Well its been a while since I’ve written in here. A lot has changed since my last post. Over the last 3 month’s I’ve moved to Montreal to test my wits (and language skills!) at Edelman Digital as a Senior Analyst reporting into their New York Office. Getting used to a new location/job…. I think that is reason enough for a bit of a blogging hiatus!
Anyways,on to the meat of this blog post. Since starting in the Marketing/Advertising/Digital (or however you would call it) industry I guess you could say I haven’t had very much interest in the mechanics of the different social media channels but was more so interested in how people react to actions on these channels and simply why people do the things they do on the net. After reading “Truth,Lies & Advertising: The Art Of Account Planning” I hit a bit of a ‘AH HA!” moment in so that to do well in marketing you need to have an understanding of what your customers do and why they do it. Particularly in Digital this is a combination of understanding online conversations and actions along with your audiences offline actions and feelings. Through reading the book I came to an understanding that while my reporting on the numbers side of agregate online actions was strong, to truly be good at what I’m doing I need to get a better understanding of the whole picture.
Stumbling quite randomly on a tweet from @Robertc1970 I came across the “A[P]SOTW Assignment” which peaked my interest in so much that its a challenge to look at the whole picture of online and offline consumer interaction. The intro to the assignment is found below and the full spec can be found at Rob Campbells site.
So in general why am I posting this here? Well I figure by blogging about my process and research I can piece together my thought process. Also simply by making my process public it forces me to go through with this, rather than say I’ll do it and push it off.
Anyways, wish me luck with this! I think my big challenge will be balancing time as perhaps I already have a lot on my plate as it is ( new city, new language, new job… yikes!) I really want to give this a go as even though I probably don’t stand a chance at winning this it will be a good exercise in stretching my brain a bit.