Matt Owen

Matt Owen is Head of Social at Econsultancy. He looks after Econsultancy’s global social media strategy and architecture, where he has led community engagement and growth since 2010.

Matt has a background in music, film and television in addition to marketing. Prior to joining Econsultancy, he was instrumental in building the UK's largest entertainment blog network before moving into dedicated social management and strategy for one of the world's largest business schools. He has a particular interest in social measurement and organizational integration.

In addition, he works with a community of 200,000+ digital marketers daily across a variety of social channels and has written best practice guides for popular social platforms. He contributes regularly to the Econsultancy blog, industry titles and makes regular appearances at events and conferences.

Econsultancy reports roundup: March 2012

Every month, Econsultancy publishes a range of reports covering best practice, market data, template files, trends and innovation and more. In short; loads of useful stuff.

Econsultancy members (Silver and above) have access to all our reports free of charge, but as our research team is currently firing on all cylinders, I thought it would be useful for new members (and existing ones) to have a quick roundup of everything we’ve published in the past month.

This month we published seven new reports and updates, including the Internet Statistics Compendium, The Econsultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Census, our new SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide, a B2B trends briefing, a display advertising best practice guide and more.

Hit the jump to discover what's new:

by Matt Owen 02 April 2012 16:33pm 0 comments

10 excellent examples of Facebook Brand Timelines

Facebook’s new Timeline format doesn’t officially go live for brand pages until March 30th, but there’s always a few who can’t wait to try new things out. In fact, 8m have already made the switch.

Timeline marks a fundamentally different approach to marketing on Facebook for many brands, with more emphasis on images and genuine engagement on the wall.

We asked our Facebook fans and Twitter followers to help us highlight some of the best examples of cover photos, milestones, and general best practice we could find.

by Matt Owen 26 March 2012 13:50pm 28 comments

B2B social media is easy (honest!)

Recently I’ve been looking a lot more closely at the B2B field, and I’ve noticed that a lot of businesses in the sector are still at the ‘testing the waters’ stage as far as social media goes.

This isn’t true across the board of course, there’s plenty of large B2Bs doing some wonderful stuff, but it struck me that there wasn’t a lot of beginner-level knowledge out there for B2B’s starting out in social media.

The reason I’ve avoided writing about the topic for a while is that most of this has probably been covered in articles we’ve published previously, but it’s always handy to have a quick glance at the principles of what we do and why we do it, and every week more people decide to take the plunge, so hopefully this will help them out as well.

by Matt Owen 07 March 2012 13:33pm 12 comments

Facebook previews Timeline for brand pages

After several weeks of speculation, Facebook today unveiled admin previews of its Timeline for brand pages update.

Speculators (including more than a few in the Econsultancy office) have seen the move as inevitable for some time. Here’s a quick run through of the changes, highlighting the most important points.

by Matt Owen 29 February 2012 14:48pm 4 comments

Innovation and staying ahead of the curve

Econsultancy will be hosting our 2012 Innovation Awards at the Park Lane Hilton in London this evening.

In the run-up to the glittering award ceremony, we’ve been speaking to our shortlisted candidates to get their take on all aspects of innovation in business.

We’ve looked at fostering the right kind of environment to get those ideas flowing, budgeting make sure plans don’t impact your bottom line, and looked back at some great ideas to help get you inspired.

Of course, even a great idea can be outdone. The industry has never advanced as quickly as it does today, with some truly awe-inspiring ideas rolling out every day.

With all this competition to factor in, we thought we’d close our series by asking our nominees about keeping ahead of the innovation curve.

by Matt Owen 23 February 2012 12:34pm 0 comments

Innovation for agencies: convincing the client

Over the past month we’ve spoken a lot about the nature of innovation in business, and during the course of these posts we’ve looked at ways to foster an innovative spirit within your company, as well as justifying the cost and protecting the budget.

But what if you aren’t the one who ultimately has to pay if your ground-breaking new ideas don’t make the cut?

A large number of our Innovation Awards entries come from agencies, which have to work doubly hard to justify unusual or experimental campaign choices, yet still manage to deliver some of the most exciting new ideas every year.

In today’s Innovation Question , we look more closely at exactly how they manage this.

by Matt Owen 22 February 2012 10:59am 1 comment

Which innovation from the past 30 years do you wish you'd come up with?

As we learned in our previous post, our Innovation Awards shortlist candidates all thought that an ability to learn from past mistakes was just as important as a vision of the future when trying to advance your business.

It’s not always mistakes we learn from though, and business innovation is as much about evolution as revolution.

Today we’re asking our expert panel which companies, products and ideas from the past have truly inspired them, and which ones they wished they’d had a hand in…

by Matt Owen 20 February 2012 14:11pm 1 comment

Q&A: Sissie Hsiao of Google Analytics on innovation

This month we’ve been posting regularly on the subject of innovation as a prelude to our annual Innovation Awards on February 23rd.

We’ve been asking our shortlisted candidates for their opinions on every aspect of innovation in business, from identifying innovative ideas and people to scaling projects at multi-national level.

Today, we thought it would be useful to hone in on one particular business and gather their responses to our list of innovation-themed questions.

Sissie Hsiao is group product manager at Google Analytics, a company which has based its reputation and success on doing things differently from the very start. We asked for her opinions on a variety of topics, and on the awards themselves.

by Matt Owen 17 February 2012 12:04pm 0 comments

What are the characteristics of great innovators?

Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Alexander Bell, Marie Curie…

On the face of it, these people may not have much in common, but they all topped Lemelson-MIT’s 2012 list of great innovators, with names that will go down in history (and occasionally, infamy). So what exactly unites these revolutionary thinkers?

We’ve been talking about innovation a lot in the lead-up to our 2012 Innovation Awards on February 23rd, and while approaches and implementation differ wildly, one point that keeps arising is that Innovation is all about people, about those brave souls with the gumption to push a wild idea through to completion.

Finding the people with the right skills is a major challenge for any business, so how do you spot these people, and how do you harness their ideas?

The candidates on our awards shortlist all know a lot about the brainstorming process, and all have the ability to bring these ideas to fruition, so who better to answer today’s Innovation question:

by Matt Owen 16 February 2012 11:27am 2 comments

Can large companies be truly innovative?

Yesterday we spoke about the business imperatives behind innovation. We know that in today’s fast-paced market it’s important to evolve if you want to get ahead, but just how easy is this?

While start-ups are often built on revolutionary ideas, creating something truly new is a much tougher challenge for larger companies.

With levels of bureaucracy, procedures and red-tape to cut through, just how viable is it for a multinational to make a real change to its existing business model or introduce something new to market?

As it turns out, it’s extremely possible! Just look at Google and Apple. Of course, those are companies built around innovation from the ground up. But what about those with more traditional organisational structures?

We turned once more to our extensive panel of innovation experts...

by Matt Owen 14 February 2012 15:54pm 0 comments