for long periods of time… But not this time!! The point is, those millions of people are who Admerasia targets at this time and that high average income is what we want to get them to use (for our clients).

Actually at this time, Admerasia is trying to move more multiculturally in attempt to expand business. They’re now spreading, mainly to the Eastern European areas, but are really willing to try any sort of new language and style, which is pretty cool.

I’d like to take a moment to mention some Asian sports players. It’s always cool to hear about successful Asian players in “non-asian” sports. Hideki Matsui, Ichiro Suzuki and many others have dominated American Baseball, while Yao Ming and a couple of others have made an impact in the NBA. Ji-Sung Park starts for Manchester United. I have yet to really hear of a truly Asian NFL player, but like the other sports, with a little bit of time and training I’m sure we’ll hear of some really good players in that sport as well. Oh, there’s Kwan Ng of the Greenwich High School Varsity Football Team… Sound familiar? That’s ’cause that’s me, ya sillay goose!!

With no work Memorial Day Monday, we start off the week… Now.

I stayed at the Liberty Hotel in Boston this weekend, it’s an ex-prison now a gorgeous hotel, one heck of a staff who were simply awesome. While I do suggest it to anyone who wants to visit the city, keep in mind it does cost around $300 a night to stay there. Important things about Boston? As a 17 year-old; it’s important that Boston has a lot of colleges and universites. They’ve got Northeastern, Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Boston University, Tufts, and loads others. Lots of crazy drunk college kids running around that city.

And as a New Yorker; Boston sports teams suck. How dare you support teams like the Celtics(basketball), Bruins(hockey), Red Sox(baseball), Patriots(football), or Revolution(soccer), when there are New York teams like the Knicks, Rangers, Yankees, Jets, or Red Bull. So what, over the past 5 seasons they have really outplayed us, winning titles and championships and having better season records than us. Nevertheless New Yorkers don’t lose faith, we’ll be back in the top seat in no time, when our teams decide to stop losing.

I was looking for a place to eat lunch at today, and decided to use Google Maps to do so. They’ve got this great feature where you type in an address, click search nearby, and you can search the neighborhood for whatever you want, delis, movie theatres, adult themed restaurants, authentic medieval weapons stores, or anything you can think of (it’s New York City, there’s something for everyone!). I typed in Admerasia’s address, and up popped a little arrow on the map. One problem… They spelt Admerasia, Admeriasia!!!! Yeah four exclamation points is a bit much, but give me a break (of that Kit Kat Bar), life has gotten a little bit boring. I’ve been now tasked to fix these typos, and other errors of this nature; like sites that still say we’re at the old address on Lafayette Street. Stupid Yellow Pages, and that’s not a racist comment against asian paper… Get it?! [HA] Hey I’m not a comedian, just read the blog, enjoy the minimal information I deliver, and move on with your life.

Turns out I didn’t have to go into work today. I spent it, how normal people do when they don’t have to go to work slept in, ate food on a couch, watched some tv, waited for my friends to all get off work anyways, and achieved nothing productive. Have a good weekend ya rascals…

Now I’ve never really been into golf. A little slow and boring for my taste, but let’s be honest, I mainly dislike it because I really blatantly suck at it. I can hit it far and towards the hole fine, just when I get on that green, I “lose concentration” and putt on 5 to 10 more strokes onto my total… You can’t even get angry and flip out, or you’ll look like a complete tool. I was planning on talking about the time I saw someone get hit by a golf ball, or a joke about how quiet they request the crowd to be, or comment on the heat and length of a game, or even talk about how the execs of the agency like to play it so much, but I’ve decided to skip all of that and save you (the reader) from reading an excess amount of my awful writing.

Onto a more Admerasia related topic, in the following blod entry I will describe the office… Buckle up, it gets really intense… [Not!] This 6th floor office has got 2 conference rooms. One is maxed out at 5 or so people, while the other can hold probably around 25 people. Both are fully equipped with a table, chairs, a white board, an artistic looking clock, oh and one of those very cool Ghostbuster-esque tripod conference call machines. Both the rooms are quite busy, and have meetings in them most of the day. I’ve had the privilege of already attending large group meetings, small brainstorming sessions, meetings with clients and update discussions. Now I regret to say that some of those large group meetings, where people are encouraged to come up with ideas for certain plans, are just an absolute mess with little direction. They wind up just being a waste of time.

Then there’s the kitchen/hang out area. Yeah that’s where the cool staff members hang out. I have yet to use the refridgerator to keep my homemade lunch chilled, because I haven’t brought lunch, but I plan on doing so soon. There was a birthday party there for one of the guys from A Language Bank, I don’t really know him very well, hence why I haven’t mentioned his name or his age, but the cake was a solid pastry. Oh, and have I ever acknowledged that there is free soda in the office? I don’t really know why but there is free Sprite and Coca-Cola over there. I don’t know about the other employees but it saves me money everyday at lunch.

Now when you get off the elevator, to your left are those meeting rooms, and to your right is that break area. Directly in front of you is the secretary. (No not Pam Beasley, she’s a saleswoman now.) The rest of the office is the company, or companies I should say. Behind the secretary to the slight left is A Language Bank, while Admerasia primarily sits in the center and right side of the space. There’s the leadership team, the followers team, creative department, finance squad, extreme base-jumping team and etc.etc that are all spread out across the floor.

“IT’S A TRAP!” Sorry about that random outburst but, come on, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Admiral Ackbar, that Mon Calamari is a legend… And I leave you with that thought, may the force be with you! [and also with you]…

Welcome back. Today we’re going to start off with CMS… That was the acronym for Central Middle School which I attended years ago. Now it stands for Content Management System. Let me clear up why were talking about this; so the Admerasia web site kind of is too awesome for its own good. Now the reason behind it, is that the new site only uses flash. Which is this new complicated thing which Google doesn’t seem to really care about. Odd right? I’d think that Google would be on top of that sort of thing. Anyways, to make it searchable; Admerasia is going to add in some older “html” type pages that those bros@Google actually like.

So these new old pages are going to contain sections such as; NEWS, BLOG, CAMPAIGNS, and other sorts of things. Now Admerasia doesn’t want to hire more people to update this website, or even designate a single person to be in charge of certain parts. We’ve decided that a rotation policy is going to be introduced. Ya know, like this week Jill will be in charge of updating the news, and Jack can write the blog. Next week Bonnie can write the blog, and Clyde will update the news. So now the problem is maybe Adam & Eve understand how to do this but Bill and Hillary don’t!? We need a straightforward way for everyone to update parts of the site, so easy that a caveman can do it. (Don’t sue me Geico… Come on you’ve moved onto those not-very-good commercials about the little pile of money with googly eyes, can’t I have the cave men?).

So the CMS thing will simplify how to update things and change things on the site constantly. We can change pictures, movies, text, news, blogs, tires (not tires) quickly and efficiently without compromising the actual template or site. Imagine if we didn’t use a CMS, and someone trying to help with the updating accidentally deleted a couple of lines of script commands and didn’t realize it!! Then the site may not even show up anymore and you’d have to search through thousands of lines of content just to find the problem, or worse… it could be attacked by goblins. Okay, well it’d be tough to get attacked by goblins, but you’re thinking, “Hey! That’ll never happen to me.” Never say never… Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus taught me that. Don’t judge, you know you liked it too.

Okay, now you’re updated on this whole CMS situation. At this point we’re trying to pick one to use, and let’s face it, we’re going to go find the reliable, state-of-the-art, elementary, and most importantly free program, and that’s where WordPress, Drupal or Joomla comes in. So after we build basic new pages for the site, we can have them be updatable via one of these programs. High-five!! Actually click high-five and give me a high-five. (pause for the high-five) Okay thanks, I know you and I both enjoyed that. I’m off to the World Language Ceremony back at Greenwich High School, later gators!

So guess what?! [what?] On the train this morning I got a seat!! Yeah I know… You’re jealous, but hey, I got lucky what can I say. This woman got up to leave at the station after mine, so I slyly snuck right into her recently vacant seat. Oh it was comfortable, getting a little sleep while my iPod played some Vega4 softly in the background.

It was a pretty basic day, with lots of research. I figured out as much as I could about the company, its competitors, and the business, through the internet and whoever would answer my questions. The different thing about Admerasia, is that the structure of the company is very open. While there are only a few executives, everyone else has a say in just about everything. No one is limited to just their one area of expertise, which allows a diverse view on a lot of ventures.

I also joined in on some meetings that discussed the direction the company was heading in. So Admerasia traditionally stuck with, well, traditional methods of advertising. They had rarely ventured into the digital market except for the past year. The plan is to really stride onto the internet guns blazing. So the company is focusing on advertising itself so that not only does the brand name get publicity, but to also learn the ropes of marketing on the internet. So this project was followed by a new website, which is quite fancy if I may say so myself.

Hey I bet you, you haven’t got a clue what SEO is. Maybe you think it’s society of education officers, or sauf erreur ou omission (that’s French), or even survivability enhancement options. Alas… It is none of those. (I really wanted to use the word “alas”) Oh, wait I’ve got one more; southeastern Ohio. Yeah that was a good one wasn’t it?! Ohio rocks. We’ll argue about that another time. Back to SEO. So it actually stands for Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell it basically is trying to get your website to appear higher on search engines like Google or Yahoo, through the means of adding content, links, updating, reliability, relatability, traffic, keywords, advertisements, interconnectivity, and etc. I just explained a day’s worth of research in a single sentence.

So lots of brainstorming going on right now. Trying to raise the publicity of Admerasia, which is harder than it sounds. How do you come up with a way to effectively increase the brand successfully? I’m trying to figure out a plan, but it’s not going to well. Well it’s still early in my career here, so I’ve got time to come up with a strategy, until then I’ll settle with the small tasks. Later bros!

So I’m done with high school finally, now here I am early on a Monday morning, off the Metro North train from Connecticut, now in my new office (more of a cubicle).

You know what’s really difficult, sleeping while standing up. It’s quite a challenge, I’ve never had to do it in the past, but there were so many people on that 7:20 train out of Cos Cob, that I had to stand. Some of the other businessmen we’re sleeping just leaning against the walls. I figured if they could do it so could I… Well I can’t. Hey it’s harder than it seems. I was tired enough to doze off, but the second I got a little bit of sleep, I’d fall! Either my legs would buckle, or I’d literally tilt over. So the train ride was not fun, I’ll have to work on grabbing one of those valuable seats, that way I can catch some shut-eye.

Got off at Grand Central Terminal, which if anyone has been there at those rush hour points, is like a human bee-hive, nothing really like it around. I escaped unharmed and walked the almost 20 blocks to the Admerasia office, where I’d start my first day.

So this VP, Sidney Yee, is in charge of my internship. He’s pretty cool and to the point, took me to lunch at Monster Sushi, which is a sushi place (didn’t see that coming did ya?) decorated with monster figurines (simple right?). Delicious food by the way, I completely recommend it.

Okay so what is Admerasia?! I had no idea before I was given a briefing, by Sidney, about what goes on. Admerasia is the #1 Asian American Advertising Agency in the United States. What the hopscotch does that mean? Basically this agency, gets clients who want to sell stuff (from cars to hardware) to the asian community in America, and creates a campaign for that. So they’re targeting the 13 or so million asians, mainly in the three states of California, Texas and New York.

So I share an office with Dennis Clemente, I’ve got a window, a phone that isn’t hooked up, a computer, an empty desk complete with empty drawers, a basket that’s for paperwork but has none and a not too comfortable seat, but hey, I got more than I expected, I just can’t wait to actually get started on some work. Till next time!