tunheimmilan posterous

Twin Cities resident Patrick Milan is the Executive Vice President of Brand Strategy & Creative Director at Tunheim Partners, a Minneapolis-based strategic communications company that monitors consumer behavior and trends. He is also the blogger behind the tunheimmilan posterous blog, in which he writes about branding, media, public relations, advertising and other marketing-related topics.

Bloggers write for a variety of reasons. What specifically drew you to blogging?

As a former journalist I love to write about observations and stuff that might surprise people. I see stories everywhere and I particularly enjoy irony. That said, although I write about life a full two-thirds of my material is from a marketing standpoint. I watch consumer trends and work to write about how they apply to forward thinking brands.

What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of maintaining a blog? How do you choose to address it?

Making the time to write. I address this by forcing myself to sit down and write as soon as the idea hits me I push everything else aside because I figure my brain is telling my the thought is hot and ready to spilled out onto the keyboard. No story waits.

What are your favorite methods of social media networking to bring traffic to your blog?

SEO, but I publish my work on a few sites via links. I’ve posted my blog material on Wall Street Journal spaces. Material gets published pretty regularly in Minnpost.com Blog Cabin where I am one of their regular contributors. I recently posted one of my blogs on B2B mobile marketing in a comments section of B2B magazine. They picked it up and published it as a commentary in their magazine.

Who or what are your top resources for discovering what’s happening in the Twin Cities area?

Self discovery. I’m always out and looking, listening and thinking.

Started just last year, how do you hope to evolve tunheimmilan’s posterous in the future?

I hope to evolve it by getting my work published. One of my blogs will appear in the StartTribune business page next week. It is my second piece the Strib has picked up and used for Business Forum. Other ways will be to continue pushing material to MinnPost and other business/marketing outlets

Bloggers often draw inspiration from each other. What other blogs do you enjoy reading? Who are your favorite local Twin Cities bloggers?

Eric Bock is a great writer. He is at the Haberman agency and writes about Sustainability.

What do you love the most about living here in the Twin Cities Metro Area and why?

The creatives. Great writers with unusual viewpoints.