by Lindsay Odom
Communications Manager, Endeavor
1. How did you get started in your career?
I used to teach writing for a living. Now, I write for a living. I started my career as a professor of literature and grammar, but mostly writing. I initially sought out other opportunities for work in higher education, but, fortunately I signed on with a company called Perspectium, a tech company based in San Diego, which needed a content writer for their marketing department. I now have a new interest in marketing, and I’ve really enjoyed working for them.
2. What is a fun fact about you, or something that people might not know about you?
For freelance work some time ago, I got special access to film at various sites around Washington, D.C. for a website called About.com that the New York Times once owned.
My wife and I traveled to film at all of these different locations, including Mount Vernon, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Zoo, the International Spy Museum, and also multiple exclusive-access rooms at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It was just the two of us and tour guides who showed us around while we were filming.
I’m really grateful for this experience because while video editing is something I dabbled in back then, it’s now something I incorporate as a content marketing manager for Perspectium.
3. What projects are you working on right now?
When I’m writing content, my audience is primarily those who need to know about data and IT system management. The average person probably doesn’t need to know about this, but might have an iPhone that integrates into other pieces of software. For example, when you upload a picture to Instagram from your phone, you can also see that on your desktop computer because Instagram integrates that photo to the application and browser when you pull it up. Perspectium does something similar – we integrate data and workflow across very large enterprise apps and databases, moving massive volumes of data.
I coordinate with other Perspectium staff to publish written and video content online for executives, CIOs, IT teams and IT directors and developers. These are the people who are interested in improving service delivery by automating work flow. A simple way of explaining what we do is getting the right data to the right place at the right time, and the result is that those who need the data have full visibility of the status of the customer or the company.
4. What is your favorite part about Endeavor?
The people. The fact that I can learn so much from them. As a remote worker, it’s really helpful to get that human interaction, so that’s what I enjoy personally.
In reality, the main benefit I’m getting from Endeavor is that it’s a place that has the best setup for me to make calls, get work done,
and focus – and I saw that to be true after I tried out a few other coworking spaces in Greenville.
Talking shop now and then with other professionals is fantastic. I’ve reserved conference rooms to host some informal luncheons, where other Endeavor members have shared some really valuable insights, especially for my field of marketing. I wouldn’t have gathered this helpful information from reading articles or watching videos, but because of Endeavor, I was able to bounce ideas off of other professionals and give them an opportunity to raise ideas in response to our discussion. Since this was a new career for me, learning more about content marketing and even business management helps me to further understand the audience that I’m writing to.
5. What advice do you have for other creatives?
Read stories that are inspiring to you, notice how the storyteller succeeds in connecting with their audience, and then take those same elements to come up with a formula of storytelling. The most important thing you can do is to talk to and listen to customers to identify pain points, because that can be instrumental in the solution of your story.
