I write a lot, including articles for customers and blogs and ventures of my own. Here is where you can find some of my work:
- Real Magnet Blog: I work as the Director of Insights at Real Magnet, an email services provider right down the street from me in Bethesda. It is not a full-time job, but is still one that affords me much opportunity for positioning through content creation. I write weekly for the blog, with articles aimed directly at their audience of B-to-B companies and associations.
- MediaPost's Email Insider: I've been writing for MediaPost for years, initially in the Online Publishing Insider and now in the Email Insider. I approach the articles in my role as Director of Insights for Real Magnet and am identified as such there. On the Real Magnet blog, I tackle largely tactical topics, but on MediaPost I take a more strategic approach and look at big picture issues that affect the email industry at large. Writing for MediaPost is an exercise in profile building for Real Magnet, but the content within the articles themselves allows for some deep education and positioning as well. It's a very successful initiative.
- November Bicycles: This is a company I co-founded in the summer of 2010. I've been racing bicycles since 1983 (not a typo), working as a professional marketer since 1995, and running a business of my own since 2004. November Bicycles combines all of my skills and passions, and allows me to try out my most unconventional marketing ideas at my own expense, not clients'. Do have a look around the site if you'd like to see a communications strategy at its most candid.
- NRF Conference Website: In 2010 the National Retail Federation launched a new conference called Innovate. Whenever you create something new, you have an opportunity to leave legacy approaches and expectations behind, and with this show I was given a long leash to use content for some pretty radical positioning. The link is to the Philosophy section of the conference website. Most conferences don't even have a Philosophy section, so gaining NRF's permission to create one - and in particular this one, which was not edited to be kindler and gentler at all - was itself a victory for positioning content. The tone you see there carried through into all the email marketing for the event as well. The conference was an enormous success, not just through its butts-in-seats metric, but because the content resonated so clearly with attendees leading up to the event, setting a tone in advance that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I spent a few months telling people that this was a new type of show where attendees were curious, challenging and vocal and voila - when they arrived that's exactly how they acted.
I also post my most recent articles on the blog, so have a look there for some specifics.
