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Aaron Strout

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Experts in the Industry: Francois Gossieaux (30 of 45)

February 25, 2009 By Aaron Strout Leave a Comment

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Francois Gossieaux, Partner at Beeline Labs, is one of the people I hold chiefly responsible for teaching me the true meaning of Marketing 2.0. I bring this up because Francois was the conference chair for the event, Community 2.0, that we kicked off when my former company, Mzinga, was still Shared Insights. I was the CMO at Shared Insights and relatively new to the way of tapping social media/social networking to generate leads, create awareness and help drive attendance. Francois was instrumental in not only teaching me how to successfully engage in social/community to accomplish these goals, he also introduced me to a boatload of smart people like Jake McKee, Mukund Mohan and Bill Johnston.
As a side note (reinforcing my point of Francois’ influence on my career), yesterday I realized that he was one of the first people I followed on Twitter. With that as our backdrop, let’s see how the master of Marketing 2.0 answered the five questions in the Experts in the Industry series:
In one sentence, please describe what you do and why you’re good at it.
I am first and foremost a passionate marketer, a product innovation enthusiast and a customer advocate with a deep understanding of how social media transformed all those disciplines.
How did you get into the world of online community, social media or social marketing?
In the early 90’s I built a partner community on Compuserve at Agfa, a division of Bayer. In 1996 I organized InterAct ’96, an online trade show and conference which attracted 40,000 attendees and exhibitors like Time Magazine, Infoworld, Microsoft, Netscape, DEC and many others.
I was the CMO at eRoom Technology for 5 years, where we helped companies build collaborative environments – or work communities. In early 2003, I founded a software company that focused on leveraging internal and external communities for the front end of the product lifecycle. After that I joined Corante, the first blog-based publishing company, which led to the founding of Beeline Labs, a marketing innovation consulting firm focused on helping companies create new customers by humanizing themselves and their brands.
I also used blogs and online petitions for grassroots local political issues in early 2000’s, created a worldwide community around the chasm that exists between haves and have not’s after 9/11, and finally started blogging frequently on Emergence Marketing in 2005.
If you had $10 million to invest in one company and one company only based on their use of “social,” which company would it be and why?
I would invest it in my own company. Our approach to helping clients is very different from other consulting firms and I believe that we could scale that faster with extra funding. I am also still a firm believer that there is an opportunity to build a software platform based on social media principles that is designed to better align with existing business processes like product innovation.
Which business leader, politician or public figure do you most respect?
Without a doubt – Barrack Obama. He leveraged the power of the crowd by empowering his volunteers, he understands how to influence the message while letting go of trying to control it, and he is embracing transparency in ways that go way beyond the lip service that most business leaders and politicians give it. He truly has the leadership skills required for a web 2.0 world – and many business leaders could learn a lesson or two from how he managed his campaign and how he is now managing his early administration.
Would you join a toothpaste community? Why?
I would if it had something in it for me and if it were not centered on toothpaste.
Freeform – here’s where you can riff on anyone or anything – good or bad. Or just share a pearl of wisdom.
We have seen an evolution from a production economy to a service economy to an experience economy and now we are witnessing a move to a participatory economy.
Social media based business is not about doing business using social media; it’s about allowing the social, with all its messiness, to penetrate all of our business processes. And whether companies like it or not, this social messiness will infiltrate everything we touch. In many cases customers already gained an equal share of voice with or without companies’ help, and with employees bringing their own tools to work (think 3G phones), they too will increasingly bypass organizational hierarchies and behave the way they were hardwired to behave in the first place – tribally, humanly.
Those business leaders who can live with this social messiness and provide leadership to harness the unbelievable power that can emerge from all this will be the true winners.

My Biggest Influencers (cross-posted from Mzinga.com)

October 29, 2008 By Aaron Strout Leave a Comment

As I transition out of my current role at Mzinga, I’m selectively cross-posting some of my more memorable posts on this site. Don’t worry, I’ve obtained the blessing of the higher-ups at Mzinga (their a cool bunch). More to come!

Cross-posted on Mzinga.com (original post date, January 16, 2008)

Like Jake Mckee aka “The Community Guy, I too got tagged with a cool meme by my good friend, Mukund. As a result of being tagged, I’m now on the hook to share my life’s three biggest influencers. Not an easy excercise by any stretch but I’m going to take a shot. Here goes:

  • My Parents – I would be an ungrateful child if I didn’t include my parents in this list. I know, this list is supposed to be thought provoking and impart all sorts of wisdom to the people reading this blog post. But for this choice, I’ve got to stay grounded. My parents did a bang up job of teaching me life’s important values (respect, honesty, integrity to name a few) and for the most part, I think I turned out okay. As a father of three, I now have the pleasure of trying to figure out how I can do the same with my children. Any of you who have kids know that this is not an easy task.
  • L. Ron Hubbard – NOT! I couldn’t resist including him, especially given the leaking of Tom Cruise’s absolute whack job of a tape. This is a must listen if you haven’t heard it already.
  • Ms. Latin – Yup, she was my 11th and 12th grade honors French teacher. At the time, I hated her guts. As it turns out, Ms. Latin realized something about me early on i.e. that was that as much as I was a relatively smart guy — notice I said “relatively”‘ — but I didn’t apply myself to school nearly as much as I should. My reward for such behavior? Two to three hours of French homework EVERY night (on top of three to four hours of other homework.) Of course I bucked her every step of the way but as I close in on my 40th year on this planet, I can look back and appreciate the work ethic Ms Latin instilled in me. Most important (and impressive) was that she never gave up on me and for that I thank her.
  • Sean Belka – I met Sean at Fidelity Investments back in 1997. He was the head of our online partnerships group and I was working in the interactive group for Fidelity’s in-house ad agency. At the time, Sean was negotiating partnerships with the likes of companies like Yahoo! and Lycos (remember them) and my group was providing the online assets for these partnerships. I didn’t know Sean well at the time but I remember being impressed by his wit, humor and ability to target cutting edge companies for strategic partnerships.

    Fast forward to 2003 when I was re-orged into Sean’s group right after he was named the head of segment marketing at Fidelity. In no time at all, Sean resurrected a partnership group and tapped me as one of the leaders in the group. As a result, I had the rare opportunity to join Sean and our division president for meetings with luminaries like Eric Schmidt at Google, Jeff Jordan of eBay (he was the president of eBay U.S. at the time) and Dan Rosensweig of Yahoo (their COO.) These meetings left an indelible impression on me and I will be forever grateful to Sean for giving me that opportunity.

  • Barry Libert (I know I said “3” but I couldn’t resist) – Barry is our current co-CEO at Mzinga and my partner on the We Are Smarter project. I’ve worked with Barry for a little over a year and a half and I have to say that to know Barry is to love him. He’s hands down one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met and a more strategic guy you’ll never meet. He’s also very approachable which is one of the things I like most about him. I won’t lie, there have been times over the years that I’ve wanted to throttle him (I’m sure he’s felt the same way about me) but at the end of the day, he’s the guy that really pushed me into social media.

Who are your biggest influences? Let’s find out from Francois Gossieaux, Nate Ritter, Jim Storer and Dave Wilkins since they’ve all been tagged!

Francois Gossieaux, Nate Ritter, Jim Storer, Dave Wilkins, Pauline Brannigan

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