ResearchGoddess

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight:

What Peter had to say about Jessica: “Jessica is smart, smart, smart. She’s very good at the Social Media world, getting great ideas and running with them.”

Jessica has traversed the United States and has settled recently in New York City. She attended the University of Alabama to study Public Relations and Advertising and graduated from the University of Alabama – Birmingham. She began her career in public relations with Publicis Consultants | PR in Seattle, focusing on food/nutrition and health/wellness accounts. Earlier this year, she moved to the East Coast to become a Senior Associate with Digitas, where she focuses on consumer accounts and agency strategy. She blogs at JessicaRandazza.com as well. Continue reading “Pay It Forward 2010 Profile: Jessica Randazza” »

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight:

What David had to say about Daniel: “Daniel previously worked at the Chicago Tribune activating “Colonel Tribune” as a character based of the Tribune’s history which gained a large following on Twitter. Since then, Daniel has [been]… doing some interesting work with storystreaming (telling stories through lifestreaming tools such as Posterous).”

Daniel attended SUNY Buffalo where he earned his undergraduate degree in Anthropology. He then attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and earned his Masters degree in Journalism. Daniel started his career in newspaper and was a Social Media Strategy Coordinator at the Chicago Tribune, and then the social media lead with Tribune Interactive. He eventually wound up working at Weber Shandwick as a Digital Communications Supervisor, and recently joined Sears Home Electronics as a Social Media Manager. He also blogs at Old Media New Tricks and the3six5 Project, with he runs in collaboration with Len Kendall.

What interested Daniel in social media: As a reporter, he saw how digital was becoming an important part of the mix. Daniel looks to brands like Zappos, which has created tons of supporters that go out and promote for the company. If the conversation is good on a site, people will go back several times per day to continue to engage in the discussions. He says that authentic conversation starts advocacy.

Some of Daniel’s thoughts on the importance of branding through social media: “In social media, there are a lot of people who understand the space but don’t have ‘tread on the tire’ when it comes to working with brand. It’s important to know how to brand yourself! Using social media with brands, facing real challenges; it’s exciting but difficult. You have to convince your clients as well as your company stakeholders of its importance. You can have the most impact by building up client relationships and coming up with solutions that make sense.”

Some of Daniel’s thoughts on journalism and social media: Daniel believes that it is important to look for different story-telling formats, but he also believes that the long-form article won’t disappear entirely – it has to exist. For example, he says to take a look at The New Yorker and The Atlantic – not all journalism can happen in 140 characters. Journalism is journalism – whether in 5,000 characters or in 140 characters.

Where Daniel sees social media going in the future: Over the next 12 months, Daniel thinks that lifestreaming will play a major role in the progression of social media. With this, he believes that Tumblr & Posterous will help people manage their social media presence. Using tools like these as ‘hub-and-spoke’ modeling for managing your social media presence can help to center your digital activities and give others a more aggregated view of your on- and offline activities.

Connect with Daniel on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog

photo credit: Chris Brogan

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight:

What David had to say about Len: “I’ve worked with Len at Critical Mass but he’s already been developing a name for himself by being a prolific writer, commentator and participant in social media and communications. Len is very passionate about the space and no doubt will continue rising due to his persistence and the level of participation he puts out there.”

Len attended Purdue University where he studied Marketing and Sales. He says that studying sales was helpful in terms of learning how to network. He started his career with Starcom, a media communications agency, where he realized that digital was his passion. After spending two years with Starcom, he joined CriticalMass, a digital marketing agency. There he was involved in digital media buying/planning and started getting more involve with social media. He found that media buying/planning was valuable, but may not be leading the charge with social technologies and observed that PR was well positioned to lead the charge when it came to social media. Following his time with CriticalMass, Len freelanced for a bit, and through this work he was offered lots of professional guidance. Eventually, GolinHarris offered him a position and he currently works as an Account Supervisor with the Dialog Group there. His focus is on providing clients with expertise on digital and social media PR campaigns. In addition to his job, Len also spends time being creative via Posterous and the3six5 Project, which he runs in collaboration with Daniel Honigman

Some people who have inspired Len: David Armano was someone who inspired Len – in fact, he said that David is the reason he went to work at CriticalMass. He respected David’s work even though they didn’t work closely. They had a sort of “digital mentorship” relationship. Len also says he learns a lot from Tac Anderson, Digital Consulting Director at Waggener Edstrom, and Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer at Mullen. Of Boches, he says that there are a lot of the creative people in the business aren’t that much into social media, but he is.

What Len loves about social media: Len says that he likes to live a life of “micro empires”. He says that he gets bored doing just one thing so he enjoys having side projects that inspire him. Being a part of social media, he says there are many opportunities to be a “renaissance man”, which is part of what inspired him to start the3six5 Project with Daniel Honigman. The idea of this project was to have 365 people write a blog post every day of 2010. Each day, a different person posts an entry, so they’ll have a diary of the year written by each of these people. The project was born from the idea of lifestreaming – they want to stream the collective life of people from many different places, and social media has helped facilitate this.

Where Len sees social media going in the future: Over the next 12 months Len believes that social media will become a business priority for the Fortune 500. If a company has a customer service or PR division, then it will most assuredly have specific employees dedicated to social media. Additionally, Len believes that jobs involving social media will continue to be on the rise. If you look at job boards you will see that there are a lot of opportunities to work with big brands in the realm of social media right now. Agencies are growing social media business areas because that is where brands are in need of service.

Connect with Len on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight: Ruth Sylte
Title: Social Media Director
Employer: GoAbroad
Who paid it forward: Bryan Person

What Bryan had to say about Ruth: “Ruth and I first crossed paths about 10 years ago, when I was in my first job out of college at a study abroad office in Central New York. Ruth ran workshops at the conferences I attended about using the web and technology in the field of international education, and as I look back, I recognize the personal impact she had on me to follow down the path of online communications. Ruth is absolutely a pioneer in the profession; I admire her vision and her passion.

“Ruth has dipped in and out of international education over the past several years, but we managed to reconnect through Twitter nearly two years ago…she certainly understands how online communications can be used to drive business and bring people together (particularly in a cross-cultural context)…I’d love to see her get some more recognition!”

Ruth lives in a college town along Minnesota’s Cannon River, south of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and northwest of Rochester. She earned a BA from St. Olaf College in Political Science and Religion. She was studying political philosophy and church history. She says that Political Science is the study of how people relate to each other in a community, which she attributes partially to her love of working with social media today. Her work has been in higher education, specifically with international education exchange, or study abroad programs. She cites Joseph Campbell’s idea that you should follow your bliss, and how this will lead you to opportunities that will take advantage of your skills and abilities. Having studied what she loved in college, this is how she views her work today.

Ruth has actually been involved with social technology for quite a few years, and she runs a consultancy called Manitou Heights through which she works with international educational groups and small businesses. Her work with GoAbroad.com as their Social Media Director is focused on positioning and integrating the resources they’ve already set up as the largest directory of abroad experiences, and she is working with them toward taking this into social media. Ruth is also currently in an MA program for Strategic Communications Management through Concordia University in St Paul.

Why Ruth feels social media has a place in higher education: International education could really benefit from using social media, but it has been very slow in adopting and adapting to it. In the educational field, she says “We’re always a couple of years behind business. It always takes longer for things to trickle down into education.” Most of her colleagues are not even on LinkedIn, and most of them are scared of Facebook; they see it as a ‘plaything’ for the young. Her advice to these colleagues is that the students are already there, and  if you are not there, you will lose them. She would like to see international education become more involved in social media, and she hopes to be one of those people who are instrumental in getting it there.

Some of Ruth’s thoughts on the progression of social media and technology tools: To Ruth, social media is the next step on a long road from how people have always been communicating with each other. You could argue that email was a beginning form of social media. These days, she uses her iPhone as an example:  ”This is our modern-day equivalent of the cuneiform tablet.” She says that social media is the next step in our path of different communication methods. Those who say that it’s just a fad don’t really get it, yet those who say that it’s the panacea of everything don’t really understand either. These things are all tools – and we forget this quite often. They are things we use to communicate with each other. People and industries alike are developing preferences, so no matter the tool you use, it still needs to be able to interface with other tools in order to be effective.

Connect with Ruth on:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog

photo credit: © Tania Larson Legvold, 2009. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I recently wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Spotlight:

What Elisa had to say about Stacey, Nadia, and Nyasha: “…when Lisa, Jory and I launched the very first BlogHer Conference in 2005, it was because we decided to *do something* about people saying it was hard to find women who blog, instead of only talking about it on our blogs (which we did plenty of too). Similarly, I believe the Blogalicious team saw that conferences like BlogHer and SXSW were spotlighting issues and perspectives about people of color in individual panels, but they wanted more. So they, too, had the chutzpah to simply decide to do a full conference by and about women of color who blog themselves. And then when they did it, they did it with a bang. We sponsored, and our company representative came back with tons of ideas and praise for how well they executed. They’ve also expanded to introduce B-Link, a service to create opportunities for women of color to engage with marketers who want to reach them.

“To me, they are rising stars because they saw a need; they took the reins and didn’t wait for anyone else to fill it; they are building community, and they are seeking to create opportunities for their community.”

Stacey, Nadia, and Nyasha met each other at Howard University’s School of Law while they were pursuing their J.D.’s. Nyasha went on to become a legistlative attorney, Stacey a government attorney, and Nadia was a commercial litigator and later became a law professor. As they each got married and started having children, they remained in touch and discovered that they all had similar questions about parenting, motherhood, marriage, and work. Their correspondence became long email chains that were really helpful. They soon discovered blogs and how they were the same interaction as their email but that they could share the helpful advice they had shared with each other with a broader audience – mostly about how to achieve a good work-life balance. This was the start of MamaLaw. This was approximately three years ago, and since then MamaLaw.com has blossomed and became a catalyst for the establishment of Blogalicious, a conference designed to encourage diversity in blogging, specifically women of color, inviting them to come learn and socialize. This was a one-of-a-kind conference, and as a result of its success, Stacey, Nadia, and Nyasha also launched B-Link, which is designed to create and foster engaging conversation between marketers and influential women of color consumers. They also launched MamaLaw Media Group which now serves as the parent company of the three ventures and is largely devoted to raising the profile of women of color online, all while networking, building relationships, and promoting inspiration and success for the blogging community.

Why they feel Elisa recommended them: their story is similar to that of Elisa’s. Through MamaLaw, they created a network of women bloggers of color and decided to put on a conference to promote diversity. The first Blogalicious was in October 2009 and they invited women of all backgrounds to come, learn, and socalize. Due to the groundbreaking nature of the conference, they believe Elisa saw a bit of herself in them, forging a new path for women, particularly women of color. They called her early on to get advice and to help answer some questions. BlogHer became one of the first sponsors.

What instigated the idea of Blogalicious: Stacey said that as much as the three of them connect on the blog, they obviously still needed to connect in person. Nothing can replace that. She believes it is important to nurture the in-person relationships, especially as we become more tech savvy. According to Nadia, she is glad she took the leap of faith to do Blogalicious. It was a dream of theirs and she fully supports going after your dreams without being intimidated. Nyasha stated that the partnership they’ve formed as friends was strengthened in the process of taking on a new endeavor. As women, being able to rely on friends as you embark on this is priceless. One wouldn’t have been able to do this without the other. One lesson that came out of the conference was the immense power that women of color have in the marketplace in terms of their ability to control household spending. After the conference, the hope was that companies will recognize their buying power and develop marketing campaigns designed to reach their demographic more aggressively.

Where they see social media going over the next 12 months: in the next 12 months we will see more diversity in social media. More people are getting into Twitter even though lots of people do one or the other right now. As we progress, more people are going to be multi-tasking with using social media. We will also see more integration of social media technologies into our everyday lives. Things like Google search will change the way people view information, and people are going to get more engaged in the conversation because of it. It will become more accessible too – the ease and accessibility of the tools will encourage more people to use them.

Connect with Stacey, Nadia, and Nyasha on:

• Twitter: Stacey (@JusticeFergie), Nadia (@JusticeJonesie), and Nyasha (@JusticeNy)
• Blog