Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2018 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 50

The Haystick Method was born out of 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 this new platform as a part of their marketing efforts.

The aim of our team was to help brands work with influential bloggers, because in 2004 (prior to Facebook and Twitter) “social media” mainly referred to blogging. There was only one problem with this well-intentioned plan—none of us knew very much about blogging.

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

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 wasn’t meant to involve spending time writing a blog? I realized I had to become more disciplined about how I collected ideas.

At first I focused on finding ideas for blog posts, usually collected by scribbling them into a notebook or emailing them to myself. Then I decided to include ideas from the daily brainstorming meetings I attended. Pretty soon I expanded to saving quotes from books and ripping pages out of magazines.

Those first four years of blogging helped me land my first book deal with McGraw-Hill. Several years later, in 2011, 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.²

My point in sharing this story is to illustrate how the pressure to find enough ideas worth writing about consistently on my blog helped me to get better at saving and sharing ideas that people cared about. Blogging helped me become a collector of ideas, which is the perfect introduction to the first step in the Haystack Method.