This space is evolving.

I started this blog almost 3 years ago. At the time, I had been out of college and working at a small marketing and design shop in Oklahoma City for a little less than a year. I was still in the process of deciding exactly what where I wanted to go with my career, and I felt that the best way to find the right path was to continue learning and exploring.

This desire to learn started well before this blog. After graduation my desire to keep learning hit a new level. I became a sponge, soaking up information from business books, ebooks, blogs, podcasts and anything information that I could get my hands on. I absorbed it all. Or as much of it as a normal sized brain can.

Keeping up this habit for a period of months I felt like I needed a place to share my own thoughts. I was making connections between the things I was reading, and the world around me, but these thoughts never went any farther than the inside of my head, and maybe a few friends and colleagues. I needed a place to capture these thoughts. A place to share ideas and make them real. A place to connect with others that were interested in the same ideas. And with that The Marketing Fresh Peel was born.

A lot has changed since the launch of this site. The initial content idea for this space was to write about marketing strategies and ideas. But my curious nature combined with my interests in technology, social media, brand strategy, and an ever-growing obsession with studying human behaviors have led me to thinking and writing about topics I never envisioned in the beginning. But that’s how blogging goes. It’s an evolving process.

I’ve also changed. As I announced at the beginning of the year, I relocated to Dallas to join ranks of Fleishman-Hillard’s growing global network of digital professionals. We have a stacked team in Dallas, full of talented people with experience from various disciplines: film, digital shops, advertising, public relations, word of mouth marketing, and a lot more. And we’re still learning how to work together, building our own model for how we think a new age communication firm should work. And we’re still growing.

During this building process I landed a spot in the strategic planning group. My natural curiosity and addict-like habits for consuming and curating massive amounts of online content were a natural fit. I finally have an outlet and the needed tools to satisfy my love for research, and I can put my obsession with human behaviors to good use.

Things have changed. My thinking has evolved. I’ve evolved. It’s only natural that this space evolve as well. So here’s what’s changing:

1. New Name

The name of this blog is changing from The Marketing Fresh Peel to simply The Fresh Peel. Having “marketing” in the title made sense in the beginning, but it doesn’t quite fit the range of content published here anymore.

2. More Research

Now that I have access to a wider range of research tools, I’m going to make it a point to use these resources to help connect the dots and paint a clearer picture around the ideas presented here.

3. More Exploration and Experimentation

In the past, the collaboration and comments on this blog has come and gone in waves. I’m going to make an effort to use this space more as a testing ground for ideas, and I’ll need your help with feedback and thoughts along the way. I won’t be looking for comments for comments sake, but people who enjoy challenging and improving ideas.

4. Curation

This is one of the things that I am most excited about. I’m revamping and systematizing the way I collect and share other content. Sure I consume and share a lot of content, but the sharing part typically ends up happening at random. So I’ve created two different Tumblr sites where I’m sharing all of the interesting things that I come across, and it gives me a place to reference back to when I need to find something again.

The sites are: Freshly Peeled, which will include content like infographics, charts, slide decks, videos, and pdfs. Juicy Finds, links to articles written by others.

Everything posted to these sites will show up in the Fresh Peel RSS feed, but will only be posted to the individual sites. (If you’re not subscribed, you can do so for free via RSS or Email.)

[Update: After months of trying to manage the curation method above, I simply found it too much for me to handle by myself. So I have decided to go back to just one blog. I will still continue to pump all of the content above into one spot, but it will be hosted in one place.]

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This space has evolved. What do you think?

Photo Credit: Sai