Amy Cao's Political Incorrectness
Many of you might know Amy Cao does social media for FoodSpotting. This is a day in the life of Amy Cao.
Amy Cao wakes up to the chirps of birds that remind her to tweet, and she gets to tweeting right away, first thing in the morning. She often finds herself dealing with six hours worth of tweets from fans from Japan who all expect individual reply tweets. So far she has managed to meet those expectations, but she wonders for how long. She says she is looking for an intern/assistant. A look alike would be nice.
Finally she gets out of bed. Her thing is she can't go to the same eatery for breakfast every day. It is the nature of the beast. Every morning she has to find a new place. She has run out of places to go to for three blocks in every direction from her place. She hopes to keep fanning out.
She orders a two course breakfast, so she will have snapped two separate pictures before she is done. Lunches are much worse. That is when she fends off the paparazzi.
Once she was spotted offering to snap someone else's breakfast dish. This was during FoodSpotting's first few months. That person was reported to have startled.
She shows up for work at her fancy office - it is rumored to look like a Penthouse suite. But that is when she does not have morning media appearances to make. In this day and age everyone with a Flip camera - wait, that went out of style - everyone with a smartphone and a blog passes for a media person, and her inbox is a daily flood of requests for a little interview, a little photo session, a little sound bite, perhaps you will let me record this in video, it's for my video blog.
She entertains as many questions about FoodSpotting as she does about Stupidly Simple Snacks, her side project. So much so that the FoodSpotting founders worry she might break away and turn Stupidly Simple Snacks into a startup of its own. And then who does social media for FoodSpotting, right?
Once a week she likes to drop by the nearby TechStars program where she is an accredited mentor. She shows up on the day when TechStars takes all
Image via CrunchBasefounders out to lunch. She makes sure people are snapping away. No spotting, no mentoring is the mantra she lives by. Her office space feels like a studio. The conversation never stops. She is known to pay visits to many, many food blogs. She does video calls with many more fans. And there is always the FoodSpotting blog to update.
Lunch times are a circus for Amy Cao. To her it feels like every other restaurant in town wants her to drop by for lunch, on the house. They all want to be spotted by the woman herself. She tries her best to meet those demands. She would like to go to every place, but she can't. She is just one person. And it is also that you can go only so far away from the office for lunch. You can turn lunches into working lunches, sure, but still.
She spends about 30 minutes after lunch fending off emails from all those other big company types who want to poach her away from FoodSpotting. She says she is tired of saying she is really into food, and she is really into startups, but she manages to politely say she is not looking for a job. No, thank you.
Her inbox is a nightmare situation. A long time ago she stopped pretending she can look into every email that comes her way. Thank God for the Priority Inbox, she hopes the important ones don't go away into the ether.
It's a small team, so she does some business development too on the side.
She has toyed with the idea of taking two lunch breaks, but the demands on her time are too great. She figured, two lunch breaks, two dish spots.
She does go for a snack in the afternoon though, a great excuse for yet another shot.
Dinner is like lunch. There is yet another restaurant to patronize.
The tweeting never really stops.
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