Matthew Amsden

Re-Entry Blog Re-Launches

Over the past six months, I've been doing a little experiment with blogs in social policy. The Re-Entry Blog, at www.tpci.us, is a site for people across government and social service who support those leaving prison and re-entering the community.

Andy Towle provided some valuable consulting to make the site not only interesting and useful to policy makers - but insightful to people who aren't aware of what a major force ex-offenders have on our communities, services - and our culture in general.

Take a look - until I got involved with this project, I had no concept of the challenges almost 600,000 people being released from prison each year face. The US has the worlds largest prison population - 98% of them will be released. This website, sponsored by the National Institute of Corrections is part of a major effort to redefine how we handle this challenge.

Banner Ad Prototypes

Here are a couple of test ads for a online survey campaign aimed at men who have sex with men (who may not actually identify as gay). They survey is being supported by the Centers for Disease Control and is meant to be a mirror of the nationwide brick and mortar survey that AIDS action conducts at gay clubs and bars. The CDC is concerned that survey recruiting at gay clubs over emphasizes urban men who self identify as gay - and almost completely ignores those that are less connected with the gay community.

So we've created a couple of prototypes to recruit for the survey online. The ads will run primarily at Manhunt, Gay.com, and Friendster, with additional recruiting at several other lesser known sites. These are just prototypes - and I need your input.

Let me know what you think - would you click on any of these? Click the comments button below, or send me an e-mail with your thoughts. Keep returning as I'll post new prototypes an changes as we come up with them.

Also, if you have any ideas - let me know.

Prototype ! - We don't want to label you

and for different ages/ethnic groups

Prototype 2 - I Want You

Blogging: A Cure for Information Overload Induced Attention Deficit Disorder

Blogging: A Cure for Information Overload Induced Attention Deficit Disorder

Personal weblog of Microsoft Marketer, John Porcaro writes today about how blogging helps a company. His points are important as much for personal professional development as they are for the competiveness of an organization.

I connected most with his statement, "my blog ... forces me to focus on a topic I’ve been pondering long enough to write about it." At work, as I deal with a hundred e-mails (only a fraction of which are worthwhile), numerous interruptions, and a constant flow of interesting information, I've begun to develop what I'll call information overload induced attention deficit disorder. To be an effective leader, we are also taught to make quick decisions and execute.

Writing about professional issues of interest, necessitates slowing down and focusing for a couple of quality minutes. Sometimes I've realized during those couple of minutes I really do not know as much about an issue as I thought - so I take more time to fill in the gaps.

Finally, watching people take a look at my blog, I realize that few are very different than I. If my point does not come across in a split second – my reader is on to another interruption, another meeting, or another piece of information that they can more quickly digest. This realization is forcing me to think about changing my writing style - shorter, crisper sentences - no fluff.

I am not quite there yet. Next week I plan to seperate my professional posts from personal ones in two separate blogs. I realize that there are two vastly different audiences who visit my site - one who is interested in marketing, another interested in - well everything else, but certainly not marketing. There will be a lot of cross fertilization between the two blogs, but I hope it will keep my readers attention by focusing content more specific to their interests.