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 editorial director of Econsultancy in New York.

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.

Video: What happened at Digital Cream San Jose

Econsultancy recently held its first ever Digital Cream in San Jose, our invitation-only event for senior client-side digital marketers.

Opened by Econsultancy EVP, Craig Hanna, Digital Cream San Jose had marketers from companies such as HP, AOL, Macy's, ModCloth and eBay participate in the roundtables, with a keynote by Chris Tolles, the CEO of Topix, on how marketers can apply techniques from presidential campaigns to their own campaigns.

by Heather Taylor 21 June 2012 18:38pm 0 comments

LinkedIn introduces targeted status updates

LinkedIn announced two new additions to its offering this morning: LinkedIn Targeted Status Updates product and a new follower insight page to help track not only who is following you but who and how your company messages are being shared.

The targeted status updates is a huge step forward for LinkedIn. It is reminiscent of Google + circles except you have more control per each message to filter by industry, seniority, job function, company size, non-company employees, and geography.

Each message shows statistics, similar to Facebook's message insights, highlighting the number of followers in the targeted group and how many impression it received, as well as clicks, shares and the percentage of engagement.

by Heather Taylor 20 June 2012 03:04am 3 comments

Top marketing lessons from the Presidential election

Today at Digital Cream in San Jose, Chris Tolles of Topix started the day of round tables and discussions by looking at how marketers can model their campaigns on political campaigns.

As we gear up for the next US election this fall, the topic is not only timely but as the presidential campaigns move rapidly to their end in the upcoming months, there are continual lessons to be learned.

by Heather Taylor 19 June 2012 21:12pm 2 comments

How Avis turns search into onsite conversion

The Avis Budget Group runs two of the largest brands in the car rental business. Between the two there are 120 million rental days from 10,000 locations. This accounts for 28 million transactions and seven billion in annual revenue.

John Peebles, VP of Marketing Strategy and Innovation, gave a little insight into how the company looks at attribution, branding and how it can respond to customers to drive conversion.

by Heather Taylor 11 June 2012 22:33pm 2 comments

The logic of data verses the irrational human

Data harvested for political campaigns or brands can be both seductive and overwhelming.

Joel Benenson, the lead pollster for President Obama's campaign & founding partner of Benenson Strategy Group, gave today's midday keynote speech at the ARF Audience Measurement 7.0 Summit in New York on how we need to look at what data we need rather than how much we can have.

The most important point Benenson stressed is that we must not allow advances in measurement, that provides us with more and more data, to obscure our insights of human decision making.

by Heather Taylor 11 June 2012 20:26pm 0 comments

How Sony uses Pinterest to drive traffic

Yesterday at Blogworld, Callan Green from Sony Electronics presented Sony's new Pinterest strategy and highlighted how businesses can get started in this growing space.

When you are preparing for the launch of this kind of strategy, it's helpful for your team to begin by using the platform personally. Next, it's important to research existing brand pins in the community. When Sony searched Pinterest, they found a lot of gadgets as they expected but they also found a lot of old school products and pictures of fan made products such as Sony walkman shaped cakes.

By knowing what fans wanted, this allowed the Sony team to plan its potential boards and analyze the assets they already had in its Flickr community, in house and in its archives.

by Heather Taylor 09 June 2012 14:12pm 12 comments

McDonald's: How to rock and roll in rough social waters

Rick Wion, the director of Social Media at McDonald's, opened his presentation at Blogworld in New York this week with the statement "everyone loves a crisis."

Controversy spurs conversation, crisis can drive traffic, and hand-wringing draws a lot of attention. In most cases, pundits are very good at it.

But what can you do as a company to navigate these waters?

by Heather Taylor 07 June 2012 20:38pm 1 comment

Who owns your social media accounts?

As businesses see the employees who started their social media accounts and strategies start to move on to other work, the question of who owns social media is on the rise.

In the last couple of years, this has led to a number of high profile lawsuits in the states.

by Heather Taylor 05 June 2012 21:35pm 9 comments

Top three lessons for success from TOMS CEO Blake Mycoskie

At the Footwear News Summit today in New York, Blake Mycoskie took to the stage to speak about TOMS shoes and his top three tips for success.

The idea of TOMS came after Mycoskie went on vacation to Argentina and saw that children there were in need of shoes and in fact, couldn't go to school without them. He thought he'd sell shoes where every pair a customer bought, a pair of shoes would go to one of the children in the village he visited.

That was all TOMS was meant to do.

by Heather Taylor 04 June 2012 16:05pm 2 comments

How to approach social media for marketing versus support

Last month at Lithium's Network Conference, Lyle Fong, Lithium's co-founder, reiterated how we have to start to look differently at how businesses use social media for marketing and support.

In order to be successful, the four "gears" of acquisition, engagement, enlistment, and monetization have to all spin equally. But in order to get there, you have to get them moving in a specific order depending on your purpose.

by Heather Taylor 01 June 2012 18:02pm 0 comments