January, 2013 Archive

It’s been another very busy week for Delightful Communications. I’ve signed another client up for some social/digital strategy work and training, and delivered a personal branding audit for a major CEO.

The new Pioneers we’ve added are John Winsor from Victors & Spoils (now part of the Havas Group), Angel Chen from WPP’s OgilvyOne, the fabulous Carolyn Everson formerly from MTV and Microsoft and now the head of global marketing solutions at Facebook and Jess Greenwood the former Contagious Magazine writer who is now at R/GA.Book reviews on Amazon US and Amazon UK have been astounding. I think we’ve had about 16 now and nearly all have been 5 Star.

We’ve sold out on the US site and our publishers are upping the ante to make sure people don’t have to wait to get their hands on a copy.

That, plus the launch in London next week should see some additional exposure. I spoke at the Microsoft Trends Council last week, and I have had a number of queries about other speaking opportunities that you can see (if they come off) when I update my professional speaker page.

Stephen Fry on the cover of our Facebook Page

Lastly, we have started a 4 part series of articles for the IAB in the UK starting with this: What content providers can learn from Stephen Fry. They’ve kindly let us talk about some of the Pioneers and the lessons learned and are conducting a Twitter competition along with it too!

Can’t wait to get to England next week to see family, for the book launch and to see clients.

If you’ve not got your copy of the book you can get it here, and if you have it please, please jot down a review on Amazon for us as they all help!

Just 2 weeks until our book launch reception in London. Thrilled JWT have agreed to host it. I remember reading up on their graduate training scheme way back in 1994 and not having a clue where to start filling out the application form.

How things change with the passage of time and a little experience?!

I’m looking forward to spending time with friends and family, as well as shoehorning in a few pints of 6X and other English bitters that I miss quite a bit.

More 5 star reviews keep coming in for the book on Amazon (links here) and we’ve published some more excerpts on Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, Gurbaksh Chahal from RadiumOne, Jaron Lanier from Microsoft who is the “Father of Virtual Reality” and Vanessa Fox, formerly from Google, she set up their webmaster tools community and now runs her own consultancy and marketing intelligence software called Nine By Blue from offices in Seattle.

Yesterday I spoke about the book at the Microsoft Trends Council in Redmond. A few senior folks showed up to hear me talk about the lessons learned from the book. Feedback was great. I think they find it valuable to hear what others are saying and doing in digital-land, and I think the historical nature of the book lends itself very well to understanding what might work for businesses in the future.

One potential other lesson they raised was practice. The notion that many of the Pioneers have honed their technical and business expertise over many years through experience. More on that on the Delightful Communications Blog by the end of the week.

Lastly, here’s a “cute” video we shot of Maggie just before Christmas of her dance moves:

Enjoy and you’ll here more from me next week!

We’re already four days into 2013, I’ve just done a five mile run on the shores of Lake Washington and I’m writing this before delving back into some fascinating client work.

The book is going well and we have started releasing excerpts from each of the Pioneers so you can get a flavour of what their chapter is about.

Here are the first four: Thomas Gensemer from Blue State Digital, June Cohen from TED, Denzyl Feigelson from AWAL and Avinash Kaushik from Google.

We’ll update you next week with another four and so on. We hope they spur you on to buy the book and share it with friends and family.

I’ll be travelling with my family to the UK in a couple of weeks as we have our official “Pioneers of Digital” book launch at JWT’s offices in Knightsbridge, plus I have some client meetings.

The other thing is, I have bought a Fitbit pedometer and think it is simply awesome!

The idea is it tracks your steps and keeps you motivated once it’s synced with your computer or iPhone (which I don’t have ;-() It’s all part of my plan to lose 30lbs in the next 6 months. 30lbs sounds a lot but I want a big goal to aim for.

Pretty much my whole US family is travelling to Phoenix for the 1/2 marathon at the start of March so I’m using that as a goal for fitness and weightloss (and so I don’t have to drag quite so much weight around with me).

Check out the Fitbit.com site and see all their different options. I’ve had it since Christmas and it literally doesn’t leave my side!

Happy New Year. Thanks for all the support in 2012. Here’s to a cracking 2013!