Of late I’ve been spending a lot of time getting to grips with my role at Explore. Its not been quite what I was expecting but nevertheless its a good job and I’m enjoying it.
I’ve had a small learning curve about search engine optimisation and PPC - all very ‘technical’ stuff that I hadn’t really considered as part of a marketing role. I had hoped to be doing much more on the social networking and blogging but its not happened to date for a number of technical and business reasons. Still working on it though. I might be able to turn the site into something resemebling web2.0 next year (well I say ‘I’ really its a lot of technical people from other companies).
Adventure travel sure is different from Broadband - in too many ways to go into. Its taken me far longer to get my head around that than I was expecting too. But I do enjoy going into work in a morning and being able to say that I did that.
View over Farnborough is quite good too (not that Farnborough is picturesque…)
Anyway - expect to start blogging more on travel and the web and marketing and stuff as its a good habit I’ve gotten out of, and I might just fix the comments too.
Ah, town. The sun streams down on a relatively quiet clapham jct as I make my way to a show on online travel marketing. I am really enjoying my new job which has its frustrations but then if it wasn’t a challenge it would be dull. It is amazing how difficult it is to convince people of things they know to be right. After all it really is all about word of mouth - although being top in google rankings is still an objective…
And by numbers and scientific proof shall we show our worth. Its a challenge. I am in marketing. Now I never thought I would say that.
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Sent from my Treo
Well, I’ve just spent two weeks on holiday in Hereford/Gloucester/Monmouthshire and that’s why the blogging has been absent. You might have noticed the comments are offline too due to some idiot spammer trying to take down the site and the server I’m hosted on. My thanks to Ian at 34sp.com for sorting that out for me. I hope to get comments back up in the near future.
But holiday was good - a new part of the UK for me and wonderful for the whole nature and food thing. Herefordshire is particularly well known for fruit orchards and cider (as well as meaty stuff that I ignored) but also had some other interesting stuff going on. Notably wine, beer, crisps and ‘homemade’ cakes! I can particularly recommend using the Hop Pocket Wine as it sold some fantastic country wines and liquers.
This was the cottage we stayed in and it was also marvelous - highly recommended if you want to tour the area.
On the subject of tours - my new role has now started at, would you believe, a travel company called Explore. I now have the humble title of e-commerce exec but so far its been a great start and I’m really looking forward to the challenge of marketing Explore online.
I’m hoping to look at utlise blogging to tell you about my experiences although not sure where that will be yet. Watch this space.
Belief is becoming something of a theme at the moment. Connected to Education and Story telling is a powerful hook for me and drives a lot of passion. Mix it with a bit of religion and you could be in for a powder keg. However Philip Pullman and Rowan Williams conversation at the National Theatre highlighted a lot of interesting ideas about religion and its place in the world. Several wonderful ideas not least the most fundamental question we should be asking ourselves are what it means to be human.
On a slightly different note Pullman responds to a question on how to develop spiritualism in children by suggesting views of education. I would suggest that you can also transpose this to life, business, training and anything else that has a human element.
But I think it depends on your view of education: whether you think that the true end and purpose of education is to help children grow up, compete and face the economic challenges of a global environment that we’re going to face in the 21st century, or whether you think it’s to do with helping them see that they are the true heirs and inheritors of the riches - the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, the literary riches - of the whole world. If you believe in setting children’s minds alive and ablaze with excitement and passion or whether it’s a matter of filling them with facts and testing on them. It depends on your vision of education - and I know which one I’d go for
So do I. And I am a successful product of the fact learning vision and I believe it to be fundamentally a failure. When I look at my children I see how their passion and excitement are often squashed. I’ll digg out a story to illustrate this later but for the time being go and read the conversation.
I wrote about my sea change in presenting a pitch solely based on the things I believe here. I promised an update and wonderfully those people who I was pitching to bought my vision of the world. Well, at least they bought me as a person and therefore I have a new role starting in mid April. I’ll talk more about it when the time is right but suffice it to say it is looking after a company’s online brand. So in one fell swoop I get to focus on the things that interest me and hopefully implement the ideas I believe in.
I am now very excited by the prospect and a little annoyed that I can’t get going on it straight away - (I have to see out the notice period on my contract).
One thing I do want to mention is that without blogging I would not have got to where I wanted to be as I have had a lot of advice, ideas and friendship from people online (and in real life) to help me with this. I put it together and did the deed however a quick pointer to the people whose ideas I used (and referenced) hopefully not too gushing and in no particular order:
Johnnie Moore for ideas regarding improv, sound advice and some dessert rather than desert and of course Beyond Branding (well his part of it and the blog).
Curt Rosengren - whose passion catalyst website and books slowly inspired me to use belief
Hugh McLeod - the power of something to believe in is infinte, carttons and of couse Stormhoek wine as a case study
James Cherkoff - whose Open Source Marketing and Open Sauce with Johnnie got me firmly hooked on this way of thinking
Stuart Smith - who first introduced me to complexity theory and keeps wanting to work with me (strange fellow 
)
Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore for Communities Dominate Brands which just puts it in the right way for me.
And my lovely wife, who grounds me and allows me to soar.
Talk to all of these people and you start to get a view of the world that makes more sense than it does for most business and work now.
Blimey… how do I follow that as a post? Answers as always on the metaphorical postcard. By the way, did I mention I was happy ?
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