Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2017 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 47

The Haystick Method was born from frustration.

In 2004, I was part of a team that was starting one of the first social media–focused practices within a large marketing agency. The idea was that we would help big companies figure out how to use social media.

Back then “social media” mainly referred to blogging since it was before Facebook and Twitter. The real aim of our team was to help brands work with influential bloggers. There was only one problem with this well-intentioned plan—none of us knew very much about blogging.

So, we all did the only thing that seemed logical to do: each of us started blogging for ourselves.

In June of that year I started my “Influential Marketing Blog” with an aim to write about marketing, public relations and advertising strategy. My first post was on the dull topic of optimal screen size for web designers. Within a few days I ran into my first challenge: I had no plan for what to write about next.

How was I going to keep this hastily created blog current with new ideas and stories when I already had a full time day job that didn’t officially involve spending time writing a blog?

I realized I had to become more disciplined about how I collected ideas.

At first my aim was just to find ideas for blog posts, scratched into a notebook or emailed to myself. Then, I included ideas from the many brainstorms I was involved in on a daily basis. Pretty soon I was saving quotes from books, ripping pages out of magazines and generating plenty of blog posts (and client ideas!) based on the ideas I had collected.

These first four years of blogging led to my first book deal with McGraw-Hill. Several years later, the desire to write a blog post about trends based on ideas I had collected across the year led me to publish the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report in 2011.

My point in sharing this story is to illustrate how collecting ideas helped me to get better at saving and sharing ideas that people cared about. I became a collector of ideas—which describes perfectly the first step in the Haystack Method.