Hey, I’m Jared.
For over 3 years I’ve used my creativity, curiosity, and attention to detail to grow and develop my skillset.
As you’ll see from my work, I’ve developed an adaptable style and vocabulary that caters to any brand voice. I’ve worked with a plethora of creation and management tools across nearly all social media platforms to refine brand voices and create meaningful connections.
My position at the The Daily Beacon was my first professional venture into social media management. While my job consisted mostly of sharing articles from our website, I quickly learned to tailor our social copy to appeal to the varying demographics of each platform, as well as tracking engagement to determine which stories to prioritize during high traffic hours. I also learned the importance of following an established brand voice and maintaining an image of neutrality as a news source.
After my promotion to Lead Editor I began to develop more ways of growing our audience through better use of each platform’s engagement tools, like polls and themed weekly trivia or pet posts, which led to a 7% increase in click-through engagement.
Working with TEDxUTK was an opportunity to put my passion for social issues to work, and to grow as a leader and social media manager. I worked on the marketing team for a semester before being voted in as Head of Marketing, where I stayed for a year.
Our responsibilities were to organize a promotional campaign for each event, as well as designing and creating the promotional materials ourselves. This was a step up from simply finding engaging ways to present existing content like we did at The Beacon, and it allowed me to develop my graphic design and photography skills while juggling coordinating timelines with multiple other teams.
I worked with speakers to capture promotional designs that communicated the tone of their presentations, and I loved the opportunity to create a visual representation of their vision.
My internship at Campfire Writing was a great experience. I had the fundamentals down, but working at Campfire helped me to more fully understand analytics and exploring brand identity. It was a very collaborative environment and we worked on projects that gave me the freedom to flex my creativity and really think outside the box. Our frequent posting, unique brand identity, and thoughtful approach to content boosted our user engagement by a total of 21% across all platforms.
It was important to us that our brand was more than a product, and our social platforms were more than a venue for advertising. One very effective way we did this was by sharing articles and videos from our Campfire Learn platform, which helped writers to navigate the industry and improve their craft. Sharing these resources through our social channels taught me the value of using social media accounts as a resource for potential customers instead of simply advertising to them.
Be more than a product
With a high posting frequency of roughly 15 posts per week, many of which were bespoke, we needed ways to consistently produce content quickly without reducing it’s value. Quotes from authors designed to inspire and motivate our audience helped us strike that balance while also contributing to our brand image as a resource.
Inspiring our audience
Our inspirational content could potentially feel too earnest or sentimental without the counterbalance of our left field sense of humor. We recognized the importance developed a unique brand identity that felt true to us without alienating segments of our audience, and we were careful to pay attention to what resonated with our them.
Defining our brand voice
is a podcast and YouTube series created entirely by myself and my two long-time friends, Taylan Rains and Ryan Parker, which focuses on the questions of how videogames change, and how they change us.
This project has been a labor of love for almost a year now, and learning to edit videos and keep my graphic design knowledge sharp has been incredibly rewarding. We’ve even managed some surprisingly high engagement on some of our YouTube shorts considering the short time our podcast has been around.
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What I do:
Social content management
Graphic Design
Data Analysis
Video Editing
Podcast editing
Photography
Surveys and interviews
Metrics Analysis & Reports
Where I do it:
Adobe Creative Express
Canva
Hootsuite
Buffer
Sprout Social
Google Forms
Google Analytics
Airtable
Audacity