I started out as a musician, which may seem strange until you start factoring in album design, tour logistics, merchandising and promotion, multichannel marketing campaigns and small business management.
A stint in the Film and TV industries followed, which provided a range of skills including (but not limited to) directing and producing for TV and the web, platform management for on-demand services, and marketing film content across Scandinavia.
Alongside this I was busy helping build what was the UK's largest blog network, and a quick spell managing social and communities for one of the largest business schools in the world.
Innovative trends to watch in 2012
Having made it to the shortlist for the 2012 Econsultancy Innovation Awards, it’s fair to say the people we’ve been interviewing this week know a thing or two about bright ideas.
Today we asked them to cast an eye back over the last twelve months and identify the innovations they feel have had the biggest effect on the marketing landscape.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, so we also challenged them to gaze ahead and offer their opinions on the trends to watch in 2012...
What price innovation?
As part of the build up to the Econsultancy’s 2012 Innovation Awards, we’ve been quizzing some of the best and brightest entrants about different aspects of innovation.
With that in mind, it's time to get down to brass tacks and takes a look at the economic imperatives surrounding innovative company cultures.
While it’s great to set your sights high, eventually you’ll have to deal with the harsh reality of funding ideas and convincing stakeholders who may not be as enamoured with the gleaming future and sense of endless possibilities as you are.
We gathered our awards shortlist once more and asked them how they manage to convince key stakeholders, and given the current economic climate, ensure that there is available budget for testing and deploying innovative ideas...
How do you build an innovative company?
In yesterday's post, we took a quick top-down look at what innovation meant to some of the businesses who’ve made it onto the shortlist for our Innovation Awards this year.
While opinions differed greatly about what makes innovation, everyone we spoke to agreed that businesses need to push boundaries in order to grow and thrive in the current climate.
Our respondents work across a huge variety of sectors, from start-ups to multinational, but they’ve all managed to integrate practical, innovative ideas into their business.
We know you don’t read the Econsultancy blog for esoteric opinions, so today we’re looking more closely at how they managed this, by asking:
How do you build an innovative company, or foster innovation within your organisation?
What makes something innovative?
Innovation has always been one of Econsultancy’s core brand values and we celebrate this every year with our Innovation Awards, shining a light on those companies and individuals who’ve helped to advance the digital marketing landscape over the past twelve months.
But what do we mean when we talk about innovation? It’s a deceptively simple word with a million interpretations. For some it can be about simple changes; incremental decisions and refinements that give big results.
For others it could be a radical overhaul of the entire company structure. Some businesses seem to naturally burst with ideas, while others require specific challenges to inspire them.
In the run up to this year’s awards we thought we’d ask those who’ve reached our awards shortlist to tell us what innovation means to them.
We’ll be publishing a series of posts throughout February, covering everything from building innovative companies to exploiting new technologies.
We hope they’ll give you an insight into how some of the market leaders work and help you develop your own innovative ideas (and dare we suggest, enter them for an award in 2013).
Your top ten multichannel marketing challenges
On October 12th, Econsultancy will be welcoming over 1,000 marketers to JUMP, our Joined-Up Marketing and PR conference.
As part of the run up to the event, now in its second year, we asked Twitter users to tell us about the problems they’ve faced when attempting to run multichannel campaigns, using the #CometoJUMP hashtag.
As an incentive, we assembled a great package of prizes for the most interesting or relevant tweet.
The results showed that marketers face a huge variety of challenges as they try to track and optimise for customers who routinely interact with multiple touchpoints both on and offline before purchasing. We also uncovered recurring themes that may be slowing progression towards fully integrated marcomms.
In addition to the winning tweet, I thought it would be enlightening to run through ten of the best entries here and check out some of the issues we’ll be covering at JUMP this year.
Facebook's F8 changes: a slight case of oversharing?
Facebook is renowned for rolling out new platform changes at a moment’s notice, but if early buzz is to be believed, this Thursday’s F8 developer conference will offer something a little bit special.
Major changes are expected that could fundamentally reshape the way content is found and shared on the world’s largest social network.
Will it be the dawn of a new social era, or is Facebook about to follow Myspace into the pit of abandoned platforms?
Klout only matters if you say it does
Early last year I wrote a post about online influence measurement service Klout, I ran a few simple tests and came to a conclusion: Klout doesn’t work.
Based on several recent articles supporting the service, I thought it was worth taking another look at Klout and restating a few points about the value of online influence and measurement.
Econsultancy: 100,000 digital marketers can't be wrong
When I joined Econsultancy a little over a year ago, there were around 30 employees spread between our UK and US offices. Since then, the company has doubled in size, and we’re still expanding, with new staff joining our offices in London, New York, Dubai, Singapore, Australia and elsewhere.
Last year the company also celebrated its tenth anniversary, and we welcomed our 100,000th member in July. Nevertheless, it occurred to us that not everybody is familiar with all that we do...
Ich mag nicht: Germany outlaws "Like"
Germany has a long history of protecting its citizen’s right to online privacy. A quick glance through the statutes will reveal for example that Germans can ask Google to pixelate their homes on streetview (god forbid some random map-browser should identify your dirty net curtains).
While studies show that Germans are still big users of social media, Facebook faced a serious problem on Friday as the state of Schleswig-Holstein announced a blanket ban on the use of the "Like" button.
Marketing Automation: the big sell...
While it is incredibly useful, Marketing Automation Software isn’t the sexiest of tech.
MA needs to be solid and dependable. It can align sales with marketing, it can help personalise content, but it isn’t likely to rank alongside the iPad in the wider consciousness anytime soon.
In short, it has an image problem. This may not seem like a huge concern, but it is contributing to a slow uptake by a hugely important market sector: SMEs
