Announcing my new role: Analyst with Forrester Research
I always had this fantasy about one day writing a post and saying I AM NO LONGER A PR and flouncing off out of the industry once and for all (probably with some choice words attacking the PR industry and making me look very clever and controversial for about 5 seconds). Even though I haven’t really done PR for any clients for over 2 years, I still worked with PROs and PR agencies, and never wanted to burn my bridges there or forget my PR roots. An understanding of influence, content, editorial, and earning media has given me marketing knowledge which is infinitely valuable in the modern media world.
But now it’s time for me to say that I have really jumped a fence and landed somewhere else which was a bit of an industry fantasy for me – Forrester Research.
This January I joined Forrester Research as an Analyst serving Interactive Marketing Professionals (that’s anyone doing Digital Marketing to you and me). You can read more about my role and how to work with me.
I’m crazy excited about the new role and can’t believe I survived the notoriously gruesome interview process (think The Hunger Games but with a presentation to a group of analysts and researchers as The Reaping.)
In the mean time what of Grapevine Consulting? Well apart from my resolution that I WILL update my hideously outdated site, Grapevine will go on the back burner for now apart from the few related products & services kept in the pipeline.
I just wanted to highlight that it’s been 4 years since I struck out on my own. Thank you to all the wonderful people and clients who have and continue to support me. I still *love* the marketing and media industries and I’m really looking forward to stretching my legs at a company which attracted the likes of Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang, Josh Bernoff, Nate Elliott, Shar VanBoskirk and many other smart folk I am meeting every day.
[Image Credit: colours and colours]
Social Media training courses
For years I’ve been running bespoke in-house training courses on Social Media with everyone from The NEC Group to St Austell Brewery and Porter Novelli.
I’ve trained Marketers and Sales Teams, as well as Board Members and CEOs, and out of working with these different groups I’ve created two unique Social Media courses covering the biggest problems I get asked to help out with.
August is usually known as a quiet month so it’s a great time to take a day out of the office and brush up on some skills. Details on the courses are below. If you know me, or have trained with me in the past, please pass on the details to anyone you know who might be interested.
SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CEOS & BUSINESS OWNERS
Tuesday August 23rd 9am – 4.30pm
Central London
Your marketing department is asking for extra budget for Social Media, and every week the Sunday Times has an article saying how important it will be for business. Your Customer Services team are worrying about complaints on your company’s Facebook page – which is being run by some 18 year old in West Wales – and your employees are tweeting every day and probably wasting valuable time (saying goodness knows what).
Social Media for CEOs & Business Owners is a one-day event exploring the four areas of:
- Why Social Media?
- Social Media Basics (what exactly is Twitter & Google+?)
- How to measure and find the ROI of Social Media
- Managing Social Media in your organisation: Best Practice
This event is for CEOs & Business Owners of both B2C and B2B businesses. They can be at the stage where they’re questioning whether they even need to be using Social Media, and how, or are already using Social Media but uncertain they’re getting results.
For more information and to book a place visit http://social4ceos.eventbrite.com/
SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY: How to Do It
Thursday August 25th 9am – 5.30pm
Central London
You’re under pressure to be using Social Media but don’t have the time or resources to do it. You’re sick of hearing case studies about Social Media but often they’re not relevant to what you do. Even worse, there’s no guidance on how to do it. The agency that works for you (or competes against you) seems to control the digital strategy but you’re not sure it’s right.
Social Media Strategy is a practical ‘How to Do It’ day for Senior Marketers exploring:
- Social Media Fundamentals: What works (and what doesn’t)
- Creating Content
- Measurement & ROI
- How to do it: Best Practice & Practical Steps
This event is for in-house marketers or agency staff who need to develop and lead Social Media strategy. The course finishes with a working session where attendees will begin to flesh out their own Social Media strategy to take back to their organisations.
For more information and to book a place visit http://socialmarketingstrategy.eventbrite.com/
Posts from elsewhere
Things have been quiet here of late, that’s mainly due to finishing off another business project (TBA any day soon) and also because I’ve been using up any blogging brains over on Tempero.
Here’s what I’ve written recently:
- The Ultimate Social Media Calendar is here: I finally used my powers to sniff out a meetup from 100 paces and set up this public Google Calendar showcasing all the digital goodness going on in the UK & London
- Are QR Codes finally going mainstream?: Since 2008 I’ve been waiting for this mobile tech to go mainstream. A small boutique New Zealand winery revived my hopes that the QR Code’s time has finally arrived
- Paid, Owned, Earned Media; your new vocabulary: If you never quite understood why marketing was converging here are the words you need to be using to make sense of it all
Favourite thing I’ve read:
The Turdis was a winner
www.showusyourlongdrop.co.nz is a site set up in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake in February. Showcasing the types of make shift toilets (or long drops as we say in NZ) people have built to deal with the city’s damaged waste and water system the site is light relief in a sea of high profile natural disaster appeals which have been launched online – all those appeals are essential of course but support like this helps connect people to stories in a totally different way.
How do I market my produce in these recessionary times?
How do I market my produce in these recessionary times?
That’s the question being addressed in Pembrokeshire this week at the National Direct Food Sales Conference.
The conference is part of the Fork2Fork campaign (directed by the seriously slick agency FBA) and is for food producers to meet and listen to presentations on how to market their produce, farmers’ market, farm shop or box scheme in these recessionary times.
Speakers include local food champion Henrietta Green whose weekend food fairs are credited with paving the way for Borough Market‘s comeback AND one little ol’ social media nerd (yours truly) talking about online promotion.
The Fork2Fork campaign is ongoing so just a shout out that if you’re looking for Farmers Markets or Farm shops in Wales, FBA have created this fantastic Google map.
I’ve embedded the conference flyer below and can’t wait to stock up my suitcase with tasty treats.
Related articles
- New York’s Fresh Bodegas Program Brings Farmers’ Market Produce to Inner City Food Desert (treehugger.com)
- Urban Root Cellars: The Next Trend in Food Preservation? The Globe and Mail (thekitchn.com)
- Conscious Shopper Challenge: Buy Local (greenphonebooth.com)
SoTech Now
Well it’s been a whirlwind journey since I got to know Paul Armstrong (@munkyfonkey) and Shannon Boudjema (@shannonboudjema) at the start of the year.
Shannon, bless her, signed up Paul and I to present at Social Collective 2010 and we thought we were going to get up there and talk about social media marketing. So far, so like every other conference.
But the more we spoke, the more we realised we were narked about the same things in the industry:
- We were tired of talking about Social Media just in marketing circles
- We didn’t care about the latest new tech brand, we were more interested in what it could do
- We thought business was still business, if social technologies aren’t MAKING or SAVING money then why are you using them? (Exc third sector from biz objectives here)
The last point we knew social media could deliver on – if the right stakeholders, with the right objectives, used the right tools. Our solution? An infographic 
You can find the SoTech Infographic over on a dedicated home we’ve set up called SoTechNow.com
This is the change in conversation we want to make. We’re hoping to keep updating the site and the infographic is only V1.0 right now so yes please, we’re very much looking for feedback on how to make this even more useful for business.
What do you reckon? Do you think we need to move on from talking about social media and start foccussing on analysing/benchmarking/creating case studies around social technologies instead?
Events: Facebook and #CommsChat
Next week is a busy week just a quick heads up on two events I’m involved with.
Social Collective meets Comms Chat aka #SoCol & #CommsChat
CommsChat is a regular online conversation (and what a great idea) set up by Adam Vincenzini and Emily Cagle. Monday’s conversation features the SoCol gang ahead of The Social Collective event taking place in September. Thanks to the lovely Shannon Boudjema for getting me involved in #SoCol. On Monday night we’re looking forward to giving you a preview of the #MAPmad theme we’re developing for the conference.
Hope to see you between 8 and 9pm on Monday night and all you have to do is get online. More details here.
Facebook for Business
I’ll admit, I’ve been slow in sorting out my Facebook smarts for business, preferring Twitter by far to the [sometimes annoying] social network. But the plain, unavoidable truth, is that Facebook is going to play a bigger and bigger part in our digital marketing futures so I’m rapidly trying to expand my knowledge.
Enter my lovely client Tempero who is hosting Facebook for Business next Thursday. Official Facebook peeps will be there plus advice and tools from some of the UK’s best companies working in this space.
Registration is here.
Cleaning up communications
Earlier in the year when I started #fixPR I wanted to stop the PR bashing and share solutions. We’re not all perfect and we don’t have a lot of time but, at the risk of sounding cheesy, if we all work together as an industry we could effect change.
Some people joined in and started debating the issues (and I thank them for their contributions) but since then I’ve noticed it’s still far more likely to see people taking a pop at each other and dragging the collective industry down. FFS!
Enter Claire Thompson and the successsfull thupr events. Claire has dedicated the next one to ‘Cleaning up Communications‘ which is a chance to “put away the bolly and look at some of the campaigns to help raise the game and have a collective think about what can be done in future…”
Claire has invited me to talk more about #fixPR (thank you) in good company with:
- Richard Ellis, PRCA (Public Relations Consultants Association)
- Molly Flatt, 1000 Heads, offering the online perspective
- Adam Parker, Realwire, on An Inconvenient PR Truth
- Tim Phillips, freelance journalist, on Talk Normal
I’d love it if you could attend, not just because we’ve managed to get women speakers outnumbering men (wow, finally representative of the PR industry) but because I’d like it to be an event where we actually SAY something and not just sit around stroking our own egos.
I’m in a bit of a feisty phase at the moment - so if you know me at all it should be fun 
Please come along and add to the collective intelligence if you’re impacted by communications in any way; PR, writer, content producer, marketer, whatever…
[Image: DanBrady]
Defeated
After half a day, and about £60, my long-awaited plans to improve the look and feel of my blog have resulted in, well, I’ve actually made it worse.
It’s not that I underestimated the complexities of installing wordpress and messing about with it but after having conquered the free version over here http://grapevineconsulting.wordpress.com/ well over a year ago I wanted to move things on a bit.
I could’ve paid someone but find it’s useful to try this this stuff at least once so I understand it a little better if it crops up in client work. Well, I can admit when I’m beat. Please bear with this ugly looking site until I can find someone to rescue me.
Technology and the new industrial revolution
The FT’s reported on new research by HSBC on how business is expected to develop over the next 20 years. New technologies and working practices are, of course, at the heart of it. I was interviewed for the report and am profiled as
a “referral economist”, a new breed of business matchmaker who profits from connecting people
That alone sounds a little shady but in context it’s about using your network to connect with business opportunities and connect other businesses to eachother.
A lot of people think “networking” is ego-driven, greasy sales types at events handing out business cards and trying to get closest to the most important person in the room. That’s just a misconception like the idea that Twitter is just ego-centric, over-sharing of the minutae of life.
Networks (and social technologies like Twitter) are about connecting people. The social media revolution has already massively impacted industry by connecting brands and customers. The next phase is when businesses connect to eachother. Wikinomics fascinates me by exploring that idea, and the concept of Amplified 09 goes further looking at what happens when we connect across industries.
I know it’s cheesy but we really do live in exciting times.
Social Media Heroes and Villains
Love Facebook? Hate Facebook?
Love Twitter? Hate Twitter?
Too confused to know? Well apparently even ’leading online opinion formers’ aren’t quite sure. Their thoughts on everything from what they love and hate, to what they wish they’d known a year ago, have all been included in a new ShinyRed report Social Media and Brands 2009. You can download a copy of the report and decide for yourself.
Hghlights of the report? Well, um, a certain little grapevine *ahem* was included alongside big bananas like Charlene Li, Antony Mayfield and Neil McIntosh. Thanks for allowing me to participate guys, loving your work!
Other contributors:
About:
I'm Darika Ahrens and I help brands develop marketing strategies for Social Media. My background is in Public Relations for companies like Orange, Microsoft, Philips, HTC, Yell.com, and Estee Lauder. I've worked with and trained some of the UK's top agencies.