Kai Eldridge

Week 2 as a social media intern has absolutely flown by! This week, my main goal was to shoot and edit as many photos as possible. As I mentioned previously, one of my goals is to post on social media at least once a day. I think it will be a lot easier to do so, now that I have begun to create a folder of photos to choose from. Most photos I took this week were of October food specials across the three pubs, which I’ll be able to sporadically post throughout the month. I also took many photos at the Brew Day in Lake City on Thursday, which I will talk about later in this post.

I am excited to announce that I have begun to schedule interviews with employees for my “employee spotlight” posts. The project is one that the managers at Elliott Bay have really emphasized, so I am happy to finally get started and to learn more about each of the people who work here.

The most fun I had this week was assisting brewer Dan at Thursday’s Brew Day! Brent, Kat, Andrew, Dan and I, filled barrels with 500 pounds of Syrah grapes, Montmorency cherries, and Pinot Noir grapes for the 2018 Spontaneous Sours which will be ready in about 7 months. They use the native cultures on the grapes to ferment the beer! While barrels were being filled, Lisa was brewing the beer which will be poured into the barrels. I think it’s awesome that Lisa is a female brewer, in what seems like a male-dominated field. We talked a bit, but I can’t wait to interview her to learn more about how she got into brewing and why she loves it!

Some other significant tasks I completed this week included creating a calendar of notable national holidays that could be useful for social media posts, and completing my first employee spotlight interview. I interviewed Julie, the new Manager at Brother Barrel. On Saturday, I will be attending the Great Pumpkin Beer Festival for Elliott Bay. I am stoked for this event and to be in attendance as a social media manager (intern)!

This week my biggest takeaway was the importance of prioritizing and understanding my own strengths. I was excited to learn to use photoshop over the next 10 weeks, but I have decided that the most efficient use of my time would be to table that project for later. I pay for a photo editing app on my phone called VSCO, and I am already familiar with how it works. I could spend 30 hours playing around with photoshop and still not fully know how to use it! I am now editing all photos with VSCO. The photos still look great, but I am able to spend less time editing and more time fulfilling other tasks!

Week 1 at Elliott Bay Brewing Co. was great! Initially, I did a did quite a bit of research to mine for content inspiration. Prior to the start of my internship, I followed upwards of 100 breweries, restaurants, and food Instagram accounts so that I could see what others were doing. I kept note of what caught my eye and inspired me, as well as what the most popular accounts in the craft beer world were doing.

My introduction at Elliott Bay Brewing included meeting many new people and getting tours at all three pubs, as well as at Brother Barrel, which is Elliott Bay’s “little brother bar.”

At the start of this week I focused on creating goals for Elliott Bay based on my research findings. I came up with a list of popular hashtags both locally and globally. I spent most of my time this week creating content. This includes taking and editing photos, posting across 6 social media sites, and engaging folks across all social media platforms. This engagement could be responding to a comment, but it also includes liking/commenting on photos of accounts who follow similar accounts to ours, and liking/commenting on photos of other brands in our field. I am trying to increase awareness of the Elliott Bay Brand.

The biggest takeaway I have from this week is how much work it is to be a social media manager. Prior to me coming on board, Travis was managing at the West Seattle pub AND in running Elliott Bay’s social media outlets. I give him props for this, because it has become so clear to me in the past 5 days that being a social media manager is a full-time job. There is no wonder that he was not able to post consistently. It is A LOT of work. There is so much content I want to create and things on my mental to do list, and there is just no way to do it all in the 30 hours I have dedicated to this internship. For example, there are tons of photos I want to take, employee spotlights I want to write, and educational content I would like to produce (such as what different kinds of malt and hops look like and what it means to create certified Organic beer). HOWEVER, what I have learned from this process, is that these things take time. Due to how Elliott Bay runs (and potential food waste), I can’t simply go in one day and take photos of every single beer and food item. I have to take a few photos at a time. In order to create the employee profiles, I must coordinate with the employees who are all EXTREMELY busy, and who don’t have time to make a Facebook post their priority. Plus, I am posting content for 4 different locations, and realistically I can only get to one (maybe two locations) a day. I am learning about patience and planning!

I am so excited for the next 9 weeks and to share the content I am creating. For reference, here are the 6 sites I am posting to:

Elliott Bay Brewing Co. Facebook

Brother Barrel Facebook

Elliott Bay Brewing Co. Twitter

Brother Barrel Twitter

Elliott Bay Brewing Co. Instagram

Brother Barrel Instagram

In the future, I may also do some work with UnTapped and helping to update the Elliott Bay Brewing Co. website but I have not begun to tackle those platforms.

Being a social media manager intern at Elliott Bay Brewing Co. is an incredible opportunity. It brings together my love for social media, food/drinks, and art. Although I have blogged and written articles for a media company in the past, I have never been handed so much responsibility and creative freedom.

Throughout the next 10 weeks,  my personal goals are to learn what it takes to be a social media manager, become better at photography, gain followers and engagement across all social platforms, and better understand which tactics are most successful in doing so. I also hope to leave behind lots of content that can be shared in the future, so that the managers at Elliott Bay may continue to keep up with their socials, even when there is not someone solely dedicated to them.