We interrupt this marketing blog to bring you a purely personal post. Well, that's not entirely true. It's a personal post with a marketing twist.If you stop by my desk, you'll find an assortment of fountain pens, usually kept on a pen holder or in a mahogany and glass display case that my colleagues have deemed the "pen humidor." I prefer to use fountain pens because they're distinctive, elegant and they require me to really focus on what I'm writing.
For about 2 1/2 years I've been at an award-winning traditional agency - in some ways a fountain pen of the marketing world. Staffed with incredibly intelligent and talented people with distinctive personalities, the agency has given me an opportunity to help clients address complex problems for sophisticated audiences.
But as you know, I've been writing about marketing in the social media space for the last year or so and have craved social media marketing projects at every turn. As my agency is small and focused on B2B clients, the opportunities have been limited. So I've managed to educate myself on the subject and to interact with some intelligent, creative and well-connected new media people, both online and in person.
My initial interest in the space was instigated from a keynote presentation at the 2006 Boston Ad Club symposium where I heard Joseph Jaffe speak. From then on, I had the bug, leading to an inexorable flow of RSS feeds and podcasts as well as the formation of my blog (I have still kept my other blog as a social media laboratory of sorts).
So when Jaffe & Co. launched crayon last October, I watched the whole thing unfold. The initial announcements, the various podcast plugs, the launch in Second Life - I was excited that new marketing was being given a boost. I even closed that October 20, 2006 blog post with "Talk about a dream job!"
Fast forward to this March, when I heard Joseph speak at the Ad Club Symposium again, this time with C.C. Chapman in tow. I was much more prepared - so much so that C.C. and I were exchanging Twitter messages across the floor of the event. Joseph, C.C. and I connected briefly at the event, followed up with a wave of emails, tweets and phone calls, and finally came to a mutual decision:
On June 4th, I officially join the crayon team.
Dream job, indeed. I'll be working with crayon clients to help them understand new media opportunities and, with the help of the crayon creative & strategic team, to help build new marketing campaigns and social media outreach programs for some major brands.
As you can imagine, I'm incredibly excited about the opportunity - not only do I get to do what I love on a daily basis, but I get to do so with some people I really admire and respect. So now, rather than being filled with lustrous fountain pens, my pen humidor is going to look something like this:
There will be a follow up post on "how social media helped me land my new job," in which I'll detail the steps that I took - some of which led to very interesting conversations, others which didn't pan out - all of which were directly linked to being part of the larger new marketing social network. It may even be something of a case study for putting social media to work as a tool in your career development.
Over the next two weeks, I'll be spending time with my family (in particular prepping for Drew's 1st birthday), accomplishing some tasks around the house, getting my home office organized and continuing to delve into this amazingly fertile and fluid world of new media.
Happy coloring!
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