I Hate Marketing

I hate marketing.  I guess the marketing I'm referring to is the sending of notices through email, twitter, facebook, and every other communication channel you can access. It makes my palms sweat. Makes my heart beat fast. I feel like I'm bothering people. I feel like I'm inundating a lot of already over-inundated people with extra information.

Part of this is that I have to get better at using different communication channels. For example, I sent out a tweet about the Phillyware meeting this thursday. It said:

hey folks, i'm holding a brainstorming meeting for ideas on building civic software community in philly. come by:http://tinyurl.com/24n8g3s

Someone from Refresh Philly repackaged it as:

Interested in building civic software tools for Philly citizens? Join @mjumbewu at @indyhall this Thurs http://bit.ly/9QOg1p

I found that a much more appropriate blast. Why? They both talked about the meeting, but while my message leads with what I was doing, RefreshPhilly's leads with the reason you would be interested. It engages you with a question, an actual prompt through which to consider the meeting, in 140 characters or less.

This is, of course, something that anyone with any experience in marketing would know.