Spotlight: Pocket Marketing Manager Simran Thadani
MagMaker / February 17, 2015
(Photo credit: Christopher Stark)
My name is Simran Thadani, and I’m part of the team at Pocket. My work in Marketing connects me to our user community, to the apps we make with pride and love, and to all the great content flowing through our platform: the stories, videos, blog posts, news pieces and links that millions of people save for later.
My love of the written word in all its forms has driven lots of my experiences, both personally and professionally. I’ve taught Shakespeare to undergrads; practiced calligraphy for 20 years; studied the history of the printing press and handwriting; designed a font; and read over 6 million words digitally in Pocket. (Needless to say, I’m also an avid book collector, and a haunter of used and rare bookshops.)
I use Flipboard as a megaphone for my work at Pocket. Pocket Hits is our growing collection of content recommendations, powered by data and curated by hand. Through Flipboard we can get the word out to a large and loyal audience that we know is looking for interesting things to read and watch. If that sounds like you, be sure to check out our Pocket Hits magazine!
The first article I flipped was “Cheap Words” by George Packer. It’s an in-depth—and deeply critical—look at Amazon’s unstoppable ascent in the worlds of books and retail (both virtual and brick-and-mortar). When The New Yorker opened up its archives in the summer of 2014, I curated my first Flipboard magazine with the best New Yorker reads ever seen in Pocket. Packer’s piece was by far my favorite. The whole exercise was tremendously fun, and fueled my reading list for weeks.
The best article I read all week was William Langewiesche’s brilliant profile of wine critic Robert Parker, from deep in the archives of The Atlantic. The piece is 14 years old and 17,000 words long, but with Pocket I was able to save it for when I actually had the time to read it intently without distractions or bothersome ads, and easily share it with my other wine aficionado friends.
My favorite topic on Flipboard is Burning Man. As each year ticks slowly by between stints in the Black Rock Desert, it’s great to have a constant supply of awesome BM reads. (P.S. The Man burns in 200 days!)
A magazine I’ve found on Flipboard that’s made my life better is Meditation, Mindfulness & Yoga by Flora Spink. I’m new to mindfulness practice—despite the fact that my name actually means meditation!—and this popular magazine has given me a series of excellent resources to learn from.
My “media diet” is similar to the way someone else might approach processed foods—I’ve gone back and forth between overdosing on social media and cutting it out entirely. At this point I don’t have Twitter, YouTube, Netflix or Facebook on my phone, which forces me to streamline to Flipboard, Feedly, Instagram and Pocket. When I do have a bigger screen in front of me, I’ll most often use it to watch a bit of Downton Abbey or House of Cards (OK, several episodes at a time).
A unique productivity tip of mine is to “Keep your head in the cloud.” In my quest to document different aspects of my life, I’ve loved finding bespoke top-in-class services to get different kinds of information organized and out of my brain. So my notes live in Google Keep; to-do lists in Wunderlist; recipes in Pepperplate; book collection catalogue in LibraryThing; travel tips and restaurant archive in Google Drive; closet inventory in Stylitics; passwords in 1Password; photos in Carousel; and, of course, reading list in Pocket. Having a suite of specialized cloud-based services at my fingertips makes my online environment cutting-edge, good-looking, easily searched, automatically synced, and always available.
~ShonaS is reading “Media Past and Future”
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