Adventure is worthwhile in itself. – Amelia Earhart
As we reflect on an amazing 2011, we’re incredibly excited about the adventures ahead for Ant’s Eye View, and for our clients. Our thought is that by continuing to be customer- and talent-focused, we can become trusted, strategic advisers to our clients.
As 2011 began, we started to advise our clients along the Social Engagement Journey and guiding companies as they transform their business through social customer engagement. Our goal was to encourage our clients to look beyond tools and technology, and instead focus on the customer. We applied our experience as practitioners, our enterprise-wide point-of-view and proven methodology for strategy to make the case for change.
This really resonated with our clients and the industry. Along the way, our clients asked us big, new questions:
- How does social customer engagement change the way we think about enterprise collaboration across our organization?
- How can we distribute social and digital competency across a global enterprise with thousands of marketers, multiple business units and dozens of markets?
- How do we break down the operational seams and build shared objectives between our marketing organization and services organization?
- How do we reorganize our global marketing organization across traditional and digital marketing functions?
- How do we build a more agile and customer-focused process to support our awareness, activation and engagement objectives?
- How do we effectively drive our success and measure the impact of our investments?
It turns out that having a sharp set of skills on social is only a part of the puzzle. In order to endure, you have to assemble the right talent, a proven methodology and a vision and culture that creates a partnership between the organization and the clients your serve.
Over the course of 2011, we’ve:
- We’ve expanded our client engagements beyond our traditional strength in technology and financial services to include food and beverage, hospitality, quick service restaurant, luxury retail and professional services giving us the opportunity to work across a wide variety of sectors. Through this process, we’ve learned that by expanding the breadth of our experience we bring greater depth to our work.
- We’ve grown our services portfolio beyond core social strategy, listening and analytics to include readiness, organizational design and marketing process developed by guiding one of the world’s largest technology firms through an overall marketing organization re-design,
- We’ve also built playbooks, helping massively-matrixed organizations make sense of social engagement planning and execution, and how both fit into a company’s culture, policies, systems and processes. This includes projects with several leading technology brands, one of the Big Four accounting firms, one of the world’s largest telecommunications and mobile providers, one of the world’s largest CPG companies, and an upscale department store with more than 100 retail locations.
- And, perhaps most importantly, we’ve continued to add great new talent to our team. In 2011 alone, we added thirteen new practitioners and we’ve also moved to three new offices in our respective communities. And today, we’re excited to announce that Len Devanna has joined our Silicon Valley office, joining us from EMC Corp. as vice president, social business strategy. He brings 17-years of digital and social media marketing experience driving social strategy change across a global workforce of 45,000 employees.
I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished over the past year. The intersection of our work, our people and our client relationships have given us an unique opportunity to learn, grow and develop as a business while setting the stage for the year ahead. 2012 brings an ongoing opportunity to build upon what we accomplished in 2011 and proactively seek out what adventures the future holds. Our experience has taught us much in the past year and we couldn’t be more excited to kick off 2012. Stay tuned for an announcement in early spring!
My first real inspiration to leave Microsoft after 15 years and form Ant’s Eye View came in February of 2007. At the time, I was General Manager of Community and MVP at Microsoft and responsible for the global online community and advocacy strategy.
To kick off the New Year, we’re thrilled to announce that veteran digital marketer