Profile of a Business Professional: Joel De La Garza

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On any given day, Joel de la Garza is a busy man. He spends his time juggling his various business identities including website designer, recording technician, interactive/digital manager and entrepreneur, and musician. He is a model of a modern business professional in the digital world. And it all started with a website.

Building a Web Presence
De La Garza was playing with and managing his band Chloe’s Honey in Austin, Texas, when he decided that the band needed a web presence. Frustrated by the lack of decent website designers in the area, he decided to build his website. He started by learning how to build HTML pages and ended building an original Flash-based site — www.chloeshoney.com — which utilized early user-generated content devices such as forums and blogging, as well as streaming audio and video. He also became interested in digital audio recording. Knowing he wanted to further his exploration into the digital media industry, he enrolled in an MBA in Digital Media Management program at St. Edward’s University in Austin in 2005.

Learning the Ins and Outs of the Industry
The two-year, daytime MBA program challenged De La Garza to rise to a new level. Along with a rigorous curriculum that included 54 hours of graduate coursework, he also spent a seven-month internship with the management company C3 Presents. During the internship, he worked in the planning and execution of several digital media campaigns. One of the campaigns included a viral online marketing strategy for the Lollapalooza Festival’s cultural extension webisode series, Lolla Lives. De La Garza created a Vlog channel on YouTube for the series of Webisodes that launched the campaign. The series now boasts over 500,000 views, over 35,000 channel views, and 463 subscribers to the channel. The webisode series went on to win a Goldie Award. You can view the series at www.youtube.com/lollalives.

De La Garza also participated in the launch of the “Live at…” digital download series for both the Lollapalooza Festival and the Austin City Limits Music Festival performances. The series capitalizes on post-festival interest by offering a series of performances from the festivals to serve as both a digital media concert document and a post-festival souvenir for attendees and fans of the artists. He also led a group of MBA students in creating an industry and market analysis and a sales and marketing plan for eSession.com

The MBA program gave De La Garza a taste of the business world with seminars on résumé writing and etiquette dinners to networking opportunities. Internships and Capstone consultancies also provided the opportunity to explore the industries he was interested in and a chance to get a foot in the door along with making meaningful contributions to various companies.

“The MBA degree, especially the Digital Media MBA, has given my educational background an air of substance that allows me to pursue employment opportunities in industries and specific fields that appeal most to me,” he says.

Welcome to the Digital World
Since graduating in 2007, De La Garza has kept busy by working on contract flash design sites in the private sector. He’s also developing a new digital media music company that will serve as a digital umbrella for artists handling everything from digital audio production, digital distribution, digital/interactive/online marketing, social networking, and Web 2.0 strategies.

De La Garza has also been in the studio lately recording a new musical project, the krypteia collective, which will makes its debut during the 2008 South by Southwest Music Festival. And he’s applying for a digital media position at a world-wide communications company in Austin.

“Wherever I ended up landing, I know I have the skills and knowledge to succeed,” he says. “It’s a whole new business world out there, and I’m ready to find my place.”