Hey there, and welcome to my story.
As an avid fan, user, cheerleader, and hypeman of Discord, I was thrilled to see an opening of the Social Media Specialist position to bring on a new member to help strengthen Discord’s social media game, fan-to-fan interaction, and overall company mission. Being a part of the Discord community, I’ve fallen in love with the platform and its goal: helping connect people all around the world and making it easier to talk with your friends. Being an original Discord HypeSquad Event Attendee & Event Coordinator, Discord Partner, and someone who’s the “friend” in the group responsible for making our Discord Servers look pretty – I’ve been able to see Discord grow and evolve as a company over the past 6 years.
Photos from our Discord HypeSquad Event activation, showcasing our mascot, Temoc, holding a Discord Shirt (one of many + stickers, pins, etc. that we gave out).
Yes to the right on the bottom picture that is me, I change my hairstyle often. 🙂
From serving as the Student Director of the Esports Department & Program at The University of Texas at Dallas, I have the skills and experience Discord is looking for: pick your favorites, as I’ll be able to apply them all towards this position; from creating and growing our social media channels from Day 1 of our program being launched in Fall 2018, developing our brand which powers our digital voice & presence, architecting our Discord Server, managing our community, student-athletes, and student-staff, managing program communications, handling partnership decks & marketing collateral, website development, analytics, overseeing our student creative student-staff, hiring, to as well as creating & overseeing initiatives such as the UT Dallas Content Creator Program, which allow students to get involved with our program, specifically encouraging students to seek their dream of content creating.
For this last semester, I started and currently lead our new university-wide virtual programming initiative, UT Dallas Minecraft, as well as led Game Glow (a fundraising initiative a part of North Texas Giving Day, featuring a live-streamed Among Us & Krunker Tournament and Casual Gaming). Public speaking? I absolutely love it! I even co-hosted our university’s block party, Game Glow, and spoke at a few panels such as In-Game Leaders Summit Winter 2020.
Discord is a platform and community that has grown so quickly in the past 6 years. Now becoming a “go-to” service for modern-day communication for friends, teenagers, students – anyone. Through the Discord social media channels, we’re able to share the stories of how that’s changed for everyone.
Photo from the photoshoot we put together to celebrate Discord’s 6th Birthday.
Esports, Gaming, Marketing, Social Media, and Community are what I live and breathe; in my free time, I help Community Manage the Collegiate Esports Leaders Discord Server, created a space for marketing students to help learn & grow together in the Student Marketing Discord Server, created a marketing plan proposal towards changing my university’s marketing efforts, started my university’s student life channel, program, founded the UT Dallas Discord Server – which was featured in Discord’s Blog, an Official Discord Partner, and hosts 50+ student organizations & groups helping manage our student life initiatives), as well as do photography & social media for numerous departments at UT Dallas.
In addition, I also launched our University’s Official TikTok Page for our Mascot (Temoc), and helped manage and create content – keeping up with modern-day trends, using analytics for improving posting times, and interacted with students/fans.
I started using Discord back in ~2015. As a kid in high school who was playing Minecraft with his friends every day of the week, we were used to using Skype and TeamSpeak (names that you literally do not hear anymore these days). Since I managed a few Minecraft Servers (even as a paid Community Manager), I would be the one who was responsible setting up the TeamSpeak, creating countless Skype group chats for our volunteer staff, friends, etc…. it was honestly painful. The security issues with Skype and the design of TeamSpeak definitely would not fly these days.
One of my friends said “Hey Eric, you should try out Discord – it’s this new platform and has a nice interface.” I gave it a go, and it did take me a while to get used to something so new and actually nice-looking. I remembered I even thought there was only the capacity of 10,000 users on Discord as I thought the #0000 tag on my name meant there could only be that many on the platform. Over the next few months, I fell in love with the platform and the reasoning behind it: it makes communicating with friends easier and safer. From that passion of loving Discord, I became involved with the community and would rep it as much as I could to my friends and strangers on the internet.
Flash forward to nearly 6 years later, I use Discord daily to connect with friends as well as create online communities to help people come together (university, esports, and more).
