MaestroJ - digital strategy & new media

This post is well overdue, but I’ve fallen into one of those very challenging and busy periods at work. So over a deliberately quiet weekend night in, I can finally celebrate the one year anniversary of this blog.

I’ve been writing in blogs for years now, but the desire for this particular incarnation came at a time when I wanted to step up in my professional career. Previous blogs and guest posts felt haphazard, directionless. It felt like a good time to consolidate my efforts into a single channel.

The one key takeout from this blog one year in that to me is glaringly obvious is that I wish I had more time updating it. Although the topics I write about are largely work related, I still have to update off business hours. I’ve considered a tumblr style blog, and even had a lukewarm attempt at posterous, but I think I’m a bit of a blabber. I enjoy words. I enjoy seeing them written down, I enjoy ideas being elaborated on and documented. I like how it feels when what I want to say is gradually articulated as a sentence develops. I always felt my writing style is actually going against what I know is online best practice writing, what I advise people of on a regular basis. We know that people scan online, so content should exist in chunks, with ideas contained, using only the minimum amount of words required on a page, not going for fancy anecdotes and not flouncing around with complicated vocabulary. But I still do those things, guilty as charged.

The other takeout I have is whether this blog deserves a future. Because I specialise in digital ideas and digital strategy, social media trends and topics have played a large part in my content. And really, do we need to add another social media blog to the quagmire? My counter to this of course, is that this blog isn’t exclusively about social media. It focuses on online ideas, which is broad - technologies, social (real world) implications of new technology, how we’re using things online, how our behaviour has changed as a result, campaigns, and more.

An as umbrella content strategy, it has legs beyond the very topic specific blogs out there. Besides I just updated my registration.

So I hope I continue to be able to have conversations with you around the online topics which I’m passionate about, and I really do hope you find at least one thing interesting in my blog dear reader. I’m here to stay.