Facebook Community Boost Interview with Lori Ann Pope on Georgia Business Radio

Rich Casanova with the Pro Business Channel on site in our own hometown of Atlanta for Georgia Business Radio. We're at a phenomenal event here today with Facebook and their community boost events, bringing the communities together city-by-city. This is a fascinating concept and tour, were excited and proud to be part of it, right now here joining me at the event live is Lori Ann Pope, Facebook's global small business event marketing lead.



Rich Casanova: Before we start talking about the event and your role, actually before we started recording you immediately had a flashback to your radio days, tell me a little bit about that.

Lori Ann Pope: So I started radio in college. I was at Brown University and worked at WBRU FM which was an FM station but a workshop for college students. And so that really instilled my love of radio, music in particular, but I also did news and also exposed me to all sorts of music. I did everything from R&B to Rock to Jazz.

Rich: [00:00:53] Yeah once it gets in your blood right you're hooked, right? So once you once you move on past this Facebook gig we talk about bringing you back in radio one day maybe right?  So you're about three and a half years into this. So what's your role now Facebook?

Lori Ann: [00:01:09] So my role at Facebook has always been the same for the last three years. I'm the global small business event marketing lead and basically what that means is that I lead the team that produces and brings us to life around the world. So we're here in the US but we've also launched in Amea, Europe the Middle East and Africa and also in Asia, we actually launched in Jakarta today.

Rich: [00:01:31] Oh, wow, that's exciting and Atlanta, you know, how often does that happen?  We had a conversation earlier with Katherine Shappley from Facebook talking about what this 50 city tour involves. So, it's 36 cities so far right?

Lori Ann: [00:01:49] It's actually more than that. So Facebook Community boost is really under sort of a larger umbrella of what we call our economic develop initiatives, which is basically how do we help communities boost economies etc. And so it's actually not a new program that we've rolled out. There's really been some version of this for the last five years. I believe you talked to Bess Yount. I call her the Godmother of Facebook Community Boost. It may have started out as Facebook fit and then morphed. So we've stuck with Boost for a long time, so it's either been boost your business or Facebook Community Boost. The whole point has always been connecting with small businesses and their employees to give them the skills and digital tools they need to basically grow their businesses online. I'm passionate about this so many of our small businesses are not engaged in the digital economy.

Rich: [00:02:43] I definitely feel your passion and a shout-out to Bess. I don't know if they still do shout outs or not. So now talk to us about the mission, the idea and the backstory of the community boost events you're doing not only here in the US but around the world and this event in particular, The experiences and some of the takeaways from this three-day event from two different perspectives.  One, the instructors and experts and also from the attendees, what's the exchange here?