Welcome to a creative mind: I’m Justice Mitchell, a Creative Director and marketing specialist passionate about sharing insights into education, marketing, and design to inspire and empower. Through these articles, I aim to educate, inform, and spark ideas that help others grow their skills and understanding. This blog also serves as my portfolio, showcasing my work and approach. I invite you to connect with me here or through my social media channels. I look forward to actively listening to you and continuing our conversations!
The Ghost in the Machine: Technology Begets Insanity - Part One
This is an interesting subject for me to approach, for it has to do with me personally as well as countless people I feel extremely close to. We are increasingly a society that reaches for pharmaceutical assistance in order to maintain “normality.”
About a decade ago, midway through my career, I reached a point where I thought something was wrong with me mentally. Years later I learned this was the result of long-term stress, anxiety and cumulative decision-making that is so prevalent within the world I call my career.
The Politics of Online and Social Media
Whether you watched the presidential election results with a “the sky is falling” reaction or a “raise the roof” dance, you can’t argue that we’ve all been affected one way or another. However, the bigger question for me is whether people made their decision early in the campaign season or were influenced by information they picked up closer to Election Day.
Social Storytelling: Ways to Create Myth and Lore
There is still a great gap between social storytelling and social media. It’s not nearly as wide as the gulf on Facebook between conservatives and liberals. But it’s a gap nonetheless.
The marketer in me says that if I get too far down the storytelling path, the “call to action” for my client may be overlooked within the content. However, social storytellers would say the application of a defined message from an external source could corrupt or misalign the audience’s attention.
Mission Control for Your Personal Brand
When people first construct a “personal brand,” the last thing they're concerned about is juggling the content, data, monitoring and associated analytics that come along for the ride. Personal branding sounds like a great idea on the surface. It allows you to control ownership of your voice, create thought leadership and add credibility to your professional outreach.
Conference 101: Give the People What They Want
You’re producing an upcoming conference, and you have a thousand items on the to-do list. Layer on top of that a budget and needs assessment to go along with the thousand tasks.
Reality check: You need to sacrifice a few darlings on your list. Prioritize based on the wants and desires of people attending the event. Your main concern should be the owners of the butts that occupy all those folding chairs. They even supersede your the wants and desires of sponsors. This little detail often seems to escape the novice event producer.
110% Blogger Outreach – Lessons from #IBM
You wanna be one of the cool kids in the marketing lunchroom? Then you damn well better have a blogger outreach program.
This is a micro-PR concept in which you research popular bloggers within the context of the client you are trying to promote. More often than not, you want to share a product or service with the blogger with the intent of getting a positive review or mention.
Take Small Steps With “Big Data”
I was incredibly fortunate to participate as a VIP blogger at the recent Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2012. The event was a virtual Who's Who of social media, business, technology, distribution and enterprise experts at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin resort in Orlando Florida.
It Was More Than Buildings ...
I was a much younger man then. Fill with energy and rage for that day. Days would follow and we would fall further into blame. The flags went up and so did the fists. Status quo.
Today, I take my little girl to school. I look into the eyes of the future, my future, possibly your future. All I see there is love, laughter, dreams and discovery. We must now teach undying fearlessness with dogged practicality.