2013 was a whirlwind of a year for me. A Vortex if you will.
[twocol_one]Geographically I started the year here:
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[twocol_one_last]and ended the year here:
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What can I say? I like beaches. I started the year aggressively growing the first micro craft brewery in El Salvador. Building it through a strong content marketing and social media program. However apparently the communist government (or other business competitors? who knows) decided they wanted it and forced us out of the country.
We returned to the “Land of Stuff” and San Diego (my wife and my sons’ home town) to be close to family and relaunch ourselves back into the world. Once back I realized that the skills and strategies I learned from years of organically growing several brands from bootstrap to bullet were what us cool kids now call Growth Hacking, Content Marketing and Social Marketing.
I called it building an army of passionate, brand evangelists on a shoestring budget to change our world.
It’s basically what I have always done. It’s the core of who I am and how I operate.
Things got pretty interesting when I heard about the stupendous Social Fresh West conference that was happening in San Diego. And then I won a ticket to attend the conference from the cool cats at Livefyre. The conference was one of the best conferences I have been to in many, many years. Hard hitting and tightly focused. Jason Keith rocks. It inspired me and helped me realize that I had been practicing these strategies for years and had gotten quite good at them. It also caused me to ask enough questions of the speakers that I was known as “the question guy”.
I’m a question asker and a Why seeker.
My questions and my twitter posting at the Social Fresh West conference caught the attention of two social media power makers here in San Diego at the conference: Melonie Gallegos and Rob Marlborough of Fandom Marketing. Enough so that they actually created a new role in their social marketing agency just for me based on what they saw of me on twitter. They reached out and we connected. Read about that whole social recruiting thing here. I was honored and proud at once. They have been a tremendous resource and learning experience for me. Incredible team, fantastic vision and great strategy. You should hire them now!
And then to top it off the Senior editor of Technorati (who also found me via Twitter) asked me to be a contributing writer there. I have been very blessed through all of the crazy chaos and fun of 2013. I met so many amazing, talented, smart and crazy cool new friends. One of the coolest things to happen that really capped my year was to be honored by being included on
Social Fresh’s list of the top 43 career moves of 2013.
Things moves pretty fast with social media. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss all the career moves your colleagues made in the past year.
A lot of smart and capable folks made big career moves this year in the social media industry. Here are the top 43 of the year.
I would never have guessed that I would have made a list like this and I feel honored and proud to be amongst some truly amazing talented individuals. Many of these I now consider to be friends after having met them in 2013. Most of the credit goes to Twitter and all of the conferences I attended in 2013. I am truly looking forward to Social Fresh West 2014!
Here is to a glorious past year and an even more glorious 2014. The future is so bright I’m already wearing shades.
