Behind the scene

What do we think of first when someone mentions Minnesota? Some would say home of wheat products or home of the famous Minnesota Twins, but I think a lot of people would agree with me when I say that the Mall of America is the first thing that comes to mind. The mall is amazingly huge and it’s known for being one of the largest retail and entertainment centers in the world. One person who currently works for them now and is partially responsible for all the media attention and publicity that the Mall of America gets is Erica Dao.

Erica Dao is the mall’s media relations specialist; she is responsible for more than over 400 events each year. Her main goal is to drive traffic through the mall; targeting mainly cities from around the Midwest such as Madison and Chicago. Erica’s job as she describes it is “98% preparation and 2% execution”. Her job consists of her moving around all day, checking her black berry for emails, pulling/borrowing items from retailers, reaching out to sources, pulling information, and most importantly feeding stories to the public. She relies heavily on local magazines, newspapers, and news stations to report on her stories. Some of her biggest struggles are staying on top of everything and balancing everything such as pressure and her personal life. At the end of the day though she loves her job and unlike most hard workers she has a pretty balanced personal life as well. Lucky for her she’s blessed with working a normal 9-5 shift and occasionally some over time during the weekends.

On August 13, 2010, me and four other lucky students got the privileged to actually meet Erica Dao in person. In our small group she described how she landed her job as a media relations specialist. She started off by saying that she is indeed from Minnesota herself and she actually graduated at St. Thomas. Her degree was in broadcast journalism, where she had high dreams of doing red carpet journalism. However, after years of moving out of state and working with a news team she decided news was not her passion. She had heard about an opening at the Mall of America, the position was called public relations coordinator. She crossed her fingers and later got the news that she had got the position. Later on during her career she got promoted to her position now as a media relations specialist.
Her easy going story definitely gave me a lot of hope for a successful turnout after college. It was a pleasure to meet her and everything she does is truly fascinating to me.