I've decided to do a few posts tonight just cause I'm in the mood and So You Think You Can Dance is my alternative (besides playing games on the computer but I'm tired and don't want to start that up right now).

I want to talk a little bit about what I've been doing at work. For those of you that don't know I've jumped all over the Marketing space since I moved out to Boston.

Starting in public relations then moving onto direct mail production doing a brief stint as a resume editor and helping a college update their web site until I finally settled into a role that was going to include some search engine marketing at Snowbound.

And if you have ever done a search in Google or one of the other engines, like Yahoo! or MSN, and you see those little ads long the top, or along the side. Well, let me just tell you that they take a lot more work than you might think.
I've been taking over the program from an outside vendor that we were using, so I've had to familiarize myself with how the algorithms work (as much as an outsider can know), what keywords make the most sense for our business, and how to cram enough content into the ad copy to get people interested.

In fact, for the last 2 weeks I've been going through collecting information on every single keyword that we have in Google Adwords because this really hasn't been done since it was set up in 2003! Wow.
But, I've learned many things about how to market on this new thing call the Internet. And I tell you what, I think it's going to stick around for a while.

But, and the point that I intended to make with this post is that I've also had the opportunity to do more marketing writing. Which is what my entire goal was when I moved out here. Only took me 2.5 years to find a job where I could.
One of the first projects that I was given when I came onboard at Snowbound (over a year now) was control of the newsletter.
In fact, as I was going through the archives, we launched a new look and new content focus for the newsletter only 2 months after I arrived. It's amazing to think about that now.
The major difference from the old style to the new is that our newsletter feature is not based around the latest feature in our products anymore. We write a neutral, informative article that talks about some aspect of the imaging industry. We are then able to showcase one of our products that relates to the topic, but we don't hoc our wares in the feature.
If any of you have been around marketing, you may understand the uphill battle we have had in keeping our features neutral. The pressure and seduction of including yourself as the role-model for issues or answer to problems is great. However, a year into our experiment (and we have successfully avoided the temptation to revert) our executives been bringing back feedback from customers about how much they like our newsletter articles and that they pass them around to each other.
Wow! Pay off! Of course, that raises the bar for me because I write all of those articles. I have to say that the realization of our vision from last year is very satisfying.
And even more so when I read our competitor's newsletters and see they are still plodding away with the old "product news" based articles.

Coming up next month I'm also going to take over writing the press releases (at least for the rest of the summer) and content on our Web site. This is a good chance for me to put into practice the messages I've learned are important to us and further hone my writing skills.