When I was growing up in a suburb of Boston, I went to a traditional school where I was expected to graduate and go to an east coast college and get a classical education and get a job in law, medicine, or finance. My dad and his sister are both lawyers, his brother is an architect, and my other aunt is a banker. I was expected to follow in their footsteps. As the oldest of 5 children, I was expected to set the standard. I suffered through 7th to 12th grade learning Latin and Greek Mythology only to graduate and go to an east coast college where I then suffered through the core curriculum of biology, economics, anthropology, and calculus in a liberal arts college. Don’t get me wrong, it was all very interesting, but I did not understand what it had to do with anything that I wanted to do in my life. I did not know exactly what I wanted to do, but nothing I had encountered in school thus far, seemed remotely like something I would want to do for the rest of my life.
In 5th grade I had a teacher who asked us to do a project about something that interested us from a book that we read. For whatever reason, the only thing that interested me was recreating a scene from an advertising agency I had read about in a book. It was a scene with a young woman at her desk, creating a storyboard for a commercial that they were going to pitch to a client and her coworkers were standing around her desk discussing what to put on the storyboard. An advertising agency was the most exciting thing that I had ever read about or learned about in my short 10 years of life and that was what I chose to do as my project.
I tell you this story because social media is something that has changed a lot of people’s lives and businesses very quickly and mostly for the better in a short amount of time in recent years including mine, but social media has only changed the lives of the people who were willing and not afraid to show up.
What do I mean by showing up you ask? Well, I took the LSAT twice because I thought that was what my parents wanted me to do. I got terrible scores and that is the only reason I did not end up in law school. So at 26, I had to think of another plan. At the time, I lived in NYC in Soho and ended up working in fashion as a sales assistant for Emanuel Ungaro on 5th Avenue and 56th Street for a few short years before leaving NYC to move to LA to pursue something else in a warmer climate.
In LA, I found the world of start ups and started off working in business development. On the side, I sold vintage designer clothing and bags on Ebay and became a PowerSeller in the year 2000. In real life, I was working in start ups doing sales and marketing, digital marketing, and eventually social media marketing.
In 2007 I started a fashion blog and learned all about affiliate marketing and collaborations with brands because I was one of the early bloggers in the space and became popular very quickly and was invited by Conde Nast and other brands to NYC to sit in on product launches. When brands like Kate Spade came to LA in 2008, I was asked to put together dinners with other bloggers for product launches. By 2010, I started my own agency for social media marketing. In 2011 I was named a social media pioneer by EHow and 2012 my agency did a campaign for Guess and it was named one of the top Pinterest campaigns by Mashable. The campaign had gone viral in 2012.
My business grew and I was known in the industry as the digital marketer who helped “fix” start up brands to help them get their next round of financing when they had a brand that was not cohesive in its marketing messaging. GMs and CEOs who moved jobs, would ask me to come onboard when they took over and I have been hired 2 or 3 times by the same CEOs and GMs when they move companies.
This all happened because of social media and it is because I decided to embrace it and show up.
By 2009, Social Media became a place where personal and company brands could launch and it did not cost millions of dollars like it did in television, radio, magazine, or newspaper ads to take a product or company to market anymore. As of today, social media is still a relatively low cost platform where you could post about yourself or your brand and people would learn about it for little marketing investment.
The very first social media site platform started in 1997 and was sold for $125M with 3.5M users to a company called Youthstream Media. Within the next decade, social media platforms became a way for people to keep in touch with one another and an important place for people to post about what was happening in their lives daily.
2002 - Friendster and Linkedin
2003 - MySpace
2004 - Facebook
2006 - Twitter
2010 - Instagram
2011 - Snapchat
Instagram was purchased for $1 Billion Dollars by Facebook and has over 1 Billion users.
Facebook went public in 2012 and received a valuation of $104B dollars. Currently, Facebook has 2.3B users.
If you have not joined any social media platforms as of today, why haven’t you done it?
Reasons to Join Social Media:
Good way to connect with friends, family, colleagues, and more
A way to qualify yourself and your personal brand: portfolio, your resume
Creative outlet for fun, art photography, fashion, etc.
You can actually turn it into a business, and it's a great way to market your business
Stay in the know and keep up-to-date with news and pop culture
Voice your opinions
Meet new like-minded people
Share photos and videos with friends and family
In our workshop we will answer all of your questions that you have been wanting to ask about social media!
Show you how to set up your personal or company brand on social media to fully optimize it
Discuss why social media can benefit you personally and professionally
Show you how to gain the exposure you want on social media for your personal or business brand
Show you how to get started creating content on the 3 most important platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedinGive you some ideas on content creation, planning, and organization to get you started
Give you some ideas to engage with people and start to grow a following and more!
XOXO,