1. Ant’s Eye View Opens Silicon Valley Office

    Tuesday, 9 Mar 2010 5 Comments Posted by:

    2009 was an amazing year for Ant’s Eye View. It’s hard to imagine that only 1 year ago, Dustin was starting as employee #1 and we only had 1 office. Today, we’re at 11 employees, 2 offices, and a unholy number of frequent flier miles amongst our team.

    Ant’s Eye View is a true “practitioner brand”, a company based on a team who have done real social media and customer engagement work inside big, complex companies. We’ve been in the trenches. We’ve written the go-to books about the topic. We’ve wrestled with legal departments. We’ve walked in our clients shoes, over and over again.

    With that in mind, it is with great pleasure that I announce something amazing: We are opening our third office. This office will be based in Silicon Valley and will support our growing base of clients in that area. Silicon Valley is home to some of the most amazing, most innovative companies in the world. We’ve been proud to count Cisco, Yahoo!, SAP, Symantec, and Apple amongst our clients. Now we can count them as neighbors too.

    Of course, to open a successful office an innovative culture like the Valley, we needed a heavy hitter. A really heavy hitter.

    We’re even more proud to announce that Ant’s Eye View has hired Kira Wampler of Intuit social media marketing and community engagement fame to lead and build our Valley office.

    When it comes to being in the trenches with customer engagement, nobody has been deeper, or done more amazing work than Kira Wampler. Having had a chance to work with Kira when she was the Group Marketing Manager of Online Engagement at Intuit, we were blown away by her depth of knowledge, amazing leadership, and of course her stunning use of BSG references. Kira has received Intuit’s Small Business Marketer of the Year Award not once, but twice (2008 and 2009), and her project Small Business United won the WOMMA 2009 Grand Prix Award. In short, she’s a rockstar.

    If you don’t know Kira, be sure to say hello. She’ll be here in Austin this weekend, taking part in SXSWi, or you can tweet her @kirasw. And in case you need something to talk to her about, here’s a few factoids that you can use as conversation starters:
    * Kira is proficient in Spanish, French and conversational Bahasa Indonesia and Vietnamese
    * Her first “tech job” was marketing a full-text, search and retrieval database on Japan-related information in…1993!
    * She’s mad for March Madness
    * She started her own company in 1995 (Spanish language adventure travel) and sold it in 1998
    * She’s married to a chef, loves great food but is totally content eating some salty french fries

    If you don’t know Kira, be sure to say hello. She’ll be here in Austin this weekend, taking part in SXSWi, or you can tweet her @kirasw. And in case you need something to talk to her about, here’s a few factoids that you can use as conversation starters:

    • Kira is proficient in Spanish, French and conversational Bahasa Indonesia and Vietnamese
    • Her first “tech job” was marketing a full-text, search and retrieval database on Japan-related information in…1993!
    • She’s mad for March Madness
    • She started her own company in 1995 (Spanish language adventure travel) and sold it in 1998
    • She’s married to a chef, loves great food but is totally content eating some salty french fries

    Welcome aboard, Kira! We can’t wait for you to start… April 14, 2010 can’t come soon enough!

    Additional Discussion:

  2. Jackie Huba to speak at the Social Business Summit

    Thursday, 11 Feb 2010 No Comments Posted by:

    Date: March 11, 2010
    Location: Austin, TX
    URL: http://www.socialbusinesssummit.com

    Contact on the Anthill: Jackie Huba

    Jackie Huba will be keynoting this conference. Her talk is titled: “Engaging The One Percenters: Twitterers, Bloggers and Facebookers Who Influence Opinions About You.”

  3. The mind of a Community Manager

    Monday, 8 Feb 2010 No Comments Posted by:

    (Originally posted at CommunityGuy.com)

    During a recent hotel stay at the wonderful Hotel Zaza in Dallas, I noticed two quotes written on the wall of my room. Both struck me as being particularly relevant to explaining the mindset a successful community manager has to own in order to do their job.

    The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

    - F. Scott Fitzgerald

    I’ve talked about how the Community Manager role is the “loneliest job in business” – it’s a job caught between customers and colleagues, where both expect that you’re on “the other side”. But the truth is, great community managers are great because they don’t choose a side, they understand, advocate, explain, and support both.

    A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

    - Antoine de Saint Exupery

    A good Community Manager supports the activities a group of fans/customers are already doing. A great Community Manager has an ability to look at a situation and see below the surface. They find the people who are true leaders, not just talkers. They offer support that is more or different from what is being asked of them because it’s what matters. They constantly look at groups and social engagements and people who, to the execs on the 24th floor just look like “unwashed masses” and see something revolutionary.

    Viva la Community Managers!