These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.
Spotlight: Len KendallTitle: Digital Account Supervisor
Employer: GolinHarris
Who paid it forward: David Armano
What David had to say about Len: “I’ve worked with Len at Critical Mass but he’s already been developing a name for himself by being a prolific writer, commentator and participant in social media and communications. Len is very passionate about the space and no doubt will continue rising due to his persistence and the level of participation he puts out there.”
Len attended Purdue University where he studied Marketing and Sales. He says that studying sales was helpful in terms of learning how to network. He started his career with Starcom, a media communications agency, where he realized that digital was his passion. After spending two years with Starcom, he joined CriticalMass, a digital marketing agency. There he was involved in digital media buying/planning and started getting more involve with social media. He found that media buying/planning was valuable, but may not be leading the charge with social technologies and observed that PR was well positioned to lead the charge when it came to social media. Following his time with CriticalMass, Len freelanced for a bit, and through this work he was offered lots of professional guidance. Eventually, GolinHarris offered him a position and he currently works as an Account Supervisor with the Dialog Group there. His focus is on providing clients with expertise on digital and social media PR campaigns. In addition to his job, Len also spends time being creative via Posterous and the3six5 Project, which he runs in collaboration with Daniel Honigman
Some people who have inspired Len: David Armano was someone who inspired Len – in fact, he said that David is the reason he went to work at CriticalMass. He respected David’s work even though they didn’t work closely. They had a sort of “digital mentorship” relationship. Len also says he learns a lot from Tac Anderson, Digital Consulting Director at Waggener Edstrom, and Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer at Mullen. Of Boches, he says that there are a lot of the creative people in the business aren’t that much into social media, but he is.
What Len loves about social media: Len says that he likes to live a life of “micro empires”. He says that he gets bored doing just one thing so he enjoys having side projects that inspire him. Being a part of social media, he says there are many opportunities to be a “renaissance man”, which is part of what inspired him to start the3six5 Project with Daniel Honigman. The idea of this project was to have 365 people write a blog post every day of 2010. Each day, a different person posts an entry, so they’ll have a diary of the year written by each of these people. The project was born from the idea of lifestreaming – they want to stream the collective life of people from many different places, and social media has helped facilitate this.
Where Len sees social media going in the future: Over the next 12 months Len believes that social media will become a business priority for the Fortune 500. If a company has a customer service or PR division, then it will most assuredly have specific employees dedicated to social media. Additionally, Len believes that jobs involving social media will continue to be on the rise. If you look at job boards you will see that there are a lot of opportunities to work with big brands in the realm of social media right now. Agencies are growing social media business areas because that is where brands are in need of service.
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