Marny Smith

Bio:

Marny is the Community Manager for NY Creative Interns, the largest Meetup group for interns and recent grads in NYC. NY Creative Interns has organized more than 20 events for 1,250+ attendees and speakers have included professionals from Condé Nast, Etsy, Bravo TV, Mediabistro, Tumblr, and Google, to name a few. Through her work with NY Creative Interns Marny hopes to provide young people with the tools they need to transition into the “real world” and get the internship or job of their dreams.

Marny also works full-time as the Customer Support Manager for ChallengePost, a privately funded start-up that powers challenges to drive new ideas and foster participation around compelling goals. ChallengePost is probably most well-known for running the NYC BigApps competition and clients include First Lady Michelle Obama and the USDA, the City of New York, Thomson Reuters, Samsung, and more. 

Born, raised, and rooted in New York City, Marny attended The Bronx High School of Science and went on to get her B.A. from The New School. Prior to her work with ChallengePost and NY Creative Interns, Marny worked as casting assistant on several feature films including World Trade Center (dir. Oliver Stone) and Ché (dir. Steven Soderbergh) and also worked as the Publicity Manager for book publisher Ryland, Peters & Small. Marny is also proud to have be one of the organizers of Columbia’s Social Media Weekend. A few of Marny’s many loves include: Kraft singles, Peter Dinklage, and LinkedIn.

• Title: Community Manager for NY Creative Interns, Customer Support Manager for ChallengePost
• Age: 28
• Location: West Village
• Contact: @marnysmith, marnysmith.com

In your bio on the NY Creative Interns website you say, “Since entering the workforce I have found that the importance of networking, building relationships and developing industry contacts cannot be underestimated when you are looking to build a successful career." Do you have any tips for someone trying to work on networking and building relationships?

Write a sincere email to someone you admire and ask them to have coffee with you. (They will say yes.) Keep asking people to have coffee with you and ask the one you like best to be your mentor. Join Meetup.com. Go to meetups and introduce yourself to five people you don’t know, ten if you’re feeling ambitious. Keep your LinkedIn profile updated. Participate in Twitter chats. Here’s a crowdsourced list of every Twitter chat out there: http://bit.ly/massivetwitterchatlist Start Blogging. If you don’t want to blog, at least create an About.me page or a Flavors.me page. Always have business cards on hand. If you don’t have a job, create your own business card and include your name, email address, phone number, and website. Be findable: put your email address in your Twitter bio, your LinkedIn page, and on your website. Most of all, be kind and be genuine. Keep in mind that networking is about being authentic, building trust and relationships, and seeing how you can help others.

You were born, raised, and went to school here in NYC. Thoughts on Jeremy Lin?

I think it’s an amazing story, since he’s one of very few Asian-Americans or Ivy Leaguers to play in the NBA at this level. The outpouring of support from fans has been inspiring, and serves as a reminder that excellence should always be rewarded, regardless of race or background. I hope that many people will see him as a role model and that his example will help to bring more diversity into American sports.

What are some of the challenges that you face at your position working for ChallengePost?  

I’m the Customer Support Manager for ChallengePost and I’m proud to say that our business and community are growing rapidly. The current challenge I’m facing is how we can scale while maintaining a high level of customer support. We really value our users and we try to respond to every query we get within 24 hours. That includes feedback, questions, bug reports, feature requests, and more. We don’t have millions of users like Twitter, Tumblr or Foursquare yet, but they’re showing that it is possible to provide good customer service at scale and we’re committed to doing the same.