The Start of Becoming a Digital Citezen

On my recent trip to San Diego and back I read this book:

The book was co-written by the founders of Hubspot.com, whose services are related to inbound marketing. Outbound Marketing are things that interrupt the consumer like commercials, junk mail and spam. Inbound Marketing includes things like search engine optimization, creating viral content to create buzz - basically things the consumer wants to find, not ignore. It was pretty interesting, a pretty quick read, and what I've learned from it has prompted me to make some changes

1. Better/more descriptive & Unique post titles - this way content is more likely to be found in a key word search
2. Increase traffic to this blog by expanding my social network
3. Trying to create remarkable content that will get people to share what I write
4. Become a digital citizen to build internet credibility and hopefully a following
   
5. Make a call to action to engage readers

If anyone is interesting in marketing this is a great read. It's also good if you're part of a start up or thinking of starting one. Inbound Marketing can be much more cost effective than the more traditional outbound marketing and it seems like more fun too.

So any suggestions on what content would make my blog more remarkable? What makes you sign up for a site's RSS feed or follow them?

~emy

4th Post - Mother's Day

Last night, thanks to a Facebook movement, Betty White was the host of SNL. What also made it special was many former female cast members came back as guests on the show. I thought that of the better sketches featuring White was with Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon, who brought back the old favorite of "NPR's The Delicious Dish". I wish I could embed a Youtube video of it, but NBC is pretty good at policing and removing the clips that are infringing the copyright. Basic overview of the sketch - White played baker Florence Dusty who was showing off her "muffin" to Shannon and Gasteyer and revealed her latest creation - The Dusty Muffin. I think it might rival the Schweddy Balls of Alec Baldwin, but mainly because of the SNL alumnae, but White played her part well.

Anyway...today is Mother's Day and I didn't take my mom out because I'm on-call for work. I don't think she minded though. As long as no one is annoying her or asking her for something she's pretty much set. Also, she normally doesn't like the gifts I get her. I only buy what she tells me to get, and this time she didn't tell me anything.

One great thing about my mom is she always took care of me when I was sick - bringing me meds, lots of oj, chicken noodle soup and of course tissues. And it's kind of a stretch as being a relevant transition - but look at this cool packaging design that Kimberly-Clark came up for Kleenex:

It's wedged slices of watermelon, orange and lime! Yes, it's definitely kind of weird pulling tissues from what looks like food, but what a good marketing strategy for the summer.

I'm guessing summer is the season with the lowest revenues for facial tissue use because in the winter people are likely to be sick with the flu and in the spring and fall people have allergies. In the summer sickness and allergies aren't really a factor so they need to something to boost sales - and these just scream "buy me as part of your summer decor!". A box of Kleenex is fairly inexpensive too, so the consumer probably doesn't feel that bad buying primarily for decorative purposes. Pretty smart Kimberly-Clark, pretty smart indeed.

~emy

First Post - Breaking Ground

Hi There! Welcome to my blog about random junk! What does that mean exactly? Basically it's going to be about all the things I find cool/interesting and the adventures I go on. The short list of common topics will be:

• Movies & TV
• Food
• Pop Culture
• Music
• Technology

So why start a blog about things tons of people already write about? Well, I reading about different SaaS companies at Startable and realized that internet marketing isn't just for companies - it's for individuals too. I'm always looking for new opportunity to grow and learn, so I started evaluating what I've been doing to market myself. The answer to that was "not much".

I have Facebook and a different blog but those are just for fun. I read a great post by Mike Volpe about using Twitter to get a job and market yourself, but for me that was out due to the junkiness of my phone and not seeing the point of tweeting from a laptop. I finally jumped on the LinkedIn band wagon about 2 years late, but thought that wasn't enough - thus the creation of this blog. I hope this blog ends up being entertaining as wells a platform to market my personality and other non-resume characteristics. Not a very interesting first post, but you gotta start somewhere!

~emy