Over the years I’ve been one of the primary writers for a number of corporate blogs for my employers. Those posts and articles represent a substantial portion of my professional portfolio and provide insights into what the prevailing conversations were at the time as well as how I viewed the blog medium and what I was doing with it.

Over the last week or so I’ve worked to make sure this site represented that history and experience as best as possible.

Bacon’s Blog

When I proposed the launch of a blog to Bacon’s Information, the Chicago-based media directory/monitoring service I worked for, blogging was still pretty new. I argued, though, that the company needed to have a voice in the growing world of self-publishing. Eventually, I was given the latitude to set up a TypePad blog (this is before WordPress was widely available and I thought Blogger might be a bit too low-tech) and give things a try.

While I got my hand-slapped a couple times, the effort overall was a success, I thought. It not only helped establish Bacon’s “new media” credentials but gave me a platform where I could write posts like this that responded to conversations about the company in a full and complete way. Monitoring blogs and keywords also allowed me to find situations, where people were upset with Bacon’s for some reason and reach out to them, leading to stories like this, were someone’s previous comments were retracted.

Unfortunately, Bacon’s deleted the blog a few weeks after I left the company since there was no one there who wanted to keep it going. Thankfully I archived all those posts and have republished them here for the sake of completeness.

MWW Group’s Open the Dialogue

When Tom Biro hired me at MWW Group in 2005, it was after we’d already been working together for a year or more. I’d been writing for AdJab and other Weblogs, Inc blogs in that time and Tom was the editor for AdJab and the two of us quickly developed a close working relationship via IM and other channels. Outside of that he was already a well-known media/marketing blogger, managing The Media Drop, a blog chronicling changes and updates in the media world. And he’d started Open the Dialogue, the official blog of MWW’s new media practice.

So when I came on board it was natural that I’d join him on that blog. Over the next two years we kept up a pretty steady cadence of writing there, each of us contributing as we had time, even if it was just one of our “LOTD” (Links of the Day) roundups of quick-hit stories we weren’t able to give more attention to. We live-blogged BloggerCon, BlogOrlando and more, reviewed books, weighed in on general industry conversations and more. Writing with Tom both there and at AdJab continues to be one of the highlights of my career, even outside of the incredible client work we pulled off.

Again, though, those archives were taken off the internet shortly after both of us left MWW in mid-2008. The site was redesigned and replatformed, which is why I’ve republished my posts, which I grabbed on my way out the door.

Voce/Porter Novelli/PNConnect

I wrote a lot in my time at Voce. Not surprising, given I was there for nine years. The Voce Nation Blog was already well-established when I got there thanks to the efforts and leadership of Mike Manuel, Josh Hallett, Nick Gernert and others. So I was honored not only to contribute but quickly become editor-in-chief of that blog, able to write my own stuff and manage the contributions of others. It was a great responsibility and one that I didn’t take lightly. After Voce was acquired by Porter Novelli I took over similar duties on that blog, as well as the subsequent PNConnect blog for the agency’s social media marketing practice.

While there are countless great things I did at Voce – check out my case studies for DC Entertainment and Sony Entertainment Network for just two examples – one thing I’m most proud of is the evolution of what would become a much bigger effort. At some point, probably in mid- to late-2009, I started sending weekly news roundups to the eight or nine folks within Voce Connect because not everyone read as extensively as I did. Eventually I realized that would make good blog content and so started publishing those roundups there. Years later that was formalized as PNConnect Weekly Reading, a weekly download on recent news that was first sent to the entire Porter Novelli network and then published as a public blog post.

Thankfully both Voce and PN have kept their blog archives alive, even if the activity waxes and wanes as time allows. While many of the posts are excerpted here you can read them in their entirety on the Voce, Porter Novelli and PNConnect sites. If that changes, I have the exports and can add the full posts here at a later date.

Chris Thilk is a freelance writer and content strategist who lives in the Chicago suburbs.

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