continued from Part 1:
As I walked into Sally’s office (I will refrain from ever exposing the real names of the people involved for obvious reasons), I sat in front of a spectacular desk that was complimented by a wall of beautiful model comp cards and major editorial ads behind it. Sally stood up to shake my hand. She was absolutely stunning. Clearly a former model turned agent. The meeting was off to a good start- I felt we had a great chemistry and she genuinely had an interest in representing me.
We talked about hobbies, pets, a little about what their agency does, and then out of the blue… a bomb dropped. Sally asked, “So what’s going on with your instagram?” She didn’t even look at the three page questionnaire I had to fill out before the meeting- she had done her homework on me (just like everyone in the business and life does these days). I already knew she wasn’t impressed with my numbers by the concerned tone in her voice when she asked the question, and the only thing that could come out of my mouth was, “I know, I need to be better about it.”
Well, my response opened up the floodgates. I soon felt like I was at a “How to be really-really-really good at social media for girls who can’t instagram so good” event. Sally was full of information and statistics. She pointed out girls and guys on their roster that were being paid to post with certain products and models that had over 100k followers and were booking jobs off their instagram posts. She stressed the importance of having a big follower number (what happened to the days when following someone was creepy?!). And the more selfies the better- people freaking love selfies!
She even said it was ok to embellish my post a little. For example, she pointed out a model that was posting from Hawaii on a “fabulous shoot” when she was actually just on vacation with friends in Hawaii weeks ago. She said this was also smart for security reasons because you don’t want people to know your exact location (I did agree with this tip). Ummm, okay, so you mean completely lie, Miss Sally? I literally (yes, I mean literally) wanted to bash my head into her beautiful glass desk.
As she was speaking I was cringing on the inside. Come on Agnes, smile! Make it look like this is something you are totally willing to do. Sell your soul to the social media world! Come on, you’re already an actress, you can make stuff up, you can improv a little here and there! You can make your life look much more fabulous than it really is. Why not? Everyone else is doing it. And some are getting paid to do it. Why not, right?
We wrapped up the meeting with her business card in my hand and her asking me to follow-up with her in a few days after the agency meeting where she would show my pics to the rest of the team for approval. We exchanged our standard industry good-byes, and I exited her office with as big a smile as I could muster.
As I left the agency, a surge of panic hit me. In the five minutes it took me to walk to my car, I was already brainstorming Instagram Posts and hashtags. I felt determined to become one of these so-called Instagram stars with the recommended minimum 100k followers. I mean, how hard could this be, right? I just post a couple times a day of how fabulous my life is and tag some clever, yet also very popular hashtags onto said post.
Only one little (okay, huge) problem with all this- my life is not that glamorous. If I were to post on a daily basis of the things I was actually doing it would go something like this:
“Just cleaning up dog shit again! Then it’s off to the litter box.” Maybe even “feeling exhausted, need to get my roots touched up.” I’d definitely follow that up with a very popular “#blessed”. But I think most importantly, if I was being super-real, I would have a post saying “didn’t get the job…again #actorlife #soblessed!”
But I was determined to make my life look so fun, fabulous, carefree, exciting and so on. Sally even said so herself- it’s ok to fake posts, remember?
To be continued….