Samples and Circumstances

That’s me in an old pickup truck, shot near Woodstock, New York. Because who doesn’t love an old pickup truck?

Wherein I display a portfolio-like collection of words & links

After a few years of teaching English right after college, I started my editorial career as a travel, shopping and arts editor in San Francisco. I moved onto management positions as I moved around the country, helping companies like Citysearch and AOL develop and implement content strategies that appealed to their audiences and helped their bottom lines. I then worked at Emma, an email marketing software company, where I focused on finding new ways to tell that company’s story and engage the community.

Everywhere I’ve worked for the last decade-plus, I’ve crafted content strategies, including messaging from websites, blogs and social media campaigns to email marketing and ads. At each of those companies, I’ve managed projects between departments to be sure that our content plans effectively aligned with product and technology schedules, and I’ve hired and managed talented, effective (if I do say so myself) editorial teams. And I’ve tracked and measured those plans to be sure they actually worked.

That all makes me an editor, manager and writer with 15 years of content development experience. I’m a strategist who also thrives in the trenches and brings departments together. I’m a creator and implementer of style guidelines and brand standards with a proven blend of creative, editorial and marketing skills. I also enjoy eating cake. You can see more resume-like details (and some recommendations that make me blush a little bit) on my LinkedIn profile.

Nowadays, you can also find me at susangrayblue.com,

A few links to my work:

Blog post about storytelling through email: http://myemma.com/blog/article/email-the-genre-everyone-reads

Blog post about content strategy: http://myemma.com/blog/article/yes-content-strategy

Blog post about an Earth Day initiative, which includes links to an infographic and an email newsletter that were also part of the campaign: http://myemma.com/blog/article/infographic-for-earth-day

Articles written for baby boomer audience for ReZoom: