This blog is written by James Carson, Digital Marketing Manager at Bauer Media. I work with brands like FHM, heat, Empire and Grazia to improve their digital offering.
I’m currently writing a book, and wrote an edit of the below, which is a longish summary of my career, as an introduction. You might find it interesting, you might think I’m mad.
It’s a work in progress.
Graduation
I studied English and History at the University of York. I got a 2:1 and didn’t break any waves. I also didn’t really know what I really wanted to do afterwards.
I had some dream of being a writer. I thought I might write for a magazine like FHM eventually, or I might become a novelist. Both careers suited me fine. I’d written a load of unfinished work, so while I was on the dole in the Summer, sending away applications to jobs I hadn’t got any hope in getting, I kept on writing.
I applied to Mi5, but quit the application process before it got serious. I interviewed at a market research company, but I interviewed really badly. I applied to pubs, clubs, boats and dead end nothingness, but got nothing. At one point I even applied to work as a bingo caller. I didn’t get that either.
Somewhere along the line I worked out that there was something called copywriting – where you write copy for adverts and product packaging. I thought that sounded interesting, so I did some research and submitted a bunch of applications. No one said I had relevant experience. Once the Summer turned into Autumn, I cut my losses, got off the dole and started working in a box factory. It was absolute hell. I couldn’t understand how graduating could pay so little.
Holiday Extras
In November, I finally got a job as a copywriter at Holiday Extras; all I had to show for half a year was a whole new bunch of 10,000 word unfinished manuscripts and a lot of rejection emails. One guy had even lambasted me that I couldn’t spell the second word in my application. “Dear Goerge”.
I worked at Holiday Extras for a year as an online copywriter. In that time I learnt HTML, image cutting and wrote web pages. I wrote and rewrote copy on airport parking and theme park breaks so it would help the sites rank better on Google. It really was an entry level job; low pay and the only progression seemed to be by joining the ranks of the CSS coders. My boss didn’t seem to do much other than what she was told.
But I was hungry. Some people tipped me off about the social media boom and the long tail and I started reading up on them. It quickly dawned on me that no one at the company really knew what they were doing. It was sometimes fun work – I was sent off to theme parks for much of the summer so I could write up about them – but it was also woefully low pay and I wasn’t learning that much. Once I discovered that simply rewriting and refreshing copy was woefully ineffective, and there were far better methods out there, I resigned without a job to go to. I had to move to London.
In that year, I’d managed to write a 50,000 manuscript about school days, but it didn’t nearly have the structure of a novel. It still sits on my computer, waiting for someone to finish it.
Greenlight Search Marketing
After about four more interviews and rejections in the space of three weeks, I got a copywriting position at Greenlight Search Marketing, where I thought they’d know a lot more. They certainly did know a whole lot more about Search Engine Optimisation. They knew about links and tactics to place them, optimising website so they’d fly up the rankings. They had a huge system where all of their clients were constantly tracked and monitored. All the time I learnt about links, SEO and anchor text. Which types of links were effective, what the relevancy was to the copy of the link.
I also learned how to write fast. When I started I was stumbling around for something to inspire me about mortgages, writing god-awful 500 word pieces that a few partners complained about. Within three months I knew everything a 22 year old could know about personal finance. I could write a 500 word piece about stoozing (Google it) in half an hour. I found the topic so fascinating I lived it, and I got all of the best deals in the market, including a fixed rate bond and a credit card which could transfer a balance into a current account. Thanks to this job, I learned ways that you could open a few accounts up and earn close to £1,000 in a year by doing very little. I knew my topic inside out and I could write it in twenty minutes.
Andreas Pouros - COO of Greenlight
But I also had this growing longing to do more. All I ever did was write long copy articles to be published, quite out of the way of human eyes. Search engines would index them, and they might like the anchor text links I was placing towards a client, but there wasn’t much evidence that anyone ever read them. On a number of occasions my manager told our team to keep our writing uninspiring, ‘because you don’t want it getting shared.’ This annoyed me. All at the same time the social media revolution was beginning to unfold. People were beginning to get excited about Facebook, Twitter and Digg and so was I. I had more to give than being uninspiring.
I spoke to the MD (Andreas Pouros) at length about my direction. After not too much persuasion, he suggested I become a researcher with the SEO team, and be at the forefront of social media knowledge. It sounded good.
Within a month I was proficient at pulling datasets from Google and shaping them into hugely meaningful keyword analysis lists. It was a unique skill, and one that taught me excel. Without it, I would be in a very different path now.
SEGA
But ultimately, I had very little to do. I quenched my thirst for social media by writing some white papers on the subject. They were both large undertakings, and thoroughly enjoyable, but I just felt I was in a different time zone, and this company didn’t care enough about that particular future. I wanted to work for a big brand, and I had a friend at SEGA Games who got me an interview. I went, got the job, and was working for them within a week. In retrospect, considering Greenlight’s powerful growth, it probably wasn’t the best decision I made. I guess I got seduced by a brand that I’d loved since childhood.
By this time, I had planned and begun writing an entire novel. Somehow or other, just because I felt it was necessary, I also built my own website in HTML and CSS from scratch. It was called www.kavosonthelash.com. I took it down because it wasn’t worth the hosting. But I still have all the content. Someone annoying bought the domain though.
SEGA excited me because it was a brand with clout. People who bought from it had passion and I’d known it since I was a child. For this reason, I could feel it was a sleeping giant for social media success. I joined as Web Editor to take responsibility of central website content.
In my first week I did close to nothing, which seemed odd. I thought it would pick up. Then, I was moved offices from Central London to Brentford which confused me somewhat. I tried to write a few pieces, but my manager told me I had to submit them through a Brand Manager. When they were returned to me, the whole lot had been rewritten. Sometimes I couldn’t write about a product at all, because it was ‘led’ by SEGA of America, who created the brand guidelines. It didn’t take long to realise that I wasn’t a Web Editor at all. I just posted stuff that people gave me.
To occupy my time I took it upon myself to do other things. The two community guys had a lot of passion, but they didn’t know much about social media, so it was misdirected. I was the inside out of them – I actually cared very little about video games. In a meeting I took the reins, got the disparate Facebook profiles and pages consolidated without SEGA of America’s permission and set the cornerstone for massive growth. SEGA of America subsequently went nuts, but the community team took most of the flack. I’d just gone and done something.
Social media still fascinated me, but I could never really gauge what it really meant. It was cool that we had 30,000 fans for our official page on Facebook, but I couldn’t understand it. Something was telling me that it was brilliant, but I didn’t really know why. The community team were terribly frightened about the whole thing. They wouldn’t post anything without Brand Manager permission, but a Brand Manager was normally too busy to answer their emails, and a community manager too timid to go over and see them. The consequence was to do very little. We posted a few things – stuck up some videos and photos, and all the while it grew, but we weren’t sure where it was going.
Alongside my interest in the growing social profiles, and my increasing free time against duties I was meant to be doing but couldn’t do, I realised that SEGA had no idea about SEO; they just about knew what it was, but it certainly wasn’t important. Thus you had a crack team of brilliant flash designers and .php developers who would build robust CMS systems and beautiful flash sites, but which would never appear on the first page of Google for what they were built for. I thought this was a massive waste, and as someone who had just come from two companies for whom SEO was the core of their business, I stepped in. I created keyword analysis and provided them some documents about progressive enhancement and not relying on flash. I spoke about it to the Head of Online and my own manager, who seemed to agree, but no rational human being would have been to the contrary.
In the meantime I continued to write my novel. I could have done it at work, but never did. That’s largely because at work you are constantly distracted, and it takes a certain frame of mind to sit down at your computer and concentrate. Also, I can’t say I wanted anyone seeing what my grand plan was. I always had the feeling that people that said they were writing novels weren’t really writing them at all, they were more just writing snippets like I had just after University. Back then, I would say I was writing a novel, but I wasn’t really. However, by Autumn 2008, I really was on the path to writing a novel, and I had a clear goal, but I kept it in my own time.
Returning to work in the morning, I realised no one really cared about what I had to say. They kept on building flash sites, and the SEO and bug fixes on the main product stalled while the entire web development team spent their time building an flash gaming site. While it was clear that I couldn’t do anything I wanted to do, rather than push my agenda my boss got me building a monthly newsletter, translated into six different languages and two different age groups, which normally took an entire week to produce. Still, it gave me something to do. In the remaining time I stared at our main website, our social media profiles and our duff flash microsites and thought of the difference they could be making, if only someone with a little authority, somewhere, knew what I had come to know.
Travelling
In Summer 2009 I realised that time was running out on me chasing my dream around the world, and rather than sit stewing doing nothing but email and watching Facebook pages grow, I quit, and I flew to Singapore. By this time I had completed a finished novel manuscript and submitted it to fourteen agencies.
I spent seven months travelling around the world. I guess I wanted to achieve some universal feeling of freedom, of being able to walk anywhere with astonishing confidence and completely overcome the social fears I had come to bear in my regular life. But heavy goals never bear all the fruit. I spent most of my time alone, as I travelled solo, thinking of my ex-girlfriend, which was unexpected. Secondly, I had never really considered the fears and insecurity that a mixture of drinking and travelling alone could bring; the sense of loathing when you repeated your motions to a new set of people for the tenth time, the hanging around with groups who you wouldn’t really get on with, or flying alone to a new continent five times to completely start again. It made me consider what’s most important in life; loyalty, companionship and fidelity. Those people who you get along with might want to make you scream if you’re with them too much, but they’re there if you need them. They’re not when you’re thousands of miles away. I missed a lot of people that I didn’t know I’d miss.
By the time I left Australia, six weeks from the end, I had written an 80,000 word travel blog but never promoted it. It sits there, just as it did when I published the last post while I was in Melbourne, South Australia, at www.jamescarson.co.uk/travel.
Bauer Media
I’m currently working here and disclosing further information would be fairly unprofessional. But being there suggests it’s been a success considering my propensity to jump at all the other companies I worked for. In my first year I was nominated for two Bauer Magazine and Digital Awards in 2011, but won neither, I was also up for PPA Data and Digital Team of the Year – I guess there is an I in team. I didn’t win that one either – I’m getting good at coming second.
By now, I’ve largely given up on being a novelist; having not put finger to pad in my own creative way since I’d sent my manuscript. I’ve had a fairly short career, but it’s been a good one, and I’ve web edited and consulted around a huge amount of content at a mixture of small agencies and massive brands and corporate climates. I hope you’ve enjoyed finding out about it. If you’ve read this far, then you must have done.
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