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Building a Virtual Community
It wasn’t a planned thing, but back in August of 2016, I started posting random shots of beer on my Instagram (cross-posted to my Facebook). It usually involved me traveling out of state and visiting a brewery, but over time I started adding the caption, “Because I only take pictures of beer.”
Over time as I stopped posting to Instagram regularly in favor of Facebook, I just used my Instagram account to just post pictures of beer and a project called, “A Year of Thursdays.”
Seeing how people were responding to “A Year of Thursdays,” I changed the caption on my beer pictures to read “Because I always take pictures of beer” and went back and changed the old one or added it (many of the first ones didn’t have that tagline). I started to take more pictures of beer and just had the “Because I always take pictures of beer” being the only accompanying text. Suddenly, it was new Instagram project.
It struck me as strange and as it went, it started to bleed into my real life: a friend took a picture of me at a show holding a beer with his caption being, “Because I always take pictures of guys of who take pictures of beer;” a promoter at a show asked if I was going to take a picture of my beer at his show; and a third friend took a picture of his beer and posted, “Taking pictures of beer. Because [at symbol(putting it here does funky things to the HTML of this site)] Don McIver.” There’s a marketer in me that realized the consistent tagline was just “good branding” but I wasn’t really selling anything. But I also think there is something deeper at work going on too.
