About Mark Tosczak

Hi. I’m Mark Tosczak, founder, owner, publisher, editor and primary author here at MarkTzk.com. As my Twitter bio says, I’m a North Carolina-based marketing and public relations professional. I work at RLF Communications in Greensboro, N.C.

But if you’ve read this far, you might want more than the 140-character summary. I’ve had a lifelong fascination with two things that come together in my life today: words and technology.

My love of words and numbers

I was first published in a newspaper around about 1976 or 1977 as part of an elementary school creative writing project. As a kid, I consumed books as if they were going out of style. I worked through the children’s section of our local public library, and by the time I was 10 or so, most of the books I was checking out were from the adult shelves. All my life, I have aspired to be a writer, both as my vocation and my avocation. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that I ended up getting an English degree (from N.C. State University).

But unlike many writers, I also had a something of an affinity for science, math and technology. Maybe it was because my dad was an engineer. Maybe it was because my mom was so smart she could study two languages, take calculus and tutor her older brothers when she was in high school. Maybe it was just because my parents never suggested to me that you couldn’t be good at both words and numbers.

In any case, after several years of advanced placement science classes, I started college as a physics major. That didn’t last, and I passed through computer science and accounting before settling on English as a major. Along the way, I picked up quite a bit of knowledge in math, science and business. I also spent four years working for the student newspaper, Technician, including a year as editor-in-chief.

Newspapers, public relations and marketing

I got out of school and started working as a journalist. I freelanced, pushed words around and wrote headlines on the copy desk at The (Durham, N.C.) Herald-Sun, then moved on to government reporting, and finally became business editor. I quit the paper after a few years and moved on to other things. Over the next 10 years or so, those included:

• Working as a freelance writer and PR consultant
• Managing communications and marketing for an economic development think tank
• Moving back into newspapers as a reporter at the News & Record in Greensboro
• Becoming senior reporter at The Business Journal of the Triad
• Joining RLF Communications in 2007 to manage PR and marketing campaigns (offline and online)

Along the way I got an MBA at Elon University.

Becoming a web native

Starting in the late 1990s, I also got very interested in the Web. As a writer, the idea that I could reach readers directly, without a publisher or other intermediary standing in the way, was exciting.

I dug into the technology. For a while, I considered changing my career and becoming a programmer — I took a couple C++ classes before I decided I was better off sticking with my career as a writer and marketer. But I did learn how to build websites, write HTML by hand and code simple Javascript and ASP. In the summer of 2000, I put up my first blog.

I wrote every line of HTML for my first site in a fancy text editor, and I hand-coded each and every post. After a few months of that I wrote some simple code to automate the process — my own primitive blogging platform. Around the same time, though, Typepad, WordPress and other blogging platforms were in development. The professional coders building those platforms were adding features much faster than I ever would be able to.

Eventually I migrated my blog to the free open-source version of Typepad running on my own webhost. Later, when Six Apart, the company behind Typepad, became more focused on paying customer, I migrated to the open-source, community-built WordPress. I’m still running WordPress, and increasingly using it for client and volunteer projects, too.

Digital influence

Today, I’m interested in the intersection of media, marketing and technology. The Internet’s promise for individuals and businesses still excites me as much as it did 15 years ago.

The Internet’s low barriers to entry have resulted in a flood of low quality, mostly unwanted content. The challenge is to produce content — whether a blog post, an ad campaign or a pitch to a newspaper reporter — that cuts through the clutter, engages an audience and achieves a goal.

The process of creating and spreading high-impact information and ideas is what I think of as digital influence. Hence this site. Here you’ll find tips, ideas and resources that should help anyone interested in increasing their online influence. I hope you’ll subscribe to MarkTzk.com, comment on blog posts and engage with me on Twitter and LinkedIn.