On a recent trip to Seattle, I was invited to sit down with Blake from Visible Technologies for a short interview. The video below is part of that interview, where I attempt to answer the question “How will social media change in 2009?”
I’m proud beyond words to share our latest announcement over at Ant’s Eye View. Long story short, the illustrious Sean McDonald (of Dell community fame) is joining our team!
Welcome to the Grassroots Age!
At Ant’s Eye View, we think every day about how to Elevate Customer Experience. You can no longer afford to look down on a mass of customers and treat them as a market. If you do, you will be left out of the real world and the real conversations that are shaping your identity and impacting your brand’s integrity. In order to elevate customer experience, you’ve first got to change your point of view – learning how to get eye-to-eye, ant-to-ant and even tweet-to-tweet with your customers. Differentiated brands will learn to listen, engage and integrate the voice of the customer seamlessly into everything they do.
At Ant’s Eye View, our job is to help our clients develop and implement strategies focused on integrating the voice of the customer and driving social engagement as a cornerstone for innovation, customer service and word of mouth marketing initiatives. Central to our brand promise is bringing leadership to you in the form of proven corporate practitioners – leaders who have made it happen in brands you’ve heard of. With that in mind, we’re incredibly pleased to welcome Sean McDonald to Ant’s Eye View and announce the opening of our Austin, Texas office.
Welcome Sean!
Sean has spent 11 years at Dell in Executive positions in Marketing, Customer Service, Online, and Communications. Since 2006, Sean led the design and operation of Dell’s online community activities on Dell.com and online conversations off dell.com. An online community affords Dell.com users an experience to Learn, Share, and Explore technology with variety of content and interactions. Last year 250 million visits occurred on Dell communities including Dell Community Forum , Direct2Dell , and Idea Storm. Dell communities operate across 6 languages. Dell is mentioned approximately 5000 times every day on non Dell websites. Sean and his team joined these web discussions-adding value by resolving customer issues and answering product questions. Learn a bit more from his talk at SWOMfest, or from industry coverage:
Sean joined Dell in 1997 as a Marketing Manager in the newly formed Consumer Business and was responsible for the Marketing Operations of a $1.7 Billion segment. His operation provided the financial analysis and forecasting to enable the business to grow 70% annually. Additional roles included Brand Management, Product Development, Call Center Operations; reaching sales $4+ Billion in 2004.
Prior to joining Dell, Sean spent 2 years with Deloitte Consulting Group as a Senior Management Consultant and 7 years in the U.S. Navy as a Lieutenant in Logistics. While in the U.S. Navy, Sean was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal and Navy Achievement Medal for operational excellence and leadership.
Sean holds a BBA and MBA from The University of Texas at Austin, the city he and his family call home. Sean is married to Liz Rescia and has two children, Keaton and Fallon. You can ask Sean just about anything related to Beatles trivia and you’re likely to find him spending time with family near any body of water. (You know those Navy boys!)
You can find Sean on Twitter at: @iamseanmcdonald
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With Sean’s addition to our team, we are also pleased to announce the development of a new 1 day workshop:
The Social Engagement Practitioner Lab: LEGO, Dell and Microsoft as only insiders could tell it
Interested in more info or scheduling? Contact us. And be sure to meet all the Ants at Ant’s Eye View!
March on!
Community Managers seeking a new job check out the 2 NEW Community Manager Jobs Posted!
As you probably noticed, I’ve updated the look and feel here at CommunityGuy.com. In a matter of minutes, I found a great (and free) theme to customize, used MAMP (open source) to be able to modify and test locally, and then updated my Wordpress (open source) platform with the new theme design.
Although it took me about an hour to do an impressive update, there were thousands of hours that went into making that ease possible. People from around the world have been working on these three projects. When that dawned on me, I couldn’t help but feel humbled and appreciative.
Nerds from around the world, I salute you.
As far as the new design goes, please let me know what you think and if you see any problems. I never really liked the last theme I had in place, but I’m digging this one! I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Mind boggling. Truly mind boggling.
Jake McKee is the Chief Strategy Officer and Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View, a customer experience strategy practice focused on helping clients escalate their customer experience. With a rich background in customer collaboration, online communities, and fan groups, and Web development, community management, and product development, Jake helps organizations understand how to act like groups of people, rather than soulless money making machines.
