Reflecting on Five Years of Blogging & Working: Looking to the Future [PART 5]

In November 2013 I started at Indeed, the world’s #1 job site. Although, I’ve been working in various content roles for the last decade, this was my first pure content marketing position. My job is to develop content that raises awareness of Indeed, helps generate leads for our sales team and improves retention of existing clients.

There’s a lot of discussion around whether content marketing overlaps PR, and while I would say there’s similarities and we share many of the same tactics, our goals are often different. A content marketer wants to raise awareness so people do (buy) something, a PR wants to raise awareness so people think something. Content marketing is immediate and apparent, whereas PR is longer term and more discreet. But I suspect that’s a blog post for another day.

Indeed really is a great place to be. The work is challenging, my colleagues are fantastic and I feel lucky to have a wonderful manager. The culture of the company is entrepreneurial and the products are world-class. It’s also fun working in Dublin’s buzzing Silicon Docks. Technology is embedded within Indeed and as a digital native, I not only find this refreshing, but essential.

In previous roles, technology was a constant source of stress and frustration for my colleagues and I. It may seem like a small thing, but working on a MacBook Air instead of a clunky desktop, having Hangouts, not calls and using Google Docs, rather than editing and sending on Word documents, means that I work and collaborate more quickly and effectively. Tech like this just makes working easy.

To give you an insight into tech frustrations I have experienced in other roles, one day it was announced that a ‘paperless office’ initiative was going to be introduced. This is a good idea and has been executed by many leading companies, the only drawback was that we all had desktop PCs. Try having a meeting without a laptop or notepad. It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t backed up with an investment in technology. So the notepad won. I’m pleased to say there are no such challenges at Indeed — we all have the right tools and technology to do our jobs.

Times are good at Indeed, and while we may be the #1 in many european countries, we can still do a better job of telling our story. 2015 promises to be another exciting year.

Anyway, I’d like to conclude this series by thanking you, the dear reader who has taken time out of their schedule to read my ramblings. It’s thanks to you that I keep blogging. Over the last 18 months, many bloggers have ceased writing or reduced the frequency in which they share their thoughts in favour of other platforms, but I’m more determined than ever to keep this blog going.

For me, the best is yet to come from Social Web Thing. Blogging has opened many doors, enabled me to meet lots of people, got me a couple of jobs and gave my reputation a boost at the start of my career — when like many others, I was looking to boost my employability and differentiate myself among the sea of graduates with their 2:1s. I’m excited about where my blog will take me next.

With more people moving away from blogging to more immediate platforms, this only shines a stronger a light on those that blog.

This post concludes my candid, scrappy five part series to celebrate fives years of Social Web Thing (I hope you’ve enjoyed it), and I’d like to finish with one piece of advice.

Keep blogging.