In the 5-months that I spent at Edelman Digital in Montreal, I learned a lot.

Measurement and Analytics are a must-have knowledge set. Just as in 1999 I pursued learning HTML because I thought it would be an essential skill for marketers and my career (and it has been), I believe that having measurement and analytics chops are mandatory to truly bring value to any company’s strategic decision-making. I will definitely continue to educate myself in this area, and encourage anyone who’s responsible for driving results to do so as well.

Corporations can be progressive. My return to the corporate world was long in coming, though in this case, brief. For being so large, Edelman is surprisingly agile in responding to the market and opportunities. This, I’m sure, accounts in large part for its incredible success. Some of the corporations I’ve worked for in my career sure could have learned a thing or two from Edelman’s approach.

Push yourself beyond your limits. When I left consulting to join Edelman Digital, I did so to go further in my career. I chose to narrow my focus to a small segment of my abilities in order to rise to other challenges, stretch and grow. It was a great way to learn new things about myself and to reaffirm some other things that perhaps I’d lost along the way.

Be grateful. I am truly grateful for my experience at Edelman. I am thankful for my successes, but more so for any missteps that I had while learning the ropes. Again, these were opportunities to learn so that I will grow and improve for the next time. I’m also grateful to have worked with so many amazing measurement and analytics pros, PR practitioners, web developers and senior management who impressed me with their dedication and talent.

What’s next for me? I’m looking for my next move. I want to use my talents in a more comprehensive way and integrate my experience – 5-years in social media with many more in marketing and communications.  I want to expand on my achievements in brand-building and strategic development, while continuing to stay at the front of the technology wave. I like trailblazers and organizations, big or small, seeking to make a difference. I want to do work that matters.

If you know of something that might fit the bill, please get in contact:

514.277.5623
Email
Twitter
LinkedIn

In the meantime, it looks like I’ll finally have time to get back to blogging

Under CC licensse: Horial Varlan

I’ve taken some time off from blogging this winter to have a Big Think.

It’s been 4 years since I left my job and started my consultancy. A few years prior to leaving my employer, I’d immersed myself into the world of social media, learning everything that I could, convinced it would revolutionize the marketing profession. I remember pitching the VP of Sales on the value of producing a podcast. That was December 2004. The first Canadian podcasts only began in October of that same year. Needless to say, my timing was a little early and my pitch was not accepted.

In the spring of 2007, Twitter was only one year old and Facebook was not nearly as mainstream as it is now. There were few social media practitioners and agencies and we educated clients about the need to “join the conversation”,  a much-overused expression. Back then, we taught people how to use tools and why applying old-style marketing techniques to social media was the wrong approach.

Factions broke out. There were the Zealots – those who held themselves and everyone else to a moral high ground, insisting you couldn’t participate in social media unless you were utterly transparent and that every CEO should blog for their company – often a naïve and unrealistic blanket approach. And, there were and the Capitalists, who applied standard issue make-money-on-the-internet, secrets-of-success, increase-your-followers-for-$109 approaches.

Somewhere in between, I knew that I could help people understand and use social media to transform their businesses. I knew that I could use my  20-years of marketing experience and pair it with my knowledge of social media to make a difference and make a living.

As more agencies started popping up, and the large agencies started to train their people in social media and take the plunge themselves, larger clients didn’t need to use a specialty consultant like me. They could just stay with the agency they used for PR, for web, for advertising.

As social media has become mainstream, the number of people offering “social media strategy” has exploded. My specialty is now a commodity and I am lumped in with those who happen to know how to build a Facebook page.

Take this story for example:

Recently, at SXSW while waiting with a group of strangers, one person turned to another and asked, “What do you do?” The other replied, “I’m in IT consulting. We primarily did email consulting, but as that’s all moving to the cloud, we’re repositioning to offer social media marketing and strategy instead.”

It seems everyone thinks they can do it.

While at SXSW, I got to chatting with the old timers of Twitter; people I’ve known since 2007 and whom I met at SXSW in 2008 who are also social media practitioners. I must have heard something like this 6 times: the market is too crowded and if you didn’t become a super A-lister  early on or get swallowed up by a big agency, it’s time to either get out or become very narrowly focused to survive.

The industry has evolved. As we’ve been saying for 2 years, Twitter and Facebook are as common as the telephone and email. The shift moved us from teaching the tools to developing strategy, defending ROI, and conversation monitoring for business intelligence and lead generation. This sector is constantly refining and in flux, racing to keep pace with the frenetic pace of technology development.

Now, beginning my 5th year on my own, I’ve been thinking a lot about where the industry is going and wondering about my place in it. There are new things for me on the horizon, but it’s a little too early to talk about them right now.

But, just in case: Does anyone out there have a spare crystal ball they could lend me?

I’ve been thinking a lot about content creation lately. I haven’t been creating much over the last 6-months and it’s been bothering me. I was at lunch with a friend the other day who commented “Yeah, but you don’t really blog anymore, do you?” Oh, dear. What a terrible reflection that mirror offered. My blog has been on a very low simmer, I’ve not been doing any video, even my other blog has been kind of quiet. This has much to do with bandwidth.

Not the kind that my Internet provider offers, but the number of hours in the day. I will lament what is a fact for most solo-preneurs: I don’t scale. Try as I might, I can’t seem to change the limiting factor of time.

I attempted to create more time by sleeping less. Hey, if Martha Stewart and Chris Brogan can get by on 4-hours a night, why not give it a whirl? I trained my body to get by on 5-hours a night, but, it resisted. I was bleary and short-tempered after many weeks of my new longer work days. This was not doing much for my creativity either. So, now I’m back up to a robust 6 1/2-hours a night and feel much better for it. I guess I’m not cut out to be another Martha or Chris.

So, with only one of me, and 17.5 waking hours in my day, let’s lop off 4.5 hours for family time (non-negotiable if I want to maintain a happy life with a 5 year-old and a husband) and an hour for such luxuries as showering and having a lunch break, and I’m left with 12 hours.

That’s the time I have everyday for client work, new business development, staying on top new things in my industry, maintaining my social networks – digital and physical, sourcing and prepping for speaking gigs, project research for digital legacy, and content creation. Oh, yes. and a personal life.

At some point, something has to give.

I’ve never been the type of blogger to whip off short and breezy posts just to keep content flowing. You know the type of blog I mean. It’s like eating at an affordable family restaurant chain: not bad, but not memorable. I prefer to write longer, more analytical posts despite the extra time they take to create. But this means I don’t write as often. Some have suggested that I change the style of posts I write to be short and sweet to accommodate a faster turn-around and increase the volume of content on my blog. I’m undecided on that, but I’ve definitely taken the advice to heart.

It’s about habits, really. Some people blog daily and that frequency results in faster production. Practice, practice, practice. I’ll need to carve out time in my 12-hour a day to build some new content creation habits. I wish that I had minion clone to do my bidding. But, I’m not in the market to hire a ghost blogger.

How can I miss you if you won’t go away?

To be honest, the break away from content creation has been good for me in some respects. It has allowed me to concentrate on supporting my clients, building some new service offerings (to be launched in the fall) and to do a fair bit of speaking. And I’ve decided not to beat myself up over being absent. Sure, maybe I won’t be an A-list blogger on the AdAge Power 150 just yet, but, I’ve spent my time in other useful and productive ways that will benefit my business.

My break from content has also made me itch to start making it again. Recently, I spoke at the Podcasters Across Borders conference in Ottawa. For years I’d heard nothing but wonderful things about PAB and it’s single-track, laid back community and it’s intelligent and intimate approach. Sure enough, being in a room full of passionate content creators for a weekend re-invigorated my spark to express myself and get back to writing here and there and over there too, post photos (instead of hoarding them), and try to process the 15+ hours of video that I’ve amassed which is collecting digital cobwebs. (I *really* need a video editor!)

Pivotal moments in unexpected places.

On the morning of the first full day at PAB, Andrea Ross took the stage. For 3-years, Andrea produced a successful podcast about children’s books with her husband, Mark Blevis, one of the PAB co-founders. In her 5-minute presentation, Andrea crystallized what creating online content is ultimately about: real, human connection.

If you’ve ever wondered if the work that you put into your blog, your podcast, your videos or your time spent on social networking sites ever mattered, please watch this video.

Who am I kidding?

Earlier, I said that my lack of posts were to do with habits and scant available time. But, really, it’s about priorities. If this blog was a bigger priority, then I would develop better different habits and make the time, right? So, then what gives?

Andrea’s presentation humanized content creation for me again. I’d gotten caught up in the thought that, to be an integrated marketing consultant, I must blog because it’s good for business. It’s a central part (some would argue “THE” central part) of any online strategy. But, lately, it has been feeling more like a chore than a joy, something I had to do to be part of the game, and with that uninspired attitude, it was easy to rank it lower on my list of priorities.

Everything I created online had to have a business purpose – work, work, work – and I lost sight of the most important part of this exercise: people. I forgot about how what I create might have meaning and resonate with people. No, not just people – YOU.

So, if you take the time out of your busy life to read my blog, I want to thank you for spending time here when you could be doing something else. And I offer an apology for being absent, in heart and in spirit as much as in posts. I’m going to re-jig my priorities, cop a new attitude, do my best to learn some new habits and make this space special again.

If you have any tips for me, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Twestival Montreal – With only a few weeks to  plan the event, I worked with a great volunteer team to raise more than $5,100 for  charity: water. Our target was $4,000; enough to build one well in Africa. Knowing that we’ve given people the gift of clean water, saving lives in the process and helping a community thrive, was worth all of the stress, my brief illness and serious lack of sleep.

The event wrap up has the full list of sponsors, volunteers and links to photos and video coverage. Thanks to everyone who  supported the event. You should be very proud of what you accomplished.

Collaboration – I’m a solo consultant, so I’m always looking for opportunities to collaborate with others on projects where I can put my skills to good use. I was fortunate to meet Mark Goren of Planting Seeds last year at a dinner in Montreal that I helped to arrange for Valeria Maltoni. Mark and I hit it off and have been collaborating on a few projects. I’m thrilled that we are working on a several new things to offer together in the coming year. Here’s one for team work!

2nd Social Media Marketing conference – I was invited to speak in Toronto about how brands can use Twitter. It was a small but lively group, where many were relatively new to Twitter and very few were tweeting on behalf of a brand.  I love speaking about Twitter and had fun presenting. I guess it showed.

(Thanks Colin!)

PodCamp Toronto – For my second time participating at PodCamp Toronto, I presented with Tracy Apps (@tapps) on video microblogging and communities. It was a blast! Tracy and I talked about the evolution of online communities and the different ways to participate in video.  Despite our faltering Internet connection, we managed to showcase a several services including Seesmic, Phreadz and 12seconds.tv, while giving mentions to Utterli, Tokbox and YouTube. We had great interaction and questions from the participants. You can download the Quicktime file of the stream or view Laurent Lasalle’s Qik of the session.

Congratulations to Sylvain Grand’Maison (who did TWO English presentations), Kim Valee, and the rest of the francophone contingent from Montreal who overcame language to make their mark on PodCamp Toronto. You did far more than most could do!

PodCamps are great for meeting friends that you don’t get to see very often or are meeting in the flesh for the first time. One of the highlights of the weekend for me was having dinner on Friday with Chris Brogan, Amber Nasland, Dave Fleet, Jeremy Wright, Dave Delaney, Merlene Paynter, Randy Matheson and Angela Misri. What a great mix of interesting and fun people that I can count as friends, new and old.

Skating Nut – Nothing could have capped off such a stellar month better than a visit by Laura Fitton (@Pistachio). Laura was on a mission to skate the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, and stayed at my home in Montreal on her way from Boston. We were up far too late catching up, but still managed to be happy and excited about our road trip the next morning.

Laura’s plans to skate the Rideau that day fell through when the Canal was closed due to poor ice conditions. Considering she’d driven 7.5 hours to be there and had the goal to skate the Canal for at least 5 years, did she fret about the timing? No way! Instead, she gamely accompanied my family to the Children’s Museum and called an impromptu Ottawa Tweet-up. Fortunately, the weather gods produced some very cold temperatures and the next day, Laura finally got her skate.

Seizing Opportunties – In retrospect, this action-packed February was about seizing opportunities and making the absolute best of things, despite obstacles. It was about taking a chance to get involved, making a difference, trying something new, working hard, sharing knowledge, meeting people face-to-face, collaborating and fostering friendship.

It was a blur.

It was wonderful.

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Calling on the power of Twitter crowdsourcing!

My Twitter bud Tracy Lee Caroll, a.k.a. @StarrGazr is in urgent need of a generator.

She and her family live in the in southern New Hampshire,  near Nashua, not far from Boston. An ice storm hit their area on Thursday night and they have been without power for almost 2 days. It will be days more before power will be restored.

With no power, they have:

• no running water – water pumps require electricity
• no lights
• no heat

Tracy Lee and her family are visiting neighbours (who have a generator) to bathe and recharge cell phones. They have firewood for their fireplace for some heat. But what they really need is a generator of their own.

They are willing to travel all the way to Rhode Island if they can secure one.

If you live in the northeastern U.S. and can help Tracy Lee find a generator, please contact her with the name & phone number of the store/person:

via Twitter: @ or DM @StarrGazr

via email: me |at| tracylee |dot| com

Check Tracy Lee’s Posterous and Flickr streams for more photos of the devestation.

I have tremendous faith in the power of Twitter to find help for people through exteneded social networks.

Please put the word out to your network to help Tracy Lee find a generator.

Thank you!

[UPDATE: Looks like Joe Cascio's generator is not going to work for Tracy's needs. The search continues. ]

[UPDATE 8:30 PM: Joe Cascio's generator IS going to work. And @Fairminder a.k.a. Jim Spencer is going to drive it out to Tracy tomorrow from Boston. Another successful Twitter crowdsourcing effort. Thank you to everyone who retweeted and put the word out to help Tracy.]

However, as a foreign observer of the election, and listening to many people on Twitter over the last year talk about U.S. politics, I was inspired to write two posts about politics and peace. I’ve put them on Flotsam & Jetsam, my newly resurrected personal jumblog (yes, I could say Tumblog, but really, it IS a jumble over there). If you’re interested, you can read A Wish For My American Cousins and  Peace Is Up To All Of Us on that site.

If it’s not your thing, no worries. Another marketing post shall be along here shortly.