either you're the tide or the ship or both

Giveaways are work are fun are rewarding

So I decided to run a giveaway through inOregon’s Instagram this week. Below you’ll see stats from the first 12 hours, and then stats from 8am this morning (day 3). Not bad for a small contest thrown together (real talk it took fucking hours to plan, coordinate, run outreach, and create the right aesthetic and messaging for this thing) in the wee hours of the night.

There are six local businesses participating, and if you visit their IG accounts rn you’ll see the giveaway post, alive and well on most of them: Dear Mom Cafe, Gather Sauna House, Area Rug Connection (one of my clients—double win), Big Story Books, Somewhere That’s Green, and Vanilla Clothing.

While I could get into the overall follower gain across accounts (~160-170 for each) and all the other data, that shit makes for some dry-ass reading. Instead of metrics, here are a few things I loved about bringing something like this to life.

1. Not knowing if something is actually going to work, and putting in hours of work anyway. Which is a metaphor if I’ve ever heard of one—for writing poetry, forging relationships, competing in sport, building a business (or literally anything), life itself. Like, you have this feeling—intuition, a knowing in your gut, a hunch—but you don’t really know what’s going to happen and there’s certainly no guarantee. And you do it anyway.

   I had no concrete evidence to tell me that putting effort into this giveaway was going to yield anything, either for me or the businesses involved. But I had a feeling it would, so I followed that.

2. A rising tide lifts all ships. Cliché but—I love this idiom/aphorism.

   I think of it as a kind of life mantra: how can I do this in a way that benefits others in addition to myself? I’m no martyr—I do plenty of shit that benefits only me. But for a lot of things, the framing is a tide and many ships. You could say it’s just social media, and it is—but it’s also the 21st century, and social media drives real business for real people. That shit counts, especially for small places.

3. Filming and editing little videos. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. Before iPhones, it was the Sony digital camcorder my best friend Amy had (we filmed everything, from Vermont snowboard trips to dance sessions to the squirrels that entered our sophomore dorm room via the window we’d left open for them, cracker snacks set along the windowsill). Or a Canon PowerShot A70. Preceded by the iconic Panasonic VHS camcorder. And all interspersed with film-based SLR cameras from Nikon, Leica, and Hasselblad. Note: While I grew up in a very blue collar, paycheck to paycheck kinda family, my dad was a photographer and camera repairman by trade—meaning, I had the coolest cameras and learned about f-stop, aperture, and field of vision at a very young age. Thanks, dad.

   

   my phone’s photo timeline from a few days ago (lots of local business clips)

   So, going into businesses for this giveaway, chatting with owners and staff, and collecting video clips to then turn into fun little reels is both in my wheelhouse and something I really enjoy. I’m not saying I’m a cinematographer or a videographer, because I’m not. I am saying that I’m a collector of images. And that I love sewing gathered visuals together into one out of an infinite number of ways in order to elicit a feeling. That feeling, in turn, becomes a story we tell ourselves, linear or not.

PDXPMFVT or bust

For the first time in over a decade, I bought a new camera. In preparation for PDXPMFVT, but also because a. I want to be able to produce higher quality work and pitch higher tier clients, b. iPhones are a great tool, but nothing compares to shooting with a real camera, and c. Returning to a real camera kinda brings me full circle back to my dad which kinda makes me want to cry in a complicated, bittersweet, nuanced, uniquely human kind of way. He‘s dead and when he was alive he wasn’t so much as on a rollercoaster, he was the rollercoaster. You get what I mean.

Wait, is this whole thing just about my dad? Probably—isn’t it always? Onward into the night we go.

So my options were to either buy the best iPhone with the best camera, or pay more or less the same price for a rad digital setup and feel that old feeling of the heft of an actual camera in your hands and use multiple lenses and reconnect with the good things your dad passed on to you.

After some good research, I chose a Fujifilm model. It apparently arrives today and I’m already glad I made the “rad digital setup” choice.

If you’ll recall from last week, some of the things I’ve been what-iffing about leading into the PDXPMFVT include: forgetting how to talk, all the shops suddenly being closed, and/or walking into a shop and realizing I’m not wearing any pants (and can’t explain why because I’ve forgotten how to talk; see figure 1.1). I don’t expect these what-ifs to disappear before the tour. And that’s ok.

What I’m trying to focus on rn is doing the things that I know help reduce the anxiety of what-if land. These include being as organized as possible. Meaning the rest of today and tomorrow will look like this:

• Finish all client work ahead of time (so I don’t have to worry about working while I’m there)

• Set up my dad’s old iPad (I got it engraved and gave it to him as a birthday present one year) with the app demo and the survey

• Pare down the survey so it’s even easier for business owners to complete (low barrier to entry for them, high reward for me, and the incentive is they get to be featured on inOregon)

• Complete the list of businesses, grouped by industry, that I want to visit

• Run this list through Chat to see if we can turn it into a geographically organized list from which I can plan the most efficient routes

• Hang out with my mom and also have dinner with my husband and friends tomorrow night

• Familiarize myself with the new Fujifilm camera (as soon as it arrives)

• Sign up for the four dance classes I’ve chosen to take while there

• Pack earlier than the morning of departure

• Remember that you cannot do eight or even three time-consuming things the morning of departure, even though you’re always 100% certain you can

• Lift weights on Wednesday instead of Thursday am (the morning of departure)

I’m sure there are other things, but as it stands simply writing out this list is proving to help drown out the what-if soundtrack. So thanks for humoring me and, once again, onward into the night we go.

PS: Subscribe now if you're into this messy build-in-public energy. Miss the last issue? It’s right here. Also literally none of this is ever advice. I’m sharing what I learn through Babe, and perhaps you’ll learn from my mistakes. Hopefully, maybe, who knows, ily.