So many people always ask me, "So what exactly do you do?" Career-wise, I work at an advertising agency, and my official title is Social Media Community Manager. What does that mean? On any given day, I have 6-10 clients that I'm working with at once. This blog will be the perfect look into one of my biggest clients of 2017: Party In The Pines.

Case: Party In The Pines, a brand-new country music festival that was held in October in North Florida. The headliners were Keith Urban & Miranda Lambert, and also featured performers like Maren Morris & Jake Owen. Pretty big deal! My agency was hired back in February to run all of the PR & Social Media efforts for the festival, leading up to and during the inaugural event. Two of us were sent to the festival to handle all PR & Social Media efforts on-site.

I was in charge of all Social Media efforts for the festival, from the initial branding meetings, to the moment the line-up was announced, through to the end of the festival. If you go to facebook.com/PartyPinesFest, everything you see on that page was the result of my 6+ months working on the account. The graphics I created in PhotoShop/Illustrator, the photography I took at the actual festival, the contests I ran with social media influencers, the actual community management (which includes the worst part: playing 24/7 customer service to endless amounts of lovely complaints and questions)...it was all me. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I created and successfully ran those 3 accounts for 6 months, before traveling to the Festival site a few weeks ago.

At the festival, I was responsible for live activating the social media accounts. That means: Instagram Stories, Facebook Lives, interviews with artists, Periscopes on Twitter, shooting photography to live post on Instagram, doing daily recap photo galleries on Facebook, monitoring our official hashtag for potential Retweets, having online conversations with artists & fans, etc. Festival days were 16-18 hour work days. NBD. They were super fast-paced and we ran off of adrenaline. Adrenaline and lots of cheap coffee. That being said, I'm still recovering. 😅

What you don't see online is the amount of research that goes into making all of the above possible. Social media is not all creative fun and "playing on Facebook" like so many people have told me. I also had to study endless spreadsheets & charts to learn what type of content our audience engaged with the most, where that audience was from, what our ROI on paid media promotions was, etc. I had countless meetings with the festival ticketing platform, with the productions team, with the website designer to make sure to make sure the brand was consistent in every aspect. I had to email Keith Urban and Miranda Lamberts' managers – and all of the other artists on the lineup – to set up promotion campaigns and ticket giveaways.

 I had to handle major crises at 6:00am on multiple occasions. Remember the Vegas mass shooting in early October? That was at a similiarly-sized country music festival and happened three weeks before our event – in the middle of our biggest ticket sales push. As you can imagine, that created a massive shitstorm for me. People were too scared to buy tickets. Those who has tickets wanted refunds. They demanded to be allowed to carry their guns at the festival. All of this was happening while we were STILL in the middle of recovering from Hurricane Irma. Being a first year festival in Florida after a major hurricane has devastated the state and the worst mass shooting of all time occurs at a similar festival...it was not an easy situation to be in at all. But, the festival pulled through in the end!

There's a lot more that I deal with on a day to day basis, but that's a brief look into the life of comeone who works in Social Media! If you even care. If you don't, below are the images from the festival you were waiting for! If you got this far, thanks for reading.