1) Consult companies (both large and SMEs) on using social media (blogs, podcasts, RSS, and more) to perform better as businesses (read: make more money, get more personal fulfilment, and spread those benefits to employees). (I do not consult on how to avoid the overuse of parentheses.) This includes fulfilment and implementation of recommendations made in consultation, such as producing websites and other projects – online and off – in collaboration with my technical and design partners.

2) Write and edit companies’ online publications.

3) Connect companies with other experts who can help them across all areas of the business – marketing, sales, HR, customer service, employee service, and finance.

4) Run the Engagement Alliance.

What I’ve Done

Most recently, I was Head of Marketing for Latitude, the UK and Europe’s largest and most successful search engine marketing agency. There, the social media intitiatives I introduced saw the company’s press coverage increase sixfold, website traffic increase 7000 per cent, and sales enquiries via the web increase tens of thousands of percentage points. I also established valuable internal communications and customer service tools using social media, bringing the business closer to clients than ever. And the events I organised for the company’s potential clients contributed to new business wins totalling millions of pounds. (Latitude was named the UK’s fastest growing media company during my time there.)

Before that, I consulted companies on blogging, through my role as an associate of the Big Blog Company – the world’s first specialist blogging consultancy, founded in early 2003. I was also responsible for making sure that tBBC was talking to the right people. So on any given day, I might be conducting blogging bootcamps for group after group of journalists, fielding interview questions for a Times business story, working my contacts to pull together a party for prominent media figures in the US, asking hard questions at a blog-sceptic LSE panel, writing a blog post about current developments in business blogging and emergent technologies, showing a potential client what he needed to do to whip his publishing company into a profitable publishing company (and turning him into a paying customer), or helping an existing client who’d decided I was the one he needed to talk to about his technical issue. (Actually, I’d probably doing at least two of those on any given day.)

I have always had my hand in freelance business consulting; my most fun project so far was assisting a major Hollywood brand beauty industry celebrity in planning the expansion of operations to and launch of products in Europe.

Way back in 2001, I joined Swiss Life subsidiary Propeller as Editor-in-Chief of their b2b e-commerce website. With versions in English, French and German, this was where the company’s customers – corporate HR professionals and their expat employees – would monitor all of the expatriation tasks that they’d outsourced to Propeller and our expert alliance partners. Based in the UK, with working stints in Switzerland, I also contributed substantially to Propeller’s PR and marketing development. This included producing supplemental websites of value for our customers, print brochures, CD-ROMs, and live web demos for our sales force. And I remember (fondly, luckily) pitching in on QA, presentation production, and anything else I could do to help the business launch and acquire customers.

Before that, I did a fair bit of freelance web writing for websites such as the insanely popular Television Without Pity (when it was still called Mighty Big TV).

Prior to all this, I lived in the US, where I grew up, went to university, worked awful jobs, got bored of university, got sick of awful jobs, and finally decided to flee to the UK. It was, without doubt, the best move I have ever made.