Heather Taylor

Heather is a writer and filmmaker who covers media and communications, tech, ecommerce and the arts and was listed by Brand Republic as one of the top 200 most influential bloggers in 2011. She is currently VP, Head of Social Content and Strategy at Social@Ogilvy. These posts were written during her time as editorial director of Econsultancy in New York (2012-13).

Prior to her move to Econsultancy, Heather was acting editor of About the BBC, the BBC corporate blog and website, and managed online corporate reputation for the BBC. Previous roles included social media manger for PayPal UK and social media/ PR manager for Groundswell award winner, giffgaff.

Heather speaks at events on social media, marketing, community and filmmaking - previous speaking engagements include talks at ComicCon, Reputation Online Live, Technology for Marketing and Advertising, PR Week, European Customer Experience World, Social Media in Business, Media Camp London, and Digital Surrey. She has also advised on social media strategy for a number of startups and charitable organizations.

LiNC: Lithium CEO Rob Tarkoff on bringing innovation into business

It's hard to predict a lasting and sustaining innovation. How do we determine what will become a platform and what we will build our lives around?

Companies are all facing this issue right now. How can brands build a social customer strategy with the continual creation of new technology and new social platforms?

At today's Lithium Network Conference, Lithium CEO Rob Tarkoff kicked off his keynote discussing innovation and how we have not always realized the moments that will change how we behave as consumers, communities and businesses. So, he stressed, we need to take time to step back and be objective.

by Heather Taylor 03 May 2012 19:15pm 0 comments

Q&A: Jeff Dachis on the new Facebook APIs and big data

Arguably Jeff Dachis is most known for co-founding the interactive marketing and design agency, Razorfish, in 1995.

A two person operation which started in Dachis's bedroom in New York, blossomed into a 2200 strong company worth more than six billion dollars. With the dot-com crash, Razorfish fell with it. Its shares plunged to $1 from $47 per share at the beginning of 2000 and 400 employees lost their jobs.

Leaving Razorfish after its downturn, Dachis went on to form Bond Art + Science in 2006 and in 2008, Dachis founded the Dachis Group in Austin, Texas with the idea that everything can and will be social.

We had a chance to talk to Dachis about why he set up Dachis Group, its relationship with Facebook, how they are integrating Facebook's new APIs and how marketers can start to leverage Facebook as it moves into big data territory.

by Heather Taylor 02 May 2012 19:13pm 0 comments

Digital Vision report: building a community culture

Digital Vision winner Allison Saur applies her insight into Native American tribal practices to create a template for the construction and maintenance of culture in virtual communities.

In the second of her three reports, Digital Tribes II: Community Culture, released today, Saur describes the difference between community and audience building, and outlines specific tools for developing and strengthening a community through techniques such as creating shared narratives, values, belief systems, and ritual.

The following is an overview written by Saur outlining the second part of her series.

by Heather Taylor 01 May 2012 16:14pm 0 comments

Twitter showdown: Virgin America vs United

For today's Twitter showdown, we're moving away from the shelves and into the skies. With a look to two of the most talked about airlines, we're pitting Virgin America against United Airlines.

With different approaches to social media, which airline do you think will win today's social media media battle?

by Heather Taylor 30 April 2012 22:17pm 7 comments

Q&A: TopRank CEO Lee Odden on integrating SEO, social media and content

As more businesses are jumping on the content train, we had a chance to talk to Lee Odden who just released his first book Optimize: How to attract and engage more customers by integrating SEO, Social Media and content marketing.

Odden gave us the scoop on why he wrote Optimize, how we can start integrating search, content and social media across our organization and how we can get the buy in we need for it to be a success.

by Heather Taylor 30 April 2012 19:20pm 5 comments

US job moves: Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft Advertising, CBS, Benetton Group

Once again we've put together the most senior and influential job moves in the US.

This time we cover influential moves from Coca-Cola to Anheuser-Busch, another surprise resignation at Microsoft, a new hire at Banner Bank, new hires at CBS and a retirement at Benetton Group.

by Heather Taylor 27 April 2012 21:13pm 0 comments

Q&A: Spruce Media's COO Lucy Jacobs on Facebook ads and success metrics

Last week, Facebook announced their new Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. This was a merger of the Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC) program and the Marketing API Program (MAP) which have been running for three years.

These programs connected brands with developers to help them optimize social plugins, build apps on the Facebook Platform, develop strategies, and manage ad campaigns for Facebook Pages.

One of the companies that has been built around the Facebook Ad space is Spruce Media. According to their website, it has a mission. Spruce Media believes Facebook will change the future of advertising so it has created a platform to help advertisers thrive on Facebook ads.

We had a chance to talk to Lucy Jacobs, COO of Spruce Media, to talk about how the company works with Facebook, Facebook best practices, how Facebook has changed the ad space and benchmarks for success.

by Heather Taylor 26 April 2012 22:27pm 0 comments

Will Google Drive leave Dropbox in the dust?

Though the rumors have been predicting this for weeks, Google has officially announced the launch of Google Drive. For anyone who has used Dropbox before, Google Drive is pretty much the same in terms of storing documents.

The key difference is that Google Docs is built into Google Drive so it's easier to create and collaborate on documents. Once you share content on Google Drive you can add and reply to comments on anything including PDFs, images and video files.

by Heather Taylor 24 April 2012 19:31pm 7 comments

Twitter showdown: Coke vs Pepsi

Today, we're launching a new weekly Twitter showdown of some of the biggest companies on the web, in your grocery store or on your brain. Today's competitors are some of the most well known brands on the planet.

Yep. It's Coca-Cola verses Pepsi. When have we heard that before? But this time, we're not having a blind taste test. With the help of Visual.ly's new easy to create infographics, we could easily compare these two drink giants.

First, a little background on what our competitors are doing.

by Heather Taylor 23 April 2012 18:41pm 3 comments

Amazon's CTO highlights seven transformations cloud services will enable

Yesterday, we attended the Amazon Web Services Summit in New York where Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon, gave the keynote speech highlighting how cloud services will transform how we do business.

Though some critics think cloud services may have unforeseen challenges, Vogals somewhat salesy keynote also had representatives of companies using Amazon cloud services come to the stage to say why the cloud is enabling their businesses to do things they could never do before.

As these (and most) businesses are discovering, a data revolution is taking place. The amount of information we need to process, map and store is growing at exponential rates. So in comes cloud services.

by Heather Taylor 20 April 2012 19:22pm 2 comments