Andi is the Community Director for Yelp! in Orlando, Florida. Her main responsibility is to connect Orlando locals with fantastic area restaurants. And what better way to do that than a party? Andi works with each restaurant to host an on-site party aimed to create returning customers out of curious locals.
Transcript
My name is Andy Perez. I work for Yelp. I'm the community director here in Central Florida. Basically what that means, Yelp, obviously a review site, but what kind of sets us apart is that we focus a lot on local and community, and so the role of the community manager, community director, in all of our larger metros is first and foremost to connect locals to really great local businesses and organizations. And we do that in the most public way through throwing great parties. And so we partner with restaurants, and we get people in, get people excited, and meeting the business owner and understanding the mission of the business, and just getting them excited about their community. So it really ranges. I work with businesses that are just getting opened and getting started and businesses that are also launching new menus or anything like that. But let's say you were getting started with a business, either you or a PR company that you're working with would reach out and say hey, we really wanna get some buzz for the opening. And so on our end with Yelp, just like you would run maybe media tastings and bring in folks from around the community that are based in media, I would work with you to put on a party that's just for our most active Yelpers in the community, with the idea that as they come in and experience what you've got, they're gonna be excited about it, they're gonna feel connected to you, and then they're gonna tell all their friends about it. So my role really is to do everything around planning the event and let the restaurant, or the business, if it's an entertainment business or whatever it is, do what they do best. So I'll do all the marketing for the event, I'll cohost the event, we'll do social media contests, photography, blog posts after the event, make as big a splash as we can make, and let the business just shine with what they do best. With this role it really is all about juggling and prioritizing. Since we do work remotely I don't have my boss sitting near me or anything lik that, and so hypothetically I could just sit around and watch Netflix all day, but the thing is that there are so many balls in the air that that just wouldn't be possible because we're planning quarters in advance. So I'm planning already for August right now, and we are currently about to be in May. And so I've still got about two to three events every month that are going on. So it really is juggling events and then being a resource for business owners means that I get emails all the time also from business owners asking about the free side of Yelp because that's the part that I work with with them, and so it really is constantly being available on my email and thinking about what are the next five events that are going on, thinking about large-scale marketing promotions that we're planning maybe six months from now and how we can start now to kind of build the network to be able to make that successful.
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