We recently connected with Alex Choonoo and have shared our conversation below.

Alex, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s talk about social media – do you manage your own or do you have someone or a company that handles it for you? Why did you make the choice you did?

I manage the social media account for my sketch team ‘Probably A Cult’ along with the founder, Ben. We debated hiring a social media manager, but we made the choice to do it ourselves to push ourselves to create new content more often. The results have been great! We’ve created an outlet to exercise our sketch comedy muscles, and we’ve grown our community. We started by committing to a simple goal, spend two hours per week creating one post for social media. A proverb that has rang true during this commitment is “content is king.” Two hours isn’t enough time to produce the highest quality of content, so when we post something that gains traction, we know it isn’t because of the production value. That truth has pushed me into the “quantity” direction for the age old “quantity vs quality” argument. Social media is essentially a free marketing tool that is at your disposal, and the lesson I learned from using it as such is the more often you post, the more often you are seen, and that’s ultimately a positive thing. If people aren’t interested in your post, the penalty is less engagement. I’ve seen several collogues hesitate to build their social media because they can’t afford a team and they are not confident in their abilities, but I believe it is a low-risk, high reward scenario, so I say go for it!

Alex, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Alex Choonoo, and I am a freelance filmmaker. What that means to me is that I am closer to a jack-of-all-trades type, than I am a focused on one set career. That is probably a result of not exactly knowing what career I wanted to pursue, until recently I discovered I want to do anything sketch comedy. I started my journey into filmmaking as a videographer and editor of skateboard videos. From middle school all the way through college, I was certain that’s what I would end up doing. I eventually did get in with a clothing line called “Famous Stars and Straps.” I went on tour with them as the cameraman, and that’s where I learned that I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life. From there I pivoted to getting on movie sets in the camera department, but since I was also familiar with editing, I took jobs doing that too. I still yearned for something more and took a sketch writing class with a work colleague for fun. Then Covid sent us into lockdown, and I ended up talking to some old friends from my skateboard community who reminded me that when we weren’t filming skateboarding, we were basically making sketch comedy, we just didn’t know that’s what we were supposed to call it. That’s when it all clicked for me, and I felt confident for the first time that sketch comedy is the world I want to be in. It stung a little to think about how I wished I came to this realization much earlier in my life, but the advantage it gave me is all the outside experience I could bring to my now sketch team. With their youth and drive plus my age and experience, we have now just finished our first feature film called “Counting In” and I am head over heels excited and proud of where we will go from here.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Listen. I can say from being on both sides of management, when you aren’t being listened to morale plumets. I also think that’s the major underlying problem the film and tv industry is having as a whole, but that’s a different discussion. Most times when I manage a team, I am a director of photography and I’m in charge of the crew. The biggest mistake I’ve made myself is not listening to my team. That doesn’t mean they are right all the time, but a great benefit to listening is my crew generally works harder when they know I am open to their creative opinions. They can put more of themself into the project, and it goes beyond collecting a paycheck.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

This story is how I created a win for a marketing campaign that was already underway. I got hired to go on tour with a well-known marker company, they were and still are driving a big bus all around the country, parking at different events and offering the opportunity for people to walk onto the bus and try out their most recent product. I landed the gig because of my jack-of-all-traits style, they needed a small team who could do more than one job. One part of the bus that had been underwhelming was that it had a giant television on the side of it, and no matter what videos we played, no one at the events engaged much with the giant TV. One day, at a music festival, I was monitoring the cameras from inside the bus, and I noticed people, per usual, would walk by the side of the bus with the TV, look at it, and keep moving along. Then an idea struck me, I thought about how people always take pictures of themselves in a self-checkout lane at the store. So, I grabbed a camera, set it by the TV, pointed it at the people walking by and re-routed the image on TV to show whatever was on that camera, making it a lot like a giant mirror on the side of the bus. It became an immediate hit! People passing by were now stopping and taking pictures of themselves being displayed on the side of the tour bus. It increased our online engagement, as well as in person engagement, and at one point there was a line of people waiting to take their selfie with the bus. Furthermore, it was an exciting story of a win for the clients who were on-site to report back to their home base about the bus.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @alexchoonoo
• Linkedin: @alexchoonoo
• Youtube: @probablyacult
• Other: I have a 24/7 livestream on twitch.tv/justasoundboardguy