Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Fortnotes 6

Posted by Roo - 25/02/11 at 11:02:00 pm

[Being the sixth in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

Mostly working on Cravendale, Honda and Lurpak and at the moment. One full day in Leeds with Cravendale clients, showing them our plans for the next few weeks and getting excited with them. Great meeting, and nice to bond with the team over hummus, wine and crisps on the train home. Yay for team picnics.

Also working a bit on Fairtrade, Nestea, P&G, Nokia, and more.

Helping one team put together a community management proposal for a client, and rolling up my sleeves and writing another one myself.

Some time talking with Katie and Will (not the royal couple, though these two are every bit as lovely) about extending some Twitter monitoring and stats gathering work I’ve been doing since I joined. Keen to get their help and involvement. Already gathering some really interesting Twitter data for a bunch of clients now, some fairly useful tools for teams to start playing with and there’s lots more fun to be had in this area.

As ever, some time spent interviewing and recruitment. Expecting to have the first creative community manager start next month, and hoping to offer a second role fairly soon. Helping interviewing for various other creative roles too.

Explaining my job to some friends at another agency, I realise again how good my role is and how much I enjoy it.

Trying to work at home one day per week. Not easy to keep the time free, but the difference it makes is enormous. Some time away from the office every week is really helpful for getting things done.

Reading: ‘What Technology Wants’ by Kevin Kelly, plus a bunch of fiction. Remembering that I used to take photos of the books I’d been reading every month, and wondering why I stopped.

Watching: a recording of Merlin Mann’s talk at Twitter HQ about meetings: “Broken Meetings (and how you’ll fix them)”. There are a lot of meetings at work and when I was managing my own diary I too often allowed it to fill up with back-to-back meetings, leaving me feeling rushed and unproductive. My PA is already amazing at helping me organise my week and protecting my time, and Merlin’s talk reminded me that I can be even braver about setting expectations about what we’ll get out of meetings, not defaulting to 60 minute meetings and not accepting meeting requests which don’t come with an agenda.

Hello/Goodbye: Cow, Pirate, Cyclist

Posted by Roo - 17/02/11 at 08:02:21 pm

Hello

Goodbye

Fortnotes 5

Posted by Roo - 11/02/11 at 11:02:00 pm

[Being the fifth in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

An exciting new project for Cravendale, plus a digital pitch for another client (which involved a bit of research and presenting some feedback and ideas). Lots of work on Honda and Lurpak.

Thursday was Make Good Music day, in which a bunch of us broke into teams and each met one of a handful of up-and-coming bands, with a view to giving them some help/pointers/ideas/etc. Sadly I had to leave before the gig + drinks in the evening, but the few hours I joined in were really fun.

Minor helping out on Fairtrade, which seems to have come together very nicely in the past couple of weeks.

Quite a bit of time on recruitment in the past couple of months; both making introductions and interviewing people.

Shockingly, had to submit my first ever DMCA takedown request on YouTube. I won’t say much about it, but rest assured the infringement was egregious and harmful rather than something we or the client could overlook.

I’ve had a nasty cold (sore throat, blocked nose, cough, etc) for this entire fortnight. Feeling a tiny bit grumpy and more stressed than usual as a result. Finally getting over it now and getting back to my normal self, and starting to go back to the gym/pool a bit more. I’d forgotten how nice it is just to feel normal.

Leila and I have taken a few weeks off Shift Run Stop since Christmas. Leila explains it well here. I’d like to start again though I have no idea when or how or when we’ll manage that. Soon, I hope.

Thinking about: targets and client expectations, conversations, ‘engagement’ vs interactions, reach, interactive video.

Watching: How to Play the Harmonica (the Blues), Stuart Lee on Top Gear, Everything is a Remix, the Float Documentary trailer, lots of cute cat videos (for research purposes, honestly), W+K’s superbowl ad for Chrysler, An Open Letter to Stephen Fry.

Looking at: Twazzup (via Rowan), Facebook’s new page layout, Tiny Geocoder, burning platforms, ‘deep media’ and ‘transmedia’.