Over the past week, I've participated in three marketing and social media conferences, as a speaker at two and moderating a panel at the other one.

Digital and social media has, of course, evolved significantly since I first started out in the industry over 13 years ago. The creativity expressed in brand activations has, over that time, lept forward significantly, just as the technologies that support them have evolved into sophisticated platforms for managing content, building participatory frameworks, and tracking behaviours.

But there's still, I feel, too often a gaping void where strategy and measurement of progress towards meeting strategic objectives should be.

I'm not the only person to observe this. Back in January, Robert Philips, former EMEA CEO of Edelman and an astute observer of the PR and Marketing industries, wrote:

"I suffered some sobering moments recently, while judging a clutch of industry awards. There was so much ’stuff’ (aka output) but so few genuine ideas. Worse still, the essence of PR had become badly polluted: here was a blancmange of ad campaign amplifications; phony product launches; ’news’ stories around, well, news; and a clutch of celebrity embarrassments. There was a sad but noticeable lack of original thinking – no genesis the likes of a Marks & Spencer Plan A, an Eco-Imagination, a Nike+ or a Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, conceived by PR folk – and a weird disconnect persisted between the commercial need (awareness, loyalty, sales etc) and the idea itself. We seemed to have grown ourselves into a vacuum. The PR industry – our profession – needs to think about where have all the big ideas gone and what is now closing our minds to their generation? We must re-connect the big idea with commercial need.

Philips describes, in that same post, from which I've selectively quoted from below, what he refers to as the Four Heels of Achilles:

1. Outcomes over output: "PR needs a unified and coherent measurement system. It must be Outcomes based. This should be urgently adopted as a global standard and endorsed by all the professional bodies. The measurement must be scientific, provable and defensible. It must be delivered to scale and speak to convergence. Advertising Value Equivalence and/ or Opportunities To See should be banished forever..."

2. The truth of data: "...(readily accessible) data must now become the foundation stone for fresh insight and for the evolution of analysis for the always-on conversation; it must speak to communities and to networks and should be used in real-time in order to drive relevance and resonance..."

3. The imperative of organisational design: "...No PR campaign will therefore be complete without strong and sensible guidance from experts in organizational design – as businesses turn themselves inside out and as both states and industries begin to look at themselves, if not from the bottom-up, then certainly through a more relevant and democratic lens..."

4. The triumph of ideas: "...We have mistakenly grown to see platforms not as ownable sources of creative energy and monetisable idea flow, but either as transient technology channels or as confluence points for otherwise random tactics. Innovation has become more about a rush to market with piecemeal thinking, than about building a sustainable programme for competitive brand or corporate advantage...."

Perhaps 4-5 years ago, I expected to see brands shift from rolling out tactical "activations" towards using digital and social media to make progress towards a set of defined strategic objectives - not social media objectives, but the grown up stuff coming out of the board room - and measuring progress towards meeting those. But far too often, I'm still seeing social media "strategies" that go something like "launch lots of channels and, over a period of time, increase the number of fans and followers".

That's not a strategy.

In the presentation I gave at two conferences last week, I used an analogy to try to illustrate the point. "Eating something" is a tactic. Following this tactic means that, on the way home from a boozy evening in the pub, you stop in your local takeaway and get something greasy to soak up a bit of the alchohol and alleviate your immediate hunger. It's seems like a great idea at the time, but the next day you start to wonder if it was a great idea afterall. If you follow this tactical approach - eating something - as if it's a strategy, so pop into that same take away with regularity, the effects will, over time, probably be negative to your health and wellbeing.

"Living a long and healthy life" is a strategic objective. To meet it, you need a strategy that includes things like eating a well balanced and healthy diet, getting regular exercise, etc. Your success, attributable mostly, but not entirely, on following your strategy, is measurable in terms of your sense of physical well being, the comments of others about how well you look (your "brand reputation"?), and the length that you live.

Many brands are, when it comes to social media, still merely counting their collection of a gazillion fans and followers, notching up new retweets and likes, and tracking sentiment. Creating a whole new lingo for measurement and reporting does no one any favours - and is likely to, eventually, erode the confidence that the boardroom has in the ability of these activities to drive progress towards tangible and organisationally meaningful objectives.

It's about time for those of us working in the digital and social media industries to start being more strategic, focus on real outcomes, and develop measurement and reporting mechanisms that have meaning in the board room. Awareness and reputation are, of course, important outcomes, but we also need to focus on demonstratibly impacting sales, driving applications from high value recruitment targets, reducing the number of customer care calls fielded, increasing customer satisfaction, and gaining insights that lead to new product and service offerings. That's all possible, but only if we start with a strategy rather than a tactic.

[The views expressed in this post are my own. In my next post, I'll describe how Social Business provides a process to help brands and organisations become far more strategic in their approach to digital and social media.]

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of giving a rather personal presentation at the Vircomm Conference - a potted history of online community management, from 1985 to present, as lived from my own perspective. Some, but not all, of the stories I ended up telling can be found in the notes - although you miss out on the one about Beatrice the World Service "pool typist" and the Gay or Not themed chat we did post-watershed for BBC3's That Gay Show. Really.

The other morning, whilst waiting on a plane for over an hour when my departure was delayed, I realised that at some point I'd become a "business traveller". Here's a few of the signs I came up with in a series of early morning tweets:

1. You've added +44 and knocked a zero off all the UK numbers in your mobile contacts

2. You know exactly where the taxi should set you down for fast access to T5 security (far end. close end opens at 6am)

3. You know your Avios balance and how many tier points you need by yoir renewal date

4. You committed your passport number to memory and carry pre-completed Landing Cards

5. You note a pre-5am spike in your tweets

6. You hit level 8 of the jetsetter badge on FourSquare and are surprised that equates to only 36 different airports

7. You know how to get around IP address enforced limits on free airport wifi

8. The person at immigration says see you next week

9. Duty free becomes your local wine retailer

10. You call destinations by their three letter airport code

11. You have suitcases specially for for one night, three nights and holidays

12. You foursquare friend request people who are checked in to the same airport lounge

13. You speak warmly of the shopping at CPH and ICN because you saw nothing else during your visits

14. You have a packing "strategy"

15. You keep spare mac dongles in each bag

16. You've reread this months HighLife 4 times

17. You avoid conversation with neighbouring passengers at all costs

18. You decant your shampoo into hotel shampoo bottles of no more than 100ml

19. You avoid buying shoes with metal in them

20. Most of your text messages are warnings from your mobile networking warning you of roaming charges

21. You avoid following people holding folders full of papers when in the immigration queue

22. You avoid families with children at security checkpoints, particularly if they have a pushchair

23. You mark the page stamped by immigration on the way in so as to speed your exit on the way out

24. All your devices are showing the time in different time zones

25. You say thank you in the wrong language when leaving a restaurant down the street from your own home

Feel free to add you own...

The past few days, I've been working on a presentation for the Vircomm Summit, a gathering of the online community management industry, which will take place in London this Thursday.

Rather than showing a whole bunch of industry folk stuff they already know - strategies, models and case studies - I've decided to deliver what can best be described as a Potted History of Online Community Management.

In the presentation, I'll cover the:

• pre-internet days of dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs)
• wild frontier of usenet and IRC
• walled gardens of the mid-90's
• early days - and challenges - for audience interactivity at the BBC
•  launch of the BBC's web chat service
• investing in community management training and roll out at the BBC
• the first (??) multi-domain community management platform we developed at G-Wizz.net
• what "twitter" looked like in 2001
• BBCi chat studio at Bush House and the professionalisation of online community management at the Corporation
• expansion by the BBC into building engagement on third party social networkign and content sharing services
• the state of the industry today - grown up strategies, approaches, platforms and measurement frameworks
• my thoughts on the source(s) of competition to the online community industry in the future

Although my narrative and most of the screenshots are in place, I've yet to tidy up the visual presentation - stay tuned, I'll post the slides as soon as I can after presenting them at Vircomm on Thursday.

My small children know I go to the office and that sometimes I go to other people's offices, but when faced with the question the other day "Daddy, what are you at work? What do you actually do?" the only reasonable response I could come up with was that "I make the internet work better". Needless to say, this opened a can of worms - with them vocally  demanding more Angry Birds, Doc McStuffins and Spiderman videos. Kids.

But it's a good point. I often struggle to explain, in a sentence or two, what the team here at Edelman Digital does. Thankfully, my Chicago based colleague, David Armano, shared a slide with me earlier this week that provides a bit of insight into the types of activities we undertake on behalf our clients. Now if I could just figure out how to get this down into a short soundbite...

The leading content portal in Croatia, Dnevnik, yesterday published a relatively lengthy interview with me discussing social media strategy.

The article is published in Croation.

Realising that most readers of cybersoc.com are unlikely to be fluent in Croation, I've published the full, unedited, English language version below:

Dnevnik: Your presentation in Zagreb is titled what’s a like ever one for your brand? Can you tell us more about it?

Corporate investment in Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising has, over the past five years or so, shifted away from traditional activities and into digital. Many brands have thrown themselves headlong into social media, not wanting to miss out on the potential benefits – the key word there being potential – without first figuring out exactly what strategic objectives they're trying to achieve.

Hardly a week goes buy that I don't hear a client or prospective client suggest that they should be "on Facebook" or ask if "Google+ is the next platform" where they should activate their brand activities online. The fact is, as experienced as I or my colleagues might be in devising and implementing social media propositions for brands, we couldn't possibly know the answer to either of these questions without first knowing what the brand's current objectives are, what existing activities are already contributing towards meeting those objectives, and what measurements are meaningful to the business.

So, in my presentation, I won't be saying that all brands should be on Facebook or anything other social platform, nor that they shouldn't be, but rather, the point I'll be trying to make is that without understanding how social media activities can measurably contribute to strategic aims, having tens of thousands or even millions of fans and followers in social media is unlikely to make much of a difference. Indeed, without understanding the brand's strategic objectives and measuring progress towards them, even if there were benefits to the brand, that success would be hidden in a slew of data that is meaningless without a strategic context to enable understanding.

Dnevnik: There is a lot of ongoing talk about measuring of your social media activities. What tools would you recommend to companies when it comes to social media measurement?

There are a wide variety of platforms available for measurement, but choosing a measurement tool comes, for me, pretty far down the totem pole of importance. First and foremost, a brand has to identify and prioritise their key objectives – what impact should social media have on their online share of voice or their search result visibility, how much can be saved when social media deflects a telephone call to a customer call centre, how many additional widgets to they want to sell, how many new customers can be converted by the advocates the brand cultivates in social media, etc. Second, reporting needs to be done in a way that stakeholders within the business can understand. Third, a governance model should be in place so that activities that don't yield results can be killed off quickly, and activities achieving the best results can benefit from additional investment. Finally, it's time to find a measurement platform that meets the brands needs, based on everything above.
 
Dnevnik: What is the number one biggest mistake companies make on social media networks?

We still, on occasion, have brands come to us – and I'm sure this is the same for other agencies – adamant that they want to be on a specific social platform without really understanding what they want to achieve there or, more importantly, without understanding how they might contribute positively to the experience their target audiences have on those platforms.
 
Dnevnik: Content management is a big deal in the social media world. What is your advice when it comes to content generation for social media networks?

There are three or four social content management platforms that we've worked with clients to implement, sometimes their own choice, other times ours. They each have their pros and cons so it's essential to let the specific use case guide the decision.

When it comes to generating and sharing content, and building engagement around it, the important thing is to get the structure of how you're going to manage that right from the start. We have seen a lot of brands recently come to us with a lengthy spreadsheet of all their pre-existing social media channels, often times using different pages, handles or accounts for each market. This approach forces audience members who are seeking out a brand in social media to realise that they may very well exist in a secondary market, and that it's the market specific account they should follow. This is counter intuitive for users, can unnecessarily split the fan base, and can lead to brands making repetitive investments from market to market in infrastructure and content that could have been reused had it been created with multi-market use in mind from the start.
 
Dnevnik: You are currently Director of Digital at Edelman but previously you were one of the first people to kick of BBC’s social media campaigns. How different is your work today compared to when you worked at BBC?

I spent about eight years at the BBC, split over two stints. In the initial instance, I was the first Online Community Producer (what we called social media before they coined the term) at the BBC, so my main priority was convincing Editorial Policy, Legal, and other functions of the business that allowing audience members to have a voice on a programme or topical website was something we could, or even should, enable. So in addition to creating the business case for message boards, web chats and comments on pages, I also had to create the governance models, community management processes and training courses to allow us to do this within a risk averse environment.

The second time around, I largely picked up where I'd left off three years previously, but pushing those platforms further across the Corporation, and launching a few new platforms, such as the BBC Blogs, which I was Acting Editor of for my final 18 months of my six year second stint at the BBC.

At the time, because I worked in editorial and broadcast, like many of my peers, I actually distrusted the BBC's PR wing – as editorial people, with our own channels for engaging audiences, we saw little reason to let the "press release people" know what we were up to, nor to involve them in it. Of course, that's all changed at the BBC and elsewhere, as the importance of social media for managing corporate reputation has become increasingly understood. If I were at the BBC today, I'd be looking to the PR team to provide a framework that empowers and supports me in my attempts to engage more meaningfully, but in a de-risked way, with audiences.

At Edelman, my focus on on devising strategies – digital, social, editorial – for all sorts of clients, ranging from International Governance bodies to B2B and B2C brands. It's the organisational and B2B work I most enjoy, personally. With a background that includes editorial, community management, business transformation, functional specification, and user experience definition, I generally act as the glue that bonds a client's initial ambitions with the deliverable at the end of the process we take them through.

 
Dnevnik: We are living in an era of startups. What would you advice people working in startups. What is the key to success?

I once worked at a start-up, and have since provided consultancy to several. The thing I love about start-ups is the energy and excitement that surrounds them. I don't think I'd like to work for a start-up again though – they have a habit of consuming every waking hour – and, on that basis, and the fact that the startup I actually worked at went belly up in a quite spectacular fashion, I suspect I'm not the right person to provide advice on this!
 
Denvnik: Have you been to Zagreb before? What are your expectations from the Marketing Kingdom Zagreb?

I've not been to Croatia before, but have been to other countries of the former Yugoslavia and thoroughly enjoyed my time in Skopje and Belgrade. In both those cities there was a lot for me to learn from the creativity and grassroots approach to digital and social media I  found being deployed. For example, in the bookshops of Skopje, tables were piled high with the selfpublished titles of bloggers - essentially, blogs that had been printed and made available in book format. The reason behind this was because, at the time, it was impossible for Bloggers in Macedonia to join Google Adsense, Amazon Associates or other ad programmes that help online publishers monetize their efforts. Printing and selling content in bookshops was the best way for bloggers to make a bit of money. I suspect things are much more advanced in the Croation market, but also hope to find the same levels of creativity, interest and passion.

It's been a while since I've provided an update here at cybersoc.com - last year was a flurry of major, multi-market digital and social media projects for me, leaving little time to blog or get out in public to talk about the work we are doing here at Edelman Digital, London.

Over the coming months, some of my current line management duties are set to shift to other shoulders, giving me a bit more time to focus more fully on what I love - strategic thinking and delivery. And with that shift, I'm going to have time to start doing something else I find both exhilerating and awkward: getting up on stage and sharing some of my experience with others. Here are the first two dates you can catch me doing that:

VirComm Summit - 07 February, London: I'll be joining a number of past colleagues and industry contacts - many of them going back as far as my first job as a Community Producer at the BBC and the early days of E-mint, the International Association of Online Community Managers - including Tamara Littleton (eModeration), Dominic Sparkes (Tempero), Phil Hall (Elzware) and Rebecca Newton (MindShare). I very much look forward to this one, although I haven't figured out the topic of my presentation just yet.

Marketing Kingdom - 14-15 March, Zagreb: Organised by Kosta Petrov, whose amazing events I've spoken at, in Belgrade and Dubai, in the past, is set to put on another great show, with speakers from the London Olympics, Tumblr, Carlsberg, Nokia, EMI and Salesforce. He's hoping for over 500 attendees for this one and I have no doubt Kosta and his team will achieve that. The title of my presentation is something along the lines of "What have all those friends and followers ever done for your brand?", which I intend to be more of a warning that digital and social media initiatives only have positive impact where they are strategically aligned with, and measured against, overarching business objectives.

We’re spending a lot of time these days discussing our Social Business offering with clients. In some instances, they’ve come to us asking what we can offer, whilst in other instances we’ve observed things in our work with them that highlights the need for the conversation. Either way, one of the things that comes up time and time again is the question, “what exactly IS social business”.

I, like others, have made attempts to define Social Business in a sentence or two, my most recent attempt being the blurb I wrote for the Social Business panel we’re hosting in our London offices on 14 February (details here):

“From increasing the breadth and depth of the interface between consumers and corporate staff, to improving the ability to share knowledge and expertise within the enterprise, Social Business is a very human centric approach to solving the challenges faced by organisations in the highly connected, always on, business world of today.”

This, of course, is more of a description of Social Business as opposed to a definition. So in trying to craft something that hits the mark a bit better, I decided to list out some the important aspects of Social Business:

• Human centric
• Supported, rather than driven by, technology
• Increases breadth and depth of participation in business activities
• Offers new opportunities for collaboration
• Connects people to processes
• Builds trust
• Enhances sense of shared ownership and mission
• Reinforces meaning
• Encourages transparency
• Cuts through complexity
• Flattens hierarchical structures
• Delivers measurably against objectives
• Makes the most of people, skills, knowledge and content

So how to define Social Business? To me, Social Business is about creating participatory frameworks that enable businesses to harness the willingness and ability of a variety of stakeholders - whether they are internal (“staff”), external (“audiences”), or both - to meaningfully and measurably contribute towards meeting the shared objectives.

I think that stab at a definition of social business connects pretty well with the elements in my bullet point list, but if you’ve come across something better, or think I’ve missed something important, please do feel free to comment.

Edelman Digital is hosting, and I'm going to be moderating, a great panel on Social Business as part of Social Media Week. The event will be in our offices at 105 Victoria Street, London SW1, on the morning of 14 February. You need to register to attend - here's the details:

Social Business In Action
A Social Media Week (London) Event Hosted by Edelman Digital

Register Here: http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1447

A growing number of organisations are tapping into the power of Social Business to harness the willingness and ability of consumers, stakeholders and staff to get closer to, and more involved in, the delivery of business critical processes and practices. From increasing the breadth and depth of the interface between consumers and corporate staff, to improving the ability to share knowledge and expertise within the enterprise, Social Business is a very human centric approach to solving the challenges faced by organisations in the highly connected, always on, business world of today. The following panelists will, during this hour long session, share their thoughts and experiences of Social Business in action:

David Armano (http://darmano.typepad.com/), Executive Vice President for Innovation and Integration at Edelman Digital, and leads Edelman's "Social Business Planning" whilst regularly writing about Social Business for The Harvard Business Review and elsewhere. David is widely considered to be an influential and authoritative voice in the use of social media for business, and has a combined audience of over 70,000 subscribers to his blog and twitter feed.

Vincent Boon is Head of Community at giffgaff (http://www.giffgaff.com), a mobile network operator "Run By You" that puts it's customers at the heart of business processes ranging from marketing to service delivery to customer care. The result, an award winning service and strong differentiation of it's offering, is perhaps the best example of Social Business success yet in the UK.

Euan Semple (http://www.euansemple.com/) is an independent consultant and leading figure within the Social Business movement. For over ten years, Euan has been helping the people within organisations, including the BBC, international organisations, and consumer brands, connect and work more effectively through Social Business programmes. He is the author of a forthcoming hardcover on Social Business, "Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do: A Manager's Guide to the Social Web."

Fourth Panelist (TBC)

Session will be moderated by Edelman London's Director of Digital, Robin Hamman (http://www.cybersoc.com), a twelve year veteran of the convergence of social media and business, who has written and spoken extensively on the subject of Social Business. A light breakfast (pastries and coffee, not full English) will be provided.

Registration is Required

Usually, on the last day of the working year, I write a post that reviews the past 12 months. Well, I spent my last day of work last year flying from London Heathrow to Frankfurt, back to Heathrow, across to London Luton then off to Gdansk so didn't quite manage to maintain the tradition.

But that explanation is a great start for my 2011 post as I spent much of the year - around a day every week and a half - gallivanting around Europe and further afield.

The year started, as 2010 ended, working with David Armano on Edelman's Social Business Planning offering. Over the past year, various members of the Edelman Digital and Edelman Consulting teams furthered our thinking and, in December 2011, our formal offering finally saw the light of day.

My client list has continued to grow and although I don't tend to name names, I can tell you I've had the pleasure of working with a leading global food and beverages brand, several international insitutions (UN and EU Parliament), a global leader in the finance sector, a consumer pet care brand, a mining company and others. Indeed, for some reason, my clients are almost all based outside of the UK - Zurich, Brussels, Moscow, Holland, Seoul, New York, San Francisco.

This probably goes some way towards explaining why, if follow me on twitter or foursquare, you will have noticed that, as I mentioned above, I spent quite a lot of the year out of the office. So much so that, at one point, several members of our team were calling me "Dora", in reference (if you don't have kids), to Dora the Explorer.

Here's the list - off the top of my head so likely to be missing one or two stops - of the places my job took me in 2011:

• NYC
• Moscow
• St. Petersburg
• Seoul
• Dublin
• Prague
• Bratislava
• Vienna
• Amsterdam (3-4 times) and Raalte (twice) and Utrecht
• Barcelona (twice) and Sitges
• Brussels (8+ times)
• Gdansk (once for work, often for play)
• Copenhagen
• Frankfurt
• Munich
• Belfast
• Belgrade

I enjoy travelling as part of my job - it's great to see new places and meet new people - and there were far to many highlights to capture here, but here's a few of them:

Belgrade, long on my list of places to visit, rolled out the red carpet in a way no other city managed to match - my conference speaking gig there was proceeded by a surprise VIP invitation to Belgrade Fashion Week (thank you Kosta!), where I met the Prince and Princess of Serbia and watched the show as part of their entourage, was interviewed by Fashion TV (I said some nonsense about the designs evoking strong images of Spring), and then went to dinner at a hard to better piano bar with a group that included a supermodel who had done Victoria's Secret and covers for just about every fashion magazine going - this does not happen every day and half the office still remains sceptical it happened.

Sitges, near Barcelona, was extraordinary for entirely different reasons. I was there to speak at a client event - it's one of my favourite clients because they're smart, receptive to our ideas, and a lot of fun. After I spoke in the morning, I headed straight to the poolside at the Dolce. Visualise, for a moment, four or five pools split across different levels, lush gardens making each one of those feel entirely private, and beautiful views out over the Med and you're there. Clients take note - please help me get back to the Dolce, sooner rather than later.

In Seoul we also had great hospitality. The hotel where our group of four stayed was not far off perfect although I never did figure out all the gadgets eluded to by all the buttons on the toilet, which had a heated seat and a protruding nozzle. I suspect, based on the icons, there was also a dryer built in there. Our Seoul office welcomed us warmly, and our client layed on a wonderful lunch for us - the octopus running down the table in a bid for freedom (he was captured and plonked into the boiling water in the end) was surely not part of the plan, but added a great story to my after dinner repoirtoir. Other memorable moments inculde member of our team somehow getting stuck in a lift, unable to figure out which Korean symbol to press for help, having a jet lag induced meeting at 4am, and buying a neck tie at 6am. We also managed to find time, during our 36 hours on the ground 13 hours from home, for dinner in the restaurant on the top floor of the tallest building in Korea and the food - as was all the food we had in Seoul - was truly delicious.

I also had a great time during my trip to St. Petersburg and Moscow. I arrived in St. Petersburg on the weekend before a client meeting which, coincidently, was scheduled in the middle of the "white nights" when the sun sets for only an hour or so in the night. I visited the Hermitage, which must be one of the World's greatest art museums, and a short boat trip outside of the city, the "Russian Versaille", Peterhof. After finishing up with the client, I headed to Moscow to spend a day with my Edelman Digital colleagues there, two of which took the afternoon off so as to take me on a tour that included Red Square and other notable sites.

Those are just a few of the travel related highlights - there were many more, including getting lost in an industrial estate on the outskirts of a small town in Holland at 1am, wandering around inside the European Parliament, getting a free Mexican dinner off a foursquare check-in in NYC - which I'd need to write a book to fully cover. Monocle, Intelligent Life, The Economist, Wallpaper, and The Guardian kept me informed along the way with BBC iPlayer and Monocle 24 providing entertainment.

As for professional stuff, our team continued to grow rapidly during 2011 - from around 40 full time staff to 70+. We've had the opportunity to work on some amazing build projects, many of them involving a full blown research and strategy phase prior to design and implementation. We've also had the chance to devise and manage some interesting social media engagements for clients. A number of the projects I've had the pleasure to work on have involved teams in multiple countries - Germany, Brussels, Russia, Spain, Holland, Italy, China, Japan, Korea, NYC and San Francisco, and Argentina. Edelman has offices in over 54 markets, and joining up enables us to ensure that the global strategies we often devise are informed, and implemented by, people with local knowledge.

I continue to find thrills in the fast paced nature of our work, and also delight in working with such great people whether they're from within our own London based Digital practice, our wider Edelman family, or clients and their other suppliers. Oh, and did I mention that we're always looking for good people to join the team?

Anyway, enough gushing about how much fun I'm having here - best of luck to you in 2012.