Times they are a changing

Ok here goes my first post on my first blog.

So I’m a traditionally trained direct marketer. And pretty good at it!

I’ve just returned back to work after another six month maternity leave (my third) to find that the world has changed for marketing people. When I left in July 2009 I was starting to dig around social media and work out how it could work for my company. I wrote a paper on it emailed it to my marketing guys around the world and told them to start doing it. That’s that box ticked I thought!

How wrong I was.

Returned in Jan 2010 to find we’re (www.terrapinn.com) not doing any of it. And many of our competitors are. We used to lead marketing innovation in the events industry now we’re lagging way behind.

I freaked.

I bought a couple of books on amazon and starting reading – fast. (Will blog about what I learned in these shortly).

There’s only one way to change behavior and that’s by changing your own. I need to lead by example. So by the end of my first week back I started tweeting. By the end of my second week back I reactivated linked In and now its the end of my forth week and I’m starting this blog.

I am totally sold on the power of social media and I am passionate about events. I want to change the way Terrapinn creates events, markets them and entire customer experience.

We run over 200 conferences annually – all around the world. That’s a lot of people I have influence and change.

So this is what I’m going to blog about – my journey in changing business conferences through first changing myself, then my company and then maybe the entire industry.

I’d love input from social media experts and my colleagues and peers in the business conference industry.

follow me on twitter: twitter.com/sharonroessen

Was that ok for my first blog?