Hollywood Fringe Staff Spotlight – Social Media Manager Rachel Stoll

If you’ve tweeted @HollywoodFringe, reblogged a Fringe Tumblr post, liked a Hollywood Fringe Facebook update, or participated in the #HFF13 tweet-up, you’ve likely already interacted with me. My name is Rachel and I manage the social channels for the Hollywood Fringe Festival. I’m also the instigator of this new Staff Spotlight series which we’re kicking off today. Every two weeks, we’ll feature a different Hollywood Fringe Staff member and ask them questions about what they do at the festival.

For this spotlight, I’ll answer the most common questions I get about the Hollywood Fringe and social media in this blog post.

How did you end up doing social media for the Hollywood Fringe?

The first year of the festival I had been arranging meetups for local LA fringers prior to the festival in LA and essentially dominating the #HFF10 hashtag and interacting with other participants. For the 2010 Festival, I was named Twitter Mistress because of my incessant tweeting. The second year I was also a participant and helped to promote shows including Voices from Chornobyl. Most fringers from 2010 and 2011 know me mostly from interacting with me on Twitter from my personal account ( @RachelStoll). After two years of being a participant, Ben Hill and Stacy Jones asked me to come on board to help them run social for the 2012 festival.

Do I have to use Twitter to get a full experience of the festival?

You don’t have to use Twitter to get a “full” experience just like you don’t have to go to see every show or visit every venue to get the “full” experience. Every fringe experience is unique and complete in itself. A lot of participants are on Twitter and it can be a great way to meet new people. If you do want to connect with other artists prior to the festival I’d highly suggest diving into the #HFF13 community and start tweeting. We’re already beginning to ramp-up for the festival and conversations are already happening.

Why do you host tweetup/What is a tweet-up?

Tweetups are where people from Twitter get together IRL (in real life) to meet and chat and tweet. It’s a great way to put faces to handles. I host them because I think it’s important to meet people offline and for me it is sort of a throwback to my informal tweetups and meetups during the 2010 festival.

What new stuff are you working on for this year’s festival?

More engaging blog content is one of my main objectives for the 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival. I feel like the blog has a lot of potential, so you’ll be seeing some cool stuff this year that we haven’t done before. I’ll also be launching Twitter chats this month as a way for participants to connect on certain topics and get questions answered about the festival. These are different from tweetups since they are entirely online and are only an hour.

Also, I’m working on integrating more images and video into everything. And there’s some top secret stuff in the works as well.

Have you thought about [insert social network here]?

Yes, but feel free to suggest anyway. We are really selective about which networks we use because we want them to make sense for the community and the festival.