Hi there! My name is Savannah Sowers, and I am a  graduate from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media with a concentration in advertising and public relations and a second major in Italian. Growing up as an only child, I quickly learned to master the skill of self-entertainment, which often involved creating things. I relied on YouTube tutorials to teach myself new skills, from photoshop to basic video editing. 

For middle and high school I attended Penn-Griffin School for the Arts, where a lot of my projects required me to incorporate my creative abilities. Through these assignments, I not only was able to sharpen my artistic abilities, but I also realized that I wanted to work in a field that encompassed creativity. This was the primary reason I chose advertising as my major, as it allowed to combine my artistic passions with my love for communicating with people. 

At my first university, UNC-Asheville, I took a two-dimensional digital design class, where I discovered my passion for graphic design. This was the first time I had free access to the Adobe Creative Suite, so I spent a majority of my first year of college exploring the various applications and teaching myself more skills with those handy Youtube Tutorials. 

When I transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill, I joined the social media and videography team for Coulture Magazine, a student-run beauty and lifestyle magazine, which gave me the opportunity to maintain and expand my graphic design and video-editing skills. The next year, I interned for the Undergraduate Admissions Office as a social media intern. This internship gave me numerous opportunities to teach myself new skills, especially with social media analytics and the Adobe Creative Suite, as well as collaborate with a variety of student organizations and academic departments.

During my senior year, I was a communications and public relations intern for Innovate Carolina, which works with various entrepreneurs and startups to help promote their ideas and innovations. I helped to create and develop social media campaigns for our social media platforms, curate content for these campaigns, correspond with various entrepreneurial organizations and companies about their innovations, and analyze our engagement patterns to help improve our strategies moving forward. My time at Innovate Carolina not only instilled a crucial self-starter mindset in me that has helped me stay motivated to work toward my goals, but also sparked my interest in client-services.

Following graduation,  I was hired at Prudential Financial as a Social Media Coordinator. My responsibilities included conceptualizing social media campaigns for the company’s newsroom Twitter account and curating tweets that highlight earned media wins; using social media listening tools to measure the impact of social media activities and insights for Global Communications strategists to support Prudential businesses and corporate functions, monitoring competitors’ and peers’ social media platforms for benchmarking purposes using Zignal Labs and Unmetric; keeping up with social media news and updates, summarizing relevant articles for media briefs sent out to the Global Communications department on a weekly basis; and utilizing Adobe Analytics to examine traffic on the company’s newsroom website and creating monthly engagement reports for the internal newsroom.

After my contract at Prudential ended, I joined Empire Properties as their first Social Media and Marketing Coordinator. Because I was tasked with pioneering the role, I was able to create an entire social media strategy from scratch for the company’s real estate business, as well as their non-profit organization, Empire Gives Back. I worked closely with both the real estate department and the company’s tenants to assist in the creation of marketing collateral, such as website material and property flyers, and to help curate content for and grow engagement on the social media platforms. I also assisted the social media manager in capturing photos and videos for the company’s restaurants and to promote any of their public events.