Restaurant ingredients, plus a little heat, are marketer’s recipe for success
Shannon Little Briggs isn’t a chef or a restaurateur but working in Memphis’ food industry has shaped her entire career. It’s also, figuratively speaking, lit a fire underneath her.
Briggs is the entrepreneur behind Shannon Little PR/Social Media, founded in 2015, and more recently, her new business, Campfire Collective.
Born at the former St. Joseph Hospital in Downtown Memphis, Briggs has lived all over Shelby County, including Cordova, Arlington, High Point Terrace and the East Buntyn neighborhood she’s been the past nine years. She loves living near her alma mater, the University of Memphis, frequently walking around campus with her one-year-old daughter.
It was during her time at the U of M that two important things happened to Briggs. First, she started working at Huey’s as an expeditor and table runner. Second, she met her now partner, Scott, who was also working at the restaurant.
Briggs said her experience at Huey’s was invaluable, both in her role as part of the restaurant industry and as a marketing professional. She was Huey’s first marketing intern, marketing assistant and eventually its first marketing and events coordinator. In all, she worked for the local restaurant company for 10 years.
It was in 2015, after landing various freelance gigs, when Briggs decided to launch her own marketing firm, Shannon Little PR/Social Media. Her business offered public relations support, marketing strategy and social media content and management, especially to small businesses in the hospitality, entertainment and nonprofit industries.
Through the years, Briggs has garnered a list of well-known clients including Muddy’s Bake Shop, Lafayette’s Music Room, and B.B. King’s Blues Club.
“Memphis wouldn’t be who it is without the hospitality sector,” Briggs said.
She also works with Welcome to Memphis, a subsidiary of Memphis Tourism.
Welcome to Memphis offers training and resources for those in the hospitality industry, and the group’s executive director, Mary Schmitz, credits Briggs with “helping launch and grow a brand that we created, from scratch,” following their partnership more than five years ago.
Briggs’ work includes the Welcome to Memphis Pick Awards, an annual event where hospitality industry workers are nominated and awarded for exemplary service.
But Briggs has been passionate about local events for some time now.
“I’ve only missed one Beale Street Music Festival since I was 13,” Briggs said, and she and her family are often found at the Overton Park Shell, Playhouse on the Square and The Orpheum Theatre as well as Grizzlies and Tigers basketball games and U of M football games.
After seven years working under the name of Shannon Little PR/Social Media, Briggs decided it was time for a change.
In addition to building her roster of clients, Briggs has built a group of six contract employees who help her execute marketing and social media efforts. Coincidentally, they’re all women, something Briggs thinks gives their work a special quality.
“There’s a heart behind it,” she said. “There’s the passion behind it.”
But it perhaps also plays into this next course of her life.
“It wasn’t just me anymore,” Briggs says about her company’s new name and brand. Campfire Collective, she hopes, captures the spirit of the business by embracing not only the teamwork between the contractors but also the “neighborly, friendly feel” that she aims for with clients.
