Since May of last year I've been working at the Crocker Art Museum as marketing specialist, but yesterday was my last day as I've had a few great opportunities come my way and have decided to pursue them. But more on that later. I wanted to write a blog entry about the Museum and how it was a great place to work, staffed with wonderful people. Now is an incredibly exiting time for the Crocker as the 125 year old museum is set to open it's expanded "New Crocker" on October 10th of this year (yes, 10/10/10). So, I'm sad that I will not be a staff member on opening day, and I will miss the marketing team which I was honored to be a part of. Lead by Marketing Communications Director LeAnne Ruzzamenti, the team of Mark, Michele, Kathleen, Gregg and Anna was a fun group to work with, and I'll miss working with them. The department was one I always admired and respected since I first moved to Sacramento. Great marketing ideas and implementation.
I'm proud of my accomplishments at the Crocker, where I was focused primarily on social networking in addition to helping maintain the website and serve as one of the editors of the quarterly member magazine ArtLetter. I'm particularly pleased with the establishment of the Crocker's Facebook Fan page which in less than nine months has grown to over 4,200 fans and is one of the largest and most active pages in Sacramento. I also established the Crocker on Twitter and YouTube and worked on its Flickr page. It's funny, I had intended to post a blog entry when I got hired using the black "I am the New Crocker" button but never got around to it, and now it's been supplanted by the new New Crocker button.
I was really looking forward to using my new camera on the trip to Comic-Con and I was able to grab a bunch of great pictures. There was so much to see and photograph, and you can check out my Flickr sets for many of the photos I took. One of my favorites is this one of Belle Chere as Red Sonja. While at Comic-Con I posted my photos to several groups (this is one of the great powers of the social networking features of photo-hosting sites, being able to tag and share content from live events can instantly give you a worldwide audience). Very quickly this photo became viewed by the hundreds, and then thousands, favorited, commented, etc. What's even cooler to me is that someone commented asking if that was Belle Chere. I had no idea who she was - but before long Belle Chere herself posted a comment saying "That's me!" and asking if she could use the photo on her site. Turns out she's a well-known cosplayer and works by day as a theatrical costumer. Pretty awesome - if you'd like to see more of her amazing costume work, check out her webpage here.
In addition, I spent some time hanging with Greg Benson of Mediocre Films and helped him to shoot some stuff. We filmed a bunch of stuff walking around, but the first thing that made it up to his YouTube channel was this prank about throwing away handbills:
I loved this prank and had a hard time suppressing my laughter as we shot it. Greg was actually drawing a crowd as he did this. The next day, the video had something like 40,000 hits - I was amazed, but Greg said that with those numbers, for him, it hadn't gone viral, it wasn't really hitting and people weren't passing it around. It was fascinating hanging out with him and learning some of the nitty gritty of YouTube videos. The other video I filmed was the famed "stripper bus" that was transportation for the cast of The Guild on the day of the panel:
Fun stuff. Greg is a YouTube star and I love his stuff. He has two channels on YouTube - Mediocre Films and Mediocre Films2 and I recommend subscribing to his stuff (you can also be a fan on Facebook here).
