Last September, I was flying high. It wasn’t just because September is my birthday month, either! It seemed like I could do no wrong on my blog. Every post was doing magically well. On Twitter, I was getting about 100 new followers a week, which was incredible because it had taken me about 3 months to get my first 100 followers. I was riding high and was rather happy with everything.
In late October, I had a business trip, and when I came back, I noticed that my blog posts didn’t seem to be resonating as much. I wasn’t worried. Clearly everyone had missed me and they needed to be pulled out of their funks. But this continued for a few weeks, and to make matters even more disconcerting, my Twitter traffic stopped growing, too. So far as I could tell, I was doing everything the same way. Had I worn out my welcome?
Today, as some of you might know, the long-awaited 2012 New, New Beetle is having its send-off party in Shanghai and New York. There’s a lot of interesting buzz about this product launch. Volkswagen called it a redesign, which is tricky because the look of the Beetle is so unique and recognizable. People are already questioning whether the promotion of the redesign was overstated, while other people are wondering if it’s updated enough to keep interest in the line strong.
Over the weekend, I finally got around to watching Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, a rather interesting flick about a group of rogue US soldiers who specialize in killing Nazis during World War II. Like just about all of Tarantino’s films, the movie is divided into chapters. While I was focusing on the movie, I was also once again enchanted by the tools Tarantino uses to engage his audience with his storytelling. There are five keys that I’ve noticed in Tarantino’s method of storytelling, and I think all five could unlock the power of engaging storytelling for your blog and all of your marketing materials.
Today is a special day for um, well, for me. Today is my official one-year anniversary of my blog, and while I don’t know the exact date that I started using Twitter, I can tell you that I started my personal account sometime after February 10th last year. So, let’s call it a year for me doing Social Media stuff professionally.
In 1848, along the American River in California, on John Sutter’s property, nuggets of gold were uncovered, and the United States, not to mention the world, was changed forever. People who had perfectly comfortable middle class lives in Pennsylvania and New England suddenly said, “Hey, wait, I could go out to California and become the richest guy in town!” People piled into California with picks, spoons, pans, and anything else they could muster, and they all went to the banks of that little California river.
“So what is going on with so and so,” I asked a friend about a mutual friend of ours one day. “Oh, they’re in Europe. They’re posting about their adventures on a site called livejournal. It’s like an online diary, sort of.”