1. Ant’s Eye View – On the march again! Please welcome Sean McDonald to our colony!!

    Monday, 30 Mar 2009 10 Comments Posted by:

    ANNOUNCEMENT!

    Welcome to the Grassroots Age!

    At Ant’s Eye View, we think every day about how to Elevate Customer ExperienceYou 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, TX 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:  Forbes.com, Fortune.com, Business Week, & Mashable.com.

    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!)

    Find him on Twitter at: @iamseanmcdonald

    New Offering!

    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.

    Meet all the Ants at Ant’s Eye View here.

    Thanks!

    Sean

  2. eModeration expands their services

    Tuesday, 17 Mar 2009 Comments Off Posted by:

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    My friends at the fantastic moderation company, eModeration, have launched a new suite of services that are worth checking out.

    Setting up a new community
    This is for companies that want to create a new community, or add to an existing community – for example, launching a new virtual world experience to an existing site, or relaunching an existing site, with a new community strategy. Some of the services that eModeration provide as part of this package include: objective and strategy creation; market research; defining community products and tools; seeding programmes; moderation tools; advising on tone, culture and content to fit brand values; writing user guidelines, help information, community rules and FAQs; and best practice consultancy.

    Strategic analysis and health check – for existing communities
    This is for companies that have an existing community, but want to make it work better for them. eModeration will: assess what is working and what isn’t; evaluate the community goals; create or enhance a community integration strategy; evaluate and recommend community tools and products; evaluate and advise on tone and culture; and lead the overall change management process.

    Ongoing community management
    This service allows companies to outsource their ongoing community management to eModeration’s team of community experts. The key aim of this service is to encourage positive participation by users in the community; and to assess progress and success of the community. The ongoing community management package includes: hosting communities, including seeding message boards and encouraging discussions and contributions from users; daily checks to ensure the community is functioning properly; continual feedback on how to improve how it is working; integration with a brand website; writing community newsletters and creating content from user contributions; keyword tracking and buzz monitoring; beta testing for new features; and ongoing analysis of trends, competitors and industry insights.

    You can learn more about eModeration at their Web site. Tell ‘em Jake sent ya.

  3. Twitter Updates for 2009-03-15

    Sunday, 15 Mar 2009 No Comments Posted by:
    • The AEV team is at SXSW this weekend! (And starting to use our @antseyeview account, can you believe it? #
    • If you’re interested in following us individually, check out: @jakemckee @seanodmvp @dustinjo #
    • Check out our fun project we’re kicking up: revolution.antseyeview.com #