Cover Letter

Ryan Labbe
51 Collamore Street
Milton, MA 02186
(617) 584-6517
rlabbe@mail.smcvt.edu
Ricardo Guillaume, Internship Coordinator
Governor-elect Charlie Baker Transition Office
Massachusetts State House
Boston, MA 02133
Dear Mr. Guillaume,
I'm applying for an internship at the Massachusetts State House, in the
Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, preferably in
either the Operational Services Division, or the Office of Technical
Assistance and Technology. I believe my skills could be useful in either
of these offices.
I am a good candidate for either of these positions. I am professional,
motivated, organized, and trustworthy. As a Business Administration
member with a concentration in Marketing, I have many other tools
that I can put to use at this job. I am confident in my Microsoft Office
skills, particularly in Excel. I am efficient in my work, and am very
eager to learn. I grew up in Massachusetts and have always been
interested in keeping our environment clean, by developing new ways
to reduce the spread of pollution.
I look forward to discussing my qualifications further. You can reach me
at my email, rlabbe@mail.smcvt.edu, or by phone, (617)-584-6517.
Thank you for your time.
Best,
Ryan Labbe

Resume

Ryan G. Labbe
Permanent address:
51 Collamore Street, Milton, MA 02186
(617) 584-6517
rlabbe@mail.smcvt.edu

Summary
Detail-oriented student seeking practical experience in a business setting that
will utilize my strong math skills. I am trustworthy, efficient, and eager to learn
about finance, marketing, and accounting practices.
Work Experience
Laborer, Hanson Furniture, Hanson, MA
June 2008 - January 2015
Refinishing tasks in busy furniture workshop
Delivery of antique furniture to business accounts after restoration
Welding Assistant, Labbe Welding Co., Milton, MA
June 2008 - January 2015
Installing decorative iron gates and railings

Activities Volunteer, Winter Valley Residences for the Elderly, Milton, MA

June 2008 - August 2014
Lead resident activities
Internal mail delivery
Light maintenance duties

Volunteer Intern, Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA),

Boston, MA
July 2015 - August 2015
Helped the OSD (Operational Services Division) devise new ways of
constructing databases to track agency green purchasing

Education
B.A., Business Administration
Saint Michael's College, Colchester, VT, Expected Dec 2016

Elevator Pitch
My name is Ryan Labbe. I'm currently a senior at Saint Michael's
College, studying Business Administration. One of my greatest
strengths is my proficiency in Microsoft Office, and I'm interested in
finding an entry-level sales job after I graduate.

Business Card

Ryan Labbe
Bachelor's Degree in B.A, Dec 2016
rlabbe@mail.smcvt.edu
(617)-584-6517

Work Philosophy Statement

When I graduate, I would like to work at the Statehouse, in
Boston, MA. I interned there last summer, and I really enjoyed it. When
I was there, I worked with the Operational Services Division to develop
a survey that would help reduce the use of chemicals in the production

of furniture. I was expected to know how to use Microsoft Office, how to

make phone calls, and how to help sell a product. These are some skills
I hope to use wherever I work.
I plan on working in a big organization that has a lot of different
departments. I plan on working a normal, 40 - 50 hours a week. I hope
to work in Boston, MA. I plan to wear a suit to work every day. I haven't
really thought too much about what I want to earn, I just want to get
enough to live off of for now. Health and Dental insurance are some of
the benefits that are important to me. In order for my work to be
satisfying, I have to be working indoors, in an office. I've never been an
outdoor person, and I believe that I can work best in front of a
computer. I'm an introvert, so working by myself is probably best for
me.

Potential Career Paths, as a Business Major

1. Working at the Massachusetts Statehouse:
Last summer, I had an internship at the Massachusetts Statehouse,
located in Boston. I worked in the Operational Services Division, and I
helped them devise new ways to construct better databases to track
environmentally friendly, green purchasing. It was my first real job in
the business world, and I really enjoyed it. I could see myself doing
something like this in the future.
2. Office Manager:
An office manager is responsible for the ordering and maintaining of
business supplies and equipment, as well as managing the office
budget. I think that I am capable of doing well in this job. I'm confident
in my accounting skills, and I am able to multi-task, which are some of
the biggest requirements for this job.
3. Sales Representative:
A sales representative sells goods or services for their organization.
They contact customers, and are expected to know the answers to any
questions that customers ask about the product. I feel like I could be
good at this job, with a little practice. I'd just have to make sure I really
know the product that I'm trying to sell, before I try to sell it to
someone.

4. Financial Analyst:
A financial analyst helps their company make decisions about how to
maximize profits. I'm confident in my math skills, and I'm pretty good
with critical thinking, so this might also be a good job for me, when I
graduate.

Salesforce, LinkedIn Article #1

Salesforce is a global web-based software and cloud computing
company that is best known for its customer relationship management
product. I came across Salesforce during the job search that we did for
class. Under an entry-level sales job, the job offering said that
Salesforce would be a good skill to have. More than one of the jobs I
looked at required knowledge of Salesforce, so I decided to do some
research on it, to better prepare myself for life after graduation.
Salesforce is a CRM company based in San Francisco, California.
As of 2016, it is one of the most highly valued cloud computing
companies in America, with a market capitalization of $45 billion
dollars. It has helped over 150,000 customers grow their businesses. It
has even helped Coca Cola Enterprises more effectively run their

business, and they are a world-recognized leader in their field. It was

founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and
Frank Dominguez. Since they launched their first CRM system, their
products have run entirely on the cloud, which means that it is allonline, and it has no physical presence. This makes it appealable to
both small businesses and large businesses. This reinvention of CRM
helped to make Salesforce the number one CRM company in the world.
Salesforce is not just made up of one product. It is made up of six
different clouds, which are integrated together to give one easy access
to all of them. The six clouds are: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud,
Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Community Cloud, and the App
cloud. These clouds are a part of the Customer Success Platform. Each
cloud has its own important function that combines well with the other
clouds, giving a person the best overall experience that they can get
using CRM.
The Sales Cloud is the world's best CRM, as well as the world's
best automation solution. The Sales Cloud provides a fast and efficient
way to show all of the phases of a sale, from lead management to the
end of the sale. By using the Sales Cloud, a business is able to close
more deals, get better leads, and accelerate productivity. It provides
easy access to a complete view of your customers, activity history, and
key contacts. It allows you to view all of the popular social media
websites, straight from the Salesforce website itself. To get better

leads, it acquires the right sales data from Data.com, when you need
it. With this sales data, you can increase both sales, and marketing
activity. Accelerating productivity is easy, using the Salesforce1 mobile
app. The app allows you to log calls, find work opportunities, and check
your dashboards, from anywhere.
The Service Cloud is mainly used for service, support, and case
management. It is an online help desk and call center platform that
supports always on customer support from any device capable of
running Salesforce. With the Service Cloud, both your business and
your customers are able to quickly search you knowledge base for
relevant answers. This will help you and your customers get the
answers they are looking for, the way that they want to get them. With
the use of Live Agent, a live chat software, you can give your
customers personalized, real time help, giving them the help that they
need. The Service Cloud also has a Communities section, which allows
fellow customers to help each other. This gives them the tools to try to
fix things themselves, before they reach out for help from your
company.
The next cloud service is the Marketing Cloud. This cloud helps
you create personalized, cross-channel market campaigns across many
different platforms, including email, mobile, and social media. Through
Journey Builder, it allows you to connect interactions from any channel,
on a 1:1 basis, and combine customer data with behaviors, which leads

to being able to anticipate a customer's needs, and knowing how to

solve them. To further increase how you market your business through
email, the Marketing Cloud allows you to utilize drag and drop
audience segmentation tools, analyze comprehensive campaign
techniques, and monitor deliverability performances. To better your
use of mobile marketing, the Marketing Cloud engage in two-way
mobile communications that include pictures, videos, and audio with
MMS. It also allows you to track when a customer opens your app, and
how much time they spent interacting with it. Finally, it teaches you
how to best approach social media marketing. It can give you social
insights like demographics and intent, which you can then use to target
social posts. It also allows you to modify and analyze social data to
enhance the value of your own services.
The fourth cloud service that Salesforce offers as part of its
Customer Service Platform is the Analytics Cloud. The Analytics Cloud
uses business intelligence software to sift through data, getting
answers that you are searching for instantly. This cloud is set up so
that the average business user can gain insights without the use of an
analyst. Salesforce does this through the use of the Wave Analytics
app. The app was first designed for mobile use, but it was then quickly
refitted for other platforms. It can give your business's sales teams
instant answers that lead to better deals. Once an opportunity has
been found on the app, it makes it easy to work with that information.

The app allows you to assign a sales task, close a service case, and
also work with important stakeholders. The best part about Wave is
that it only takes a couple of weeks to get it set up, and it is easily
integrated with all of your existing Salesforce data.
The penultimate cloud offered in the Customer Service Platform
is the Community Cloud. The Community Cloud is a business process
platform that connects shareholders together. Some of these
shareholders include employees, customers, partners, suppliers, and
distributors. The cloud's main features include being able to accelerate
channel sales, further connecting with customers, and building your
own unique community. This cloud accelerates channel sales by
allowing you to connect directly with resellers, distributors, and
partners to increase sales. Building deeper customer relationships is
easy with direct customer interaction. You can enable customers to
give direct feedback to you, based on how they liked your product.
Building a community can start by first connecting with agencies or
vendors in your business ecosystem. It can then be further expanded
by getting in touch with students, alumni, and job applicants, to
increase your company's business success.
The final piece of this platform is the App Cloud. The App Cloud is
the best cloud application development platform out there today. It lets
you create your own apps very easily, and it doesn't take a long time
to build them. This app allows you to build, run, manage, and optimize

apps all in one place. Some of the main features of this cloud include
building customer experiences, building mobile apps, and connecting
and integrating with your back office. Some examples given to create
deeper customer relationships are to create apps that allow patients to
consult with their doctors, or an app that lets fellow sports fans
connect with each other. For building mobile apps, they give a couple
of ideas, including a field ops idea guide, an IT idea guide, and a retail
idea guide. Field ops apps make operations more productive and more
responsive. They can allow workers to take, manage, and fulfill orders,
as well as access info, and track deliveries. IT apps track progress, and
capture every stage of the development process, from start to finish.
Retail apps can help a business give their customers a more
personalized shopping experience, or giving your employees access to
a specific customer's information when that person enters the store.
Connecting and integrating data into the cloud is also very easy. Data
can be incorporated from legacy systems (SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft)
in real time Salesforce applications.
Overall, I think Salesforce is a valuable resource to learn. It is a
very expansive system, with many different parts to it, but that is what
makes it so useful. With the Customer Service Platform at your
disposal, your business can aspire to new heights, by developing new
apps, deepening customer service, market through many outlets

integrated into Salesforce, and many other features. Salesforce has a

thirty day free trial, and I highly recommend signing up for it.

References

http://www.salesforce.com/eu/crm/what-is-salesforce/

LinkedIn Article, #2
This paper is about social media, and how it relates to the growth
of businesses. We learned a lot about this in class and I did a
presentation on an aspect of it, but this paper provides an in-depth
example of how businesses are using the internet and social media to
attract more consumers, and become a more attractive company
overall.
In the article, Increasing the ROI of Social Media Marketing,
Kumar and Mirchandani discuss their seven-step approach to ensure a
successful social media campaign. These two authors, paired with two
others, Vikram Bhaskaran and Milap Shah, worked on the Hokey Pokey
project, which was a plan to increase an ice cream chain's popularity
through social media. Their seven-step plan is a successful method to

acquire and retain profitable customers, and it creates a buzz about

the company through social media.
Hokey Pokey's seven steps are as follows: (1) Monitor the
conversations; (2) Identify influential individuals; (3) Identify the
factors shared by influential individuals; (4) Locate the potential
influencers who have relevant interests; (5) Recruit those influencers;
(6) Incentivize the influencers to spread positive word of mouth; and
finally, (7) Reap the rewards. In the article, 20 Social Media Tips To
Rule in 2014, author Drew Hendricks suggests different business tips
that a company should take to achieve success in social media. I
believe that Hokey Pokey used some of these tips in their own social
media plan. For example, Hokey Pokey's first step, "monitor the
conversations," and Hendricks' ninth tip, "hire a social media
manager." Hendricks explains, "In an ideal world, you'll make room in
the budget to hire an experienced social media manager full-time.
They can work magic in a fraction of the time anyone else can
(Hendricks 2)." By hiring a social media manager, you have a person
that will only focus on social media. By having a social media manager,
it will be easier to monitor conversations, gain access to valuable
information, and find influential people to promote their business.
Another similarity that I found between the two was Hokey Pokey's
fourth step, "locating potential influencers who have interests relevant
to the campaign," and Hendricks' seventeenth tip, "make fans wants to

see your posts." The author declares, "This seemingly simple advice is
the toughest. What would you want to see as a fan or friend (Hendricks
3)?" This tip fits in well with Hokey Pokey's plan because the people
who can make relevant posts are the influencers that they want to
extend their company's reputation in the world of social media. One
more similarity that I found between the two was Hokey Pokey's sixth
step, "incentivizing the influencers," and Hendricks' sixth tip, "make
social media special." This tip is as follows: "Offer truly desirable things
like discounts and giveaways solely to people who follow you on social
media. They should be getting something out of being your fan or
liking your page (Hendricks 1)." This advice pairs up with Hokey
Pokey's sixth step, in giving prices to influencers, in return for the work
they do to make the company better known to the world.
In the article Measuring the Degree of Corporate Social Media
Use, authors Aichner and Jacob write about "the extent to which
companies are exploiting the potentialities of single or multiple social
media platforms (257)." They specifically state that there are several
different types of social media that businesses can exploit, including
blogs, business networks, collaborative works, enterprise social
networks, forums, micro blogs, photo sharing, product reviews, social
bookmarking, social gaming, social networks, video sharing, and
finally, virtual worlds. Hokey Pokey primarily used social networking
websites, like Facebook and Twitter, but they could have also use the

above types of social media to make their product known. Social

networks, video-sharing platforms, and business networks are the most
relevant forms of social media for businesses to use. The authors say
that "When using social media on a corporate level, it is not only
important to set objectives, but also to measure its success by using
relevant metrics (Aichner & Jacob 261)." Some types of business
relevant metrics include visits, tags, page views, members,
impressions, incoming links, and average length of time visitors spent
on the website.
Hokey Pokey created their own metrics. They had three: The
Customer Influence effect, The Stickiness Index, and the Customer
Influence Value. The Customer Influence effect measures "the influence
a user has on other users in the network in regard to conversations
relevant to ice cream (Kumar & Mirchandani 58)." To develop this
metric, they used Charles Hubbell's classic network centrality theory,
which "measures the influence of a user as a function of the influence
of the people that he or she is connected with, plus a factor
attributable to his or her own decision to spread the message (Kumar &
Mirchandani 58)." The Stickiness Index was used to find people who
were influential on social networks, and were interested in ice cream.
The authors state, "To calculate the Stickiness Index, we matched an
influential individual to a particular category of words, based on the
association of the words with each other and other words used by all

users globally (Kumar & Mirchandani 58)." As for the results, they were
looking for two major pieces of information. One was the amount of
social media users in the region who discussed ice cream, and the
second one was the other topics that these individuals talked about
(Kumar & Mirchandani 58). These measurements helped them further
narrow down the people that they wanted to use for their social media
project. The last metric that Hokey Pokey used was the Customer
Influence Value. This metric was used to measure the monetary gain,
or loss, created by running this social media campaign. The authors'
state
To compute the CIV of users in this network, we combine the
value that each

individual influencer brings to the company through

his or her own

purchases - known as customer lifetime value (CLV) -

with the proportion of

the CLV of each of his or her influences that is

attributable to the individual's

influence. (Kumar & Mirchandani

58)
By calculating the CIV, Hokey Pokey was able to put a numeric score
to each of the influencers that they found. By using all three of these
metrics, they were able to find the perfect people for the job that they
were looking to fill.
As stated previously, Hokey Pokey primarily used Facebook and
Twitter as their social media outlets. In the article, Media brands in
Social Network Sites: Problems German Media Companies have Faced

and Lessons they have Learned, authors Rohn and Baumann agree
that Facebook and Twitter are the most-used types of social media
platforms, and that they are great ways for companies to market their
products. The authors state, "Through the user' comments on their
postings, companies could engage in dialogue with their audiences and
learn about their opinions regarding content and topics (Rohn &
Baumann 73)." This quote shows that social media sites are very good
forms of communication between businesses and customers.
I agree with Hokey Pokey's approach to social media. I think they
took the correct steps to achieve success, and I believe they did their
research on creating their seven-step plan. In all of the other articles I
found pertaining to business in social media, I found some aspects of
Hokey Pokey's plan. I'm happy that it worked out for them in the end.
Hokey Pokey's social media plan is an example of how businesses are
adapting to the rise of social media, and using it to their advantage.

Works Cited
1. Aichner, Thomas, and Frank Jacob. "Measuring The Degree Of
Corporate Social Media Use." International Journal Of Market Research
57.2 (2015): 257-275. Business Source Complete. Web. 27 May 2015.
Link:
http://content.ebscohost.com.library.smcvt.edu/ContentServer.asp?
T=P&P=AN&K=101880542&S=R&D=bth&EbscoContent=dGJyMNXb4k
SeqLU4y9f3OLCmr02ep7ZSsKm4SLWWxWXS&ContentCustomer=dGJy
MPGvrkmuq65RuePfgeyx43zx

2. Hendricks, Drew. "20 Social Media Tips To Rule In 2014."

www.forbes.com,
14 May 2014. Web. 27 May 2015
Link:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhendricks/2014/05/14/20-socialmedia-tips-to-rule-in-2014/
3. Rohn, Ulrike, and Sabine Bauumann. "Media Brands In Social
Network Sites: Problems German Media Companies Have Faced And
Lessons They Have Learned." Journal Of Brand Strategy 4.1 (2015): 7082. Business Source Complete. Web. 27 May 2015.
Link:
http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.library.smcvt.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?
sid=16c963b3-df60-43a9-b7e7-e45abc151e2d
%40sessionmgr114&vid=7&hid=117