jeff.medema.application (PDF)

Jeff Medema

I am a writer with a passion and an aptitude for creating
significant, compelling, and creative content. My application
of this skill to several unique writing styles makes me capable
of generating quality material for a wide variety of needs and
purposes. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Technical
Communications from the University of Wisconsin - Stout in
2012, and have spent my professional career primarily
working to help brands connect with their audience using
focused and effective content.

Contact
jeff.medema.contact@gmail.com
505.922.5019
www.linkedin.com/in/jeffmedema

Education
B.A. Technical Communications
University of Wisconsin - Stout

Class of 2012

During my time at the University of Wisconsin - Stout, I
discovered a fascination with how people share ideas and
information with one another and a desire to make a career
out of communicating through effective and intuitive content.

Skills
Creative Content
Community Building
Editing
Marketing Strategies
Multimedia Creation
Technical Copy
Benchmarking
Social Media

Experience
Einstein Medical,
.
Inc..
, Mira Mesa, CA
January 2016 - Present
Web Copywriter
• Plan and develop ongoing SEO content subscriptions for
medical and legal clients of the company.
• Consult with clients of the company to gather content
development information and specific practice details.
• Contribute to site design planning and develop copy
across all site elements using a custom CMS.
• Research medical procedures and legal practice areas,
and stay up-to-date on new techniques and technologies.
• Credited as main writer in the launch of 15 client websites
in first 6 months.
Holonis, Inc., San Diego, CA
June 2012 - November 2015
Creative Content Writer
• Contributed to the development of the company’s voice,
brand, and messaging using several mediums for written
content.
• Independently submitted additional documentation,
guides, and other content beyond assigned tasks to
improve company practices and share useful information.
• Managed team of freelance writers as editor and ensured
all material was grammatically correct, optimized to rank on
search engines and within the company vision.
• Worked with team of multimedia content producers to
publish written content, podcasts, videos and other digital
media alongside written content.
• Assisted in the production of company podcasts, photos,
and videos as sound engineer, photographer/videographer,
and media editor.
California Paint Experts, San Diego, CA
January 2013 - June 2015
Site Developer & Content Creator
• Outlined and implemented a digital marketing strategy for
publishing the company’s blogs, podcasts, videos and other
media.
• Developed and published content to produce more than
250 individual landing pages.
• Managed community affairs and communications across
several social media accounts and through the company email.
Freelance Clients
November 2015 - January 2016
• YouthBloc, Inc.
• Transition Haven, Inc.

Connect Your Audience to Your Brand with Better 
Storytelling 
Telling stories as a brand is how you relate ideas, share yourself and identify with your audience 
through your content. 
 
By  Jeff Medema  | Media Contributor 
 
Brand exposure is nothing if not an adapting, evolving and dynamic artform the modern 
marketer must master. Yesterday you caught up with  video marketing  and a week ago was the 
backlinking  revamp on your articles, but now you’re starting to hear whispers about optimizing 
articles with multimedia . The modern marketer moves from tactic to tactic day to day, but there’s 
one thing that’s remained consistent throughout: Storytelling. 
 
Stories are how we identify with each other. They grip us and move us. Stories connect us and 
immerse us in ideas, characters, and emotions that help us relate to each other. They help us 
share and express values and ideals, and they’re one of the most powerful tools to the modern 
marketer. 
 
Where storytelling was once just a means of instilling values in the next generation and even 
preserving history, it’s now an absolutely essential part of connecting audiences to  brands . In 
your day to day, you establish the ‘what’ for your brand, but audiences care significantly more 
about the ‘why’ when they find you. Why do you do what you do? Why should anyone trust in 
you and what you offer? Storytelling is how you give them that ‘why’ and instill in them your 
brand values, ideals, goals and more. 
 
The fact of the matter is that the power has shifted. Brands aren’t the only ones making moves 
in marketing. Many brands, like  Starbucks , have actually caught on to this and harnessed the 
power of users by encouraging user generated content. 
 

 
And more than just making moves, brands aren’t the only ones with the power to tell their story. 
As we get closer and closer to a completely leveled playing field as a result of the shift to digital, 

we’re seeing a change in roles. Everyone has the power to publish, the power to curate, the 
power to be found, and the power to be heard. With such ephemeral and ever­changing roles as 
we move from profile to profile and community to community, there’s no way to keep it all 
straight save for one singular title: People. 
 
We are people connecting with other people in a P2P market, and we do it by telling each other 
stories and creating even more of them together. 
 
Tell Your Story 
 
The first story people want to hear is the one you’ve lived. They want to know how your brand 
came to be and why it began in the first place. And more than just appeasing their interest in 
you, you’re implanting a story that’s easy to remember and relate to. 
 
Just think about how the big brands do it. You may not know the computing power of the latest 
Apple devices, but you’ve certainly heard of Steve Jobs and may even know his story. The 
same goes for Facebook. We all know how small of an idea it was at its conception and how it 
grew beyond Zuckerburg’s wildest dreams. 
 
In what you say and what you create, you have to tell your own story. Telling your audience 
what you’re doing without telling them what you’ve done won’t engage them. Those that tell their 
stories, and tell them well, are the ones that will succeed. 
 
Tell Many Stories 
 
Today,  everyone is a publisher . Just by looking at your news feed, you’re being exposed to 
thousands of stories from publishers of all varieties. The next step after you’ve told your story is 
to create and tell even more, and this is accomplished through content. 
 
Small stories, self­contained and succinct to fit within the limited attention span for most Internet 
browsing, can be seen all over, like this one from TrueMove H. 
 
[Insert  this Video  Here] 
 
These stories instill a relatable emotion in us, whether it’s compassion, happiness or even 
anger. Most importantly, these stories do not push brands upon the audience. They may push 
those same values, ideals and goals that you hold, but they do so with a different approach. 
 
Capturing these moments in stories and bringing them forward for your audience is an art. 
Modern marketers have a lot demanded of them, but storytelling must be at the foundation of it 
all, and should weave its way into how you relate to and engage those that matter most to your 
success. 
 

How will you share your stories? Ask us anything about how to tell your story or about the 
stories you’ve already told in the comment section below. 
 

What You Need to Know About How the 
Internet is Connecting People to People 
The traditional model of identifying businesses and customers is being broken down and 
replaced by the much more efficient and accurate P2P. 
  
By  Jeff Medema  | Media Contributor 
 
When you think about yourself as a member of the Internet, what do you envision? Techie? 
Lurker? Enlightened Guru? Very likely, it’s not just simply Consumer, and even if it’s Business, 
there’s surely a lot more to you than that. 
 
We transcend these titles implied by buckets, like B2B and B2C, as people of the Internet; we 
are so much more. As individuals, we play enough of a part in each of these roles, in addition to 
a thousand other dynamic and fluid roles, that the line begins to blur. It becomes far too 
complicated to restrict ourselves to just two roles when we think about how we connect to each 
other. We are people connecting to other people, simple as that. 
 
What matters is how we build who we are online. Building a  digital presence  may seem like 
something just businesspeople need to worry about, but it’s something you do without even 
trying just by being online. Uploading videos, posting pictures, and even just saying what’s on 
your mind in a public space builds upon what others can find about you. 
 
And it’s these networked public spaces that allow all sorts of amazing  communities  to really 
come to life. In these communities, founders and highly active members may attain something 
of a higher status, but the group is ultimately made up of a collection of equals. Individuals may 
have different reasons for joining, but at the end of the day, it’s still just people connecting with 
other people. What you need to determine for yourself is: what do you want to achieve by being 
part of these communities? 
 
You Can Achieve Anything 
 
It may seem cliche, but it holds quite a bit of truth. Anyone with an idea, product, service, or 
merely the desire to be heard has the power to build a digital presence and get noticed online. 
The denizens of the Internet have made this even easier by building their communities on 
platforms and in places with specialized methods of sharing and connecting. Tattoo artists like 
Alice Carrier , for instance, have tons of pictures to share, and have built large communities by 
utilizing Instagram. 
 

 
 
Communities like these are able to build and evolve that much more efficiently because of the 
capabilities of the platforms they’re hosted on, so determining which ones fit your needs is 
extremely important. Instagram allows communities that share pictures to thrive, YouTube does 
the same for videos, and Facebook does just about everything. Identifying what you do and how 
you can share it will point you in the right direction when deciding on where to build your 
community. 
 
You Can Connect With Anyone 
 
In something of a natural evolution, technology has trickled into every facet of modern life. 
Whether we’re lounging with our laptops or listening to workout tracks while we’re out on a run, 
technology is reaching us and connecting us with the rest of the world. Advancements like 
mobile technology, and the even more recent rise of wearable technology, are changing how we 
connect with each other. 
 
These technologies allow us to learn a lot more about what the rest of the world does on a daily 
basis, allowing us to predict needs and deliver information and materials. Admittedly, this 
information has the potential to be abused, but the vast majority are using it just to do things like 

offer traveler’s insurance to frequent flyers and coupons to those who frequent certain 
ecommerce stores. 
 
The key is that there is no limit to the distance you can have between you and the people you’re 
trying to reach. The Internet has connected us all, and allowed us to reach each other 
regardless of where we are and what we’re doing. All you need is a plan to reach your audience 
and the  data  to make smart decisions about how what you’re offering is going to fulfill their 
needs and be relevant to them in the moment that you offer it. 
 
We Will All Be Connected 
 
Technology that connects us is spreading to every corner of the globe, and the advantages of 
this connection are only just beginning to be understood. Not too far in the future,  wearables will 
take the next step  and permanently connect us. Already, millions have chosen to count their 
steps and monitor their heart rates with this technology, and it’s not long before they’ll want to 
learn more. 
 
Technology will eventually predict the onset of dangerous health conditions using data from the 
body. It’ll communicate with doctors and may even be able to administer treatment on the spot. 
Not using this life­saving technology will seem ludicrous. 
 
On the way to this future, there will be a ton of amazing advancements that continue to improve 
our life and connect us all even more deeply than we already are. We will see stunning new 
technology used in thousands of exciting ways, and you’ll be there for the ride. Look for 
opportunities to connect with the people you can serve, and use information intuitively to make 
smarter decisions about how to do it. 
 

An Appetite for Apps: How Mobile Consumed Everything
There’s an app for everything. But of course, that’s not really saying anything new. You’ll
hear it all the time these days. Whether it’s in response to amazement from the kinds of
apps that label stars as your camera scans the night sky or confoundment over the fact
that a stapler simulator app actually exists, it’s safe to say that every smartphone owner
has said that phrase at one point or another.
A problem exists here, however. These peaks and depths of our technological
advancement alone do not reveal the full impact mobile technology has had on our
society.

A Technological Shift
There is no parallel to this massive impact. Regardless of what all-in-one device of the
past you measure it against, mobile is still connected to a nebulous and ever-changing
atmosphere being made better everyday by the world at large. No gadget or machine
has had such a knack for adaptation and utility in all of human history.
But what about something fun to compare some minor similarities to? The humble
Trapper Keeper seems like a good place to start. A fond memory for teenagers in the
80’s, Trapper Keepers were a kid’s most secure place to hide their schoolwork and
important documents, but more importantly where you could hide all those notes that
you passed with the boy/girl in chemistry class.
Now, however, all those notes from class are documents on your Google Drive app, the
built-in calculator has been turned into an app, and all those perfectly folded notes are
now part of embarrassing text threads so old that no one could find them (as they should
be).
Smartphone apps are more than just the collection of consolidated information; they
locate new information using a myriad of unique pathways. One of the unfortunate side
effects of which is “clickbait,” a term for all the low quality, highly sensationalized, and
often misleading ads and links that crowd web pages all over the Internet.
Thankfully, at its root, and in majority, are a countless number of pathways both
implemented and generated by programmers trying to help you find more of what you’re
looking to find. One of the most straightforward examples of this is found on
Thesaurus.com. A surprisingly perfect parallel to how digital technology brings you to
pages similar to what you’re already looking at, the thesaurus brings you to words similar
in meaning to the one you type in.
Taking a step back, you can apply this to almost all the information you consume using a
smartphone. Looking for Chinese food on Yelp, browsing retweets from those you follow,
and finding that one actor from that one movie on IMDb. It’s all connected and it makes
up what we call the web, a subtly different but equally important concept in
understanding modern society.

But Why Does it Matter?

Why does it matter that we have all this access? What has this wealth of information at
our fingertips really done for us? It matters because we are way more equipped for life in
general as a result of this technology.
It’s about the power.
While we know that the power has shifted dramatically from businesses to consumers as
a result of highly shared and easily accessible information about anything, everything,
and especially every business, it’s amplified by having it all available at your fingertips.
Falsely advertising prices online to trick people into visiting a store can be refuted with a
few taps and swipes, and the ability to compare prices for online products to those in the
store has empowered shopaholics everywhere. Reviews on Yelp, Google+, and plenty
more sites allow consumers to talk to each other and weed out those with dishonest
business practices.
The Internet may have given the world a brand new power, but mobile and the creation
of apps has changed how that power is directed. Mobile is being used in brand new
ways every single day and empowering every user to make smarter decisions and
smarter purchases, granting a clearer picture of the world around us and enriching lives
everywhere.