Long Story Short
Why Content Strategy?
My career with content strategy started back in high school. I was already madly in love with the world wide web and my main curiosity came from wanting to connect with those out of reach. My strongest pull for creating content was to share stories that I was not seeing on the internet. I began to create resources for my sports teams that I belonged to tell their stories, I used MySpace to express my story, and I used my photography and graphic design to support my local classmates to spread the word about their senior showcase. For various field hockey camps and coaches, I was paid to create their digital brand on Facebook and webpages. It didn't matter the field, I was hooked on storytelling.
In college, I ended up pursuing Division 1 Field Hockey in Richmond, VA while studying leadership. This ended up refining my skillset of follow through and input. While at college, I was diagnosed with Stage 2-4B Hodgkin's Lymphoma (read: a type of blood cancer found in otherwise healthy young people). My whole appearance ended up being documented as a bi-product of travel weekend evidence all over Facebook and I had to constantly enroll multiple levels of acquaintances on my every changing health status. This ended up being a catalyst for my online advocacy for talking about cancer online - spreading awareness and raising funds for my new community. The remainder of my collegiate career, I was rewiring my emotional and physical health, and changed my degree to study sociology and studio / fine arts. While learning the backends of various types of digital mediums - photography and videography - on how to best capture, the skill of discipline, and create content of life including sports, interviewing, and creative expression.
After graduation, I moved back to the Philadelphia area to coach while exploring possibly going to a graduate program. During that time, I applied to a little known retailer by the name of lululemon where I was exposed to many areas of the business at a maven (read: a location that was in a key market for innovation) store. I was surrounded by fierce female leaders, entrepreneurs, and creatives - who not only exposed me to what this looked like in a truly collaborative setting and they taught me how to value my worth in this area, especially the skill that I possessed. I was eventually in charge of creating our weekly mass product email. This evolved to creating buzz locally within our community by documenting our connections in various gear around the city while building relationship through interviews. This job lit me up - I was connecting and creating. At first, I felt confined by the routine - and once unlocked, I found a groove of making this my area of the business to gain not only local as well as global buzz. I created content every holiday to highlight our team, I innovated on yearly initiatives, and captured community events around the city. I had to learn to work faster, to document efficiently, and stay ready for the magic moments between it all. Eventually, I managed our branded Facebook page and led trainings to keep the standard high.This lead to a beautiful happenstance of creating a digitally supported, no time constraint race with my manager entitled, The Ghost Race. It was completely new with no previous 'test pilot' or brand guidelines to riff off of. I reached out to friends and connections to see who was willing to share and highlight their story within the run community, create their own mini race experience, and support them as best I could on the day of while capturing the photography content alongside another coworker who captured video...for a week straight. It was exhausting and exhilarating.
The success of this experience gave me the green light to interview for a role based in New York City - it was a goal of mine to relocate here and explore possibilities to grow within the company. I officially moved in December 2016, began my next role and started learning about this new city. The two and a half years to follow were filled with endless unexpected challenges and successes. An outside work experience through November Project gave me another outlet to grow and build and strategize what content should look like for an ever-evolving community, that was outdoor free fitness - no matter the weather. I was not only creating the content, I was growing the community with a friend of mine in a park located in Brooklyn every Wednesday morning. The stories of every person who showed up were fascinating. Seeing their lives unfold, year over year, was an experience I will never forget. I stepped down from leading this group in August 2019, and then left lululemon that November to pursue a new role - social media content strategy - for Tracy Anderson Method. I finally earned the job title of what I had been pursuing all along. And it feels really really good.
Long story short - content strategy, be it simply capturing the content or sharing the story, is what I live for. I love learning about a new subject, then finding the best way to share and engage through the endless technology at our fingertips. No matter how big the brand. Or small of a person. If there is a story to tell, I want in.
