IT’S A SUNNY WEEKDAY MORNING, and the NoDa offices for Black Wednesday are full of the sounds of iPhones buzzing and quick staccato typing on keyboards. Social media marketers sit behind sleek Macs in the modern space, featuring floor-to-ceiling windows, concrete floors, and black walls. In her office at the back of the spacious studio, the boutique marketing and PR company’s owner, Corri Smith, leans back behind her desk, where a fragrant candle is burning and a cow skin rug covers the floor.

Smith, 32, is a social media maven in Charlotte, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that her office feels Instagram-ready. Smith has been using social media to promote local brands—including her own—since 2012, when she worked for Heist Brewery. She launched Black Wednesday in 2015, after working solo for several local brands, and today the company has three additional full-time employees and two interns.

“It’s really nuts,” Smith says. “When I started marketing businesses, Facebook business pages didn’t even exist yet. You created a page for your business and then friended people. Instagram was brand-new. But I started using social media to get people through the door and engage with them before, during, and after their experience.”

Smith has created an entire career from her social media savvy. In addition to her successful company, she teaches SkillPop’s pop-up classes each month on social media topics. Her classes, which hold 25 to 30 students, are almost always full—often with others who would like to build a business around the medium.

“We’re a banking city,” she says. “So, we live in a space where a lot of people are not necessarily doing what they love. I’m consistently speaking to people who are unhappy in their jobs, because they’re working in a corporate space that’s not their passion.” Smith estimates that about half of the participants in her classes are people who want to turn their side passion into something sustainable fulltime, and hope to use social media to do that.

Click here to view the original publication via Charlotte Magazine.