Social Media
I started my social media path at Alpha Media Group, inheriting 9 pages for three brands across multiple platforms. Probably my greatest achievement there was taking a Facebook page with 3400 followers and growing it to amazing new heights. Today, the page now boasts 2.5 million followers. I also encouraged regular user-generated content and regularly pushed traffic to our website—300,000 more pageviews in a single day. I left Alpha Media Group to pursue creating original content at The Smoking Jacket, where the posts I created regularly got hundreds of thousands of views and were immensely popular on socials as well as content aggregators Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon.
I later went on to become the Design Director of the largest law magazine in the world, the American Bar Association Journal. There, I started their LinkedIn and Instagram pages. LinkedIn is now their number one organic traffic driver and their Instagram feed provides new angles of content which is later developed for use on their website.
I moved from there to become the Senior Director of Creative Services at Nashville’s oldest (and largest) nonprofit, where I was once again in charge of all of the social media channels.
Towards the end of the pandemic, I became a Meta microinfluencer. Making viral reels for my own Instagram and Facebook pages, I achieved my most viral reels to date with 89,000 views on a single reel on Facebook and 28,000 on Instagram. This became the perfect outlet for creative expression, and I took the success and skills from those experiences and applied them in my nonprofit work as well.
Regularly producing content, I became known for my editing prowess and storytelling ability in the short format of one minute and 30 seconds. Due to usage rights for the background music, I’m unable to share my most popular work. Below are a few examples I’m actually able to share.
Viral Reels
Wednesday Addams, Lisa Loring Tribute
We lost so many loved ones during and immediately after the pandemic. This included a spate of celebrities which constituted the bulk of many people’s childhood memories. In an effort to bring us all together in a time when we really couldn’t be around many other people, I began creating tribute reels of recently deceased celebrities to showcase their careers and cultural significance. In fact, my most viral reel to date (with 89,000 views) is a tribute reel to Lisa Marie Presley.
This particular tribute reel is dedicated to the memory of the original Wednesday Addams from the “Addams Family” TV show, Lisa Loring. She left us right after the immense popularity of “Wednesday,” the streaming TV show on Netflix featuring Jenn Ortega as Wednesday, which renewed interest in the original show. Here, I drew an additional connection by featuring both Wednesdays performing the dance craze called “The Droop.”
Dolly Parton and the Nashville Scene
After moving back from Chicago, I re-entered the Nashville Art Scene, starting in a local coffee shop and progressing to an avant-garde gallery.
With my newfound popularity from the tribute reels, I realized I could apply the same tools for shameless self promotion. I then began creating new reels encouraging people to come out to these events as well as showcase celebrity accomplishments when it coincided with my new portraiture.
These, too, went quasi-viral, which enabled me to look beyond the doldrums of celebrity deaths and celebrate life itself.
Nonprofit Short-Form Videos
As Senior Director of Creative Services for Nashville’s oldest nonprofit, I took what I’d learned as a Meta micro influencer to create compelling content for Martha O’Bryan Center which was “mission-driven.” Soon after I began posting, several of the students on all of our campuses around East Nashville would speak in hushed whispers about the cool videos that “picture man” was making and they became eager to participate, which was very rewarding. As an added bonus, my very first reel for Martha O’Bryan immediately went viral, which was great because I had asked a major donor and partner to collaborate on it while I was still onsite during our event together. They were very excited about our partnership after that and told me so several times that day before I left. Unfortunately, I used the song “Highway to the Danger Zone” from the movie Top Gun, so usage rights won’t allow me to share it here. So, I’m providing other examples of my editing chops with different subject matter for you to view instead.
Podcast Short-Form Videos
After successfully producing short-form videos as a micro-influencer and then as Senior Director of Creative Services, I started a podcast, where I produced, cohosted and edited the episodes and the short-form videos to promote it.