Confessions of an E-Commerce Strategist

I’ll admit it. I’m no blogger. As a matter of fact, I don’t profess to be. If you read my bio, you may be able to see where I’m coming from. All of my life I’ve been very passionate about creating things. From a very early age I would get in the zone when I was doing anything from building Lego sculptures to sketching flying mutant insect superheros (image below by atmo).

It took me several years to realize that I don’t need to put pencil to sketchpad, or fire up Photoshop to get my creative release. By thinking of things in a new way, doing what others are not and creating a feedback loop for me to improve on the things that I’ve built, created, managed, dreamed of, or otherwise came to fruition, I have been able to vent creatively. It took a long time for me to realize that Norma from Accounting is just as likely to get the same kind of creative release as she builds some kind of super Excel spreadsheet to solve a recurring problem for her department as I would in my job as a “creative type”.

As a person who defines and executes on E-commere and direct marketing strategy every day, it has taken me quite a long time to define and categorize the things I do into two camps: strategy and tactics. It may seem that the work would be easy to categorize, but as many of us get knee deep in the mud of every day tasks, it is sometimes more difficult to see the forest for the trees.

Skellie, at Skelliewag.org wrote an insightful post a few weeks ago about not selling out. Not really sure how this pertains to me and what I’m writing here, but it was thought provoking enough for me to write a post. As I dig into Sphinn and other social media sites, I’ll admit it all seems to be a bit odd. Content for content’s sake. Everyone writing for some kind of traffic home run, rather than what might be useful for prospective readers or customers.

Seems to me to be all tactic and not much strategy.

Definitely something I’ll take into consideration as an E-commerce guy who sometimes impersonates as a blogger.