My 3 Words for 2016

Last year I finally decided to take the leap and try Chris Brogan’s “My 3 Words” exercise. In case you are not familiar, the idea is to come up with just three words that frame your goals and intentions for the coming year.

My three words for 2015 were Passion, Social, Grow. Looking back I would say I definitely accomplished some of what I set out to do but not all:

• For Social, I was a lot more active on Twitter and also LinkedIn to some extent. Facebook continues to not have much appeal to me so I focused on the other two.
• I also managed to Grow this blog, although not as much as I would like, and try new things in my marketing career.
• Unfortunately, I did not pursue my Passion of photography much and clearly did not relaunch the website for it.

For 2016, I definitely want to do a lot better in accomplishing more of my 3 words, so without further ado here they are:

• Learn: Marketing has changed a lot over the last few years. While I think I’ve done a pretty good job keeping up with the new trends, there is always stuff I can learn. I want to take more time to learn about several areas of marketing and communications including: social media (and to try at least one new platform beyond LinkedIn and Twitter); marketing automation as it becomes more instrumental to any successful campaign; and web design both from the perspective of what makes a good site even better from the experience to conversion and how to implement it.
• Teach: While everyone can always learn more, I’ve gained a lot of experience over the past 2 decades in marketing and I want to teach that to others. That teaching will start with this blog as I hope to make more of my posts into “how to” ones and to share monthly (or weekly, I hope) tips in the relaunch of my newsletter. But I also want to develop more educational material around the new integrated marketing that I talked about this past year, including a potential course that outlines the steps to develop and execute an integrated marketing plan.
• Write: It’s no secret to some that I have been wanting to write a book for quite some time. The good news is that I’ve started two but the bad news is that neither is finished and I have at least 2 more ideas I would like to turn into a book. I just need to write more in 2016 not just for this blog but I would also like to finish at least one of the books that I started.