Archive for March, 2009
Yesterday, the Oregonian announced the state of Oregon has officially reached 10.8% unemployment. Considering I am self-employed and have many close friends and family members who are unemployed, this is a sobering number to see. It means the economy is in tough straits, but we already knew that. What it also means is that things will get worse before they get better, and there will be even more competition for the best jobs tomorrow than there was yesterday.
Some months ago, I was working on a blog marketing project for an old friend of mine. One of his strategies was to interact as much as possible with “quality” blogs in the same industry as a way to build notoriety among his colleagues. Considering the thousands of results tools like Google and Yahoo return when you search for specific keywords (many of the results being absolutely useless), this seemed like an interesting strategy.
The topic of this post is based on a suggestion from @carlincomm – “101 Reasons that Twitter makes you a better writer. 1-A tweet is a great headline. 2-140 characters builds discipline. 3-more fun”
One of the trickiest parts of marketing is writing concisely – painting a picture of a thousand words with a few eloquent sentences. Whether it’s a one-sentence tagline or a page-long direct mail piece, the ability to fully explain an idea in just a few words is vital to success in the industry. Few marketers that I know are also good writers, and they invest a huge chunk of their time in improving their ability to craft word pictures for their customers. A useful tool that has emerged recently online is Twitter, one of the more popular social networking applications on the web today.
I wrote my first computer program when I was 10 years old. It wasn’t much – it ran on DOS, only displayed a few lines of text, and took forever and a half for me to figure out. Oddly enough, I was so jazzed about programming that I announced to my parents that I wanted to work with computer when I grew up. I taught myself QuickBASIC and spent far too many days inside working on my computer than I’d like to remember.
I wish I could say I read the news paper every day, but I got out of that habit while I was in grad school. Web news just seemed easier to consume as my life became busier. That, and I could add a filter to what I was reading and pick only what I wanted to learn most out of the clutter.