Leaving HP. Back to Agency Life.

I have been truly lucky to have had the opportunity to work for such an amazing company at such an amazing time. If you would have told me 5 years ago when I started doing social media that I’d be working at HP, I would have said you were crazy. A) Me at a large company like HP  B) Companies like HP don’t have full time social media people. Fast forward a few years and I became one of the luckiest people in this space.

I’ve been able to do pioneering work and learn from actual hands on experience with the largest IT company in the World. I’ve seen HP make huge leaps in this space and let me tell you, you haven’t seen anything yet. There are now dozens of people dedicated to social media as well as hundreds of people who have some social media responsibilities in their job. In some ways this was a really hard decision to make because so much cool stuff is happening behind the scenes right now.  And best of all, I’ve met and worked with some of the best people in my entire life.

But after just shy of 2 years I will be leaving HP and joining Waggener Edstrom’s Studio D group. Waggener Edstrom is an amazing PR company and the Studio D team is doing some amazing stuff with digital content and social media (check out Twendz). I’ll be joining the team as the Digital Consulting Director in their Seattle office as of May 4th. Yes this means I’ll be leaving my beloved Boise to move to the Emerald City (for more on that you can read the post on TechBoise).

Consequentially, because Highway 12 Ventures doesn’t do any deals in Seattle I will also be stepping down as EIR. Look for a few posts over there before I leave.

I’m extremely excited for the opportunity to take everything I’ve learned over the last 5 years, to expand on that and to continue to grow. I have believe that this recession is the perfect opportunity for agencies and companies to “double down” on social media. Social media is increasingly become a major tool set for all company communication and it’s only going to grow in importance as we continue through this recession and especially as we come out the other side.

Waggener Edstrom obviously shares this belief with me. They are building an amazing team and I am humbled that they have chosen me to be a part of that.

To you my friends and readers I thank you for continued support and feedback. I promise that this move won’t effect my posting here, except to make the content I share here even better.