I love words!

I love words. I have always loved reading and writing, and my work gives me so many opportunities to communicate with people. It makes me very happy. I don’t know if it’s just me, but there is a thrill, and a sense of accomplishment, when I get the phrasing right, when it all flows, and when I successfully encapsulate (encapsulate is such a good word!) what my client wants into a blog, or social media post, or a marketing message.
 
Tones of voice are so important too. It’s lovely to have different clients where you can adjust how you sound to suit their business. Sometimes you have to be very professional and knowledgeable, sometimes personable and almost chatty, but you can never be yourself.
 
Until now!
 
I’m taking up the 30 day blogging challenge. It’s been so hard for me to write my own blogs, as I feel uncomfortable shouting about what I do. But with a little thought and encouragement from some awesome friends (more of them on a later blog), I’m going to frantically type some stuff down, every day, to say more about what I do.
 
I came out of university with a fascinating but pretty much vocationally useless media and cultural studies degree. I always tell people that it was just three years watching daytime TV in our pajamas as ‘research’ but it was a lot more than that. Sometimes we went out to the cinema too.
 
Marketing seemed a natural choice as a career. It’s all about communication through different channels, so I could take what I learnt in my degree about messages, semiotics and how people think (and act) culturally, and apply it. I took a marketing diploma a little later into my career to cement my knowledge and give it a bit more structure. I also learnt which big words to use to seem more knowledgeable and structured to other people. It works.
 
Now I’m working with my own clients, helping them choose the words that help them communicate with people who need, want or would benefit from their service and product. It’s never, for me, about selling things to people who don’t need them. It’s always been about finding the right market, where they are, and what messages they respond to.
 
Over the next 30 days I’m going to talk a little about what my clients ask and think about, a little about what motivates me and a bit more about how wonderful words are generally. To keep it all together, I’m going to use my (until now, completely useless) quote collection*. These quotes are always going to be very loosely connected to the subject matter, but they are going to be good ones.
 
*I had a notebook full of quotes when I was younger, covered in a collage of band photos. Now there’s Pinterest. The kids are missing out.