All About Me -- Social Media

I have extensive experience leveraging social media on behalf of brands.

While at Starwood I led the development of the first hotel travel blog dedicated to travel content (as opposed to program content), www.thelobby.com. I developed and authored the vision and development of www.sheraton.com, built on user generated content and the first major brand to bet its success on its users (other brands used micro-sites). I was heavily involved in the measurement strategy around UGC on Sheraton.com to determine the impact of social media on hotel bookings. I have led numerous initiatives involving blogs, FaceBook, distributed content, guest and member engagement and research efforts to better understand how SPG members engage with social media. I furthered direct conversations with SPG members through a variety of means including webinars, phone calls, and a 3rd party frequent traveler site, www.flyertalk.

One of my last projects, although small, was a labor of love that highlighted all of the cool work we did at Starwood with a number of social media apps and other innovative platforms, www.room-51.com.

In addition to efforts on behalf of Starwood and others, I author two blogs, Tweet, am on FaceBook (friend me!), LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and others.

Please Feed the Animals and Social Media in the Age of Layoffs

I read an interesting article today in Ad Age about an Ad Copywriter that was laid off who started a blog, Please Feed the Animals whose mission is to "To eliminate the barriers between advertising agencies looking for talent and talent looking for work by providing a free online venue for professionals to showcase themselves online."

The tools available now are making organizing the unemployed way easier. For example, the day after I was laid off I started a group on FaceBook for all of the ex Starwood employees to chat, post jobs, support each other etc. Within a few days, there were a lot of jobs posted, a number of recruiters had joined, and people were finding people. Erik's blog offers the same kind of dynamic. LinkedIn has countless groups and recruiters have told me most of their days are searching on FB, LinkedIn etc for prospects.

Its nice to know that the days of being unemployed, alone and unsupported are quickly coming to a close.