The Non-starter’s Resolution

Welcome to the Vignette blog and my first blog post. I had a hard time getting started with blogging, so I’ve been happy the team got us out of the gate. Great job so far Vignetters! Thank you.

We want to keep our blog simple and share our point of view. This is our forum to pull back the curtain and show you how we work and play, and create some conversation around thoughtful and innovative employee communications. We hope you enjoy what we have to share and hope to hear what you think about it.

Back to getting started… My reluctance to sit down and write has reached some legendary proportions here in the studio. There is even talk of the marketing team interviewing me and then turning that into ‘writing.’ I’ve convinced myself it is time to suck it up, put my hands on the keyboard and get moving.

To kick off our blog in 2014 we are experimenting with the idea of unique themes for each month. January is about ‘getting started.’ Since it is the top of year and everyone is making resolutions and planning, we thought ‘Starting Fresh’ would work for our first theme. Time to clean your desk, organize your junk drawer, clean out the shared fridge and make some executive decisions about throwing out expired salad dressing. Time to convert your good intentions into real ideas and actions for 2014.

Later this month we are going to share an internal communications planning tool to help you outline what you want to accomplish this fiscal year. We are working on blog posts on topics like designing a new employee on-boarding program and how to jump-start your internal social network.

In 2013, we found some of our most successful and personally rewarding projects were the ones that had the mostrobust discovery effort. Dave is going to share with you our approach and insights on the discovery phaseof our projects and how important it is to the end result.

And January would not be complete without some predictions and trend-spotting. We are pulling together our team’s predictions for 2014 in employee communications and retail communications. I have to warn you: some of these may be a little out there!

A last note on getting started: If you find beginnings as hard as I do, I strongly recommend picking up Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Ann Lamott. An amazing readthat will stick with you and get your brain thinking, your heart feeling, and your pen moving.

Happy 2014 everyone. Best of luck and I hope our paths cross sometime soon.

-Mike