After working in the film/video industry for 20+ years I became the Executive Director of the longest running film festival in the US, the Columbus International Film + Video Festival. There was only one problem – there were zero dollars in the promotional budget and almost no audience.
That experience forced me to learn to work smart and be inventive. I fell in love with on line marketing and all that it could do. In 12 years I took the Festival from being a small 2 day Festival attended by 200 people to a year round organization with events attended by thousands of people.
After a while I realized that the part of the job that gave me the most satisfaction was the marketing of the Festival and all of its various events. So in 2015 I decided to leave the Festival and to pursue marketing full time as Susan B. Halpern, Social Media Maven.