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!