Pioneers of Digital Now LIVE on Kindle UK

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Amazon have flicked a switch and you can now pre-order your digital copy of the book so it downloads instantly next week when published in the UK.

The launch date is 3rd October, with the US following on November 28th.

If you have the slightest desire to get a copy then please pre-order now, as we gather they help with our book rankings right out of the gate.

You can see Paul speak at Social Media Week tomorrow, and Mel will be doing a book signing next week at SMX East in New York.

The PR ball is rolling and we’re thrilled you’ll be able to get your hands on our work very soon!

Thanks

Mel & Paul

Pioneers of Digital at Social Media Week London

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Those lovely people at Social Media Week London have invited us to talk about the book at Google’s Campus in London on Tuesday 25th September at 2pm.

Check out the session description here, and if you go and see Paul speak (Mel’s back home in Seattle), let us know what your think @DigiPioneers or on our Facebook Page.

The whole week looks like it’s going to be an excellent feast of digital delight, so well done to the organisers!

Thanks,

Mel & Paul

Vanessa Fox on Creating Google Webmaster Tools

Anyone who has used Google has been exposed to the groundbreaking work started by Vanessa Fox in 2005.

That’s a lot of people.

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The 7th in our Pioneers of Digital series we’re blogging before the book launches in the UK and the US, is now founder of Nine By Blue, a Seattle-based marketing intelligence firm and author of Marketing in the Age of Google.

During her time at Google she took on a project that was described by her boss at the time as, “an experiment that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike.”

It succeeded. And you can read in the book all about the way Vanessa, who was working out of their tiny Kirkland office at the time, persuaded engineers at Google’s Mountain View HQ, and the industry as a whole to help her create one of the most visited intelligence tools and community on the web.

Pioneers of Digital launches on October 3rd – pre-order your copy now by visiting Buy Pioneers of Digital Book and check back soon for the next ‘reveal’.

Thanks,

Mel & Paul

PS: If you liked this snippet from the book, please share it with your friends and followers using the buttons below and help us spread the word!

Malcolm Poynton and Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty

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The 6th Pioneer in our reveal series is Malcolm Poynton, the inspirational Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy One (London) who brought the massive digital vision for Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty to life.

The project’s global ambition required an approach to digital that had never been achieved before. Poynton, a New Zealander with plenty of adland experience, had the know-how to bring the project’s momentum into the age of digital advertising.  In a campaign that featured real women rather than models, it became the first digital campaign to drive participants to a fully fledged supportive online community that reached over 200 million people worldwide, with over 26 million people engaging with the campaign online.

Poynton – now Chief Creative Officer at SapientNitro – remembers that the ‘Campaign for Real Beauty line was not just a call to action; it was the ‘advertising strapline, the URL… and it was the Big Ideal’

The chapter profiling Poynton and the Campaign for Real Beauty traces the timeline of the campaign, and shows how a fantastic brand team, PR and advertising agency all worked to deliver a benchmark in online advertising. 

Pioneers of Digital launches in October – pre-order your copy now by visiting Buy Pioneers of Digital Book and check back soon for the next ‘reveal’.

Thanks,

Paul & Mel

PS: If you liked this snippet from the book, please share it with your friends and followers using the buttons below and help us spread the word!

Zhang Minhui from China’s Sohu.cn on Advertising to Half a Billion Users

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Zhang Minhui is number five in our series…..

Sohu.cn in China has the largest combined search, social and entertainment portals in the world. With over 505 million internet users – more than the entire population of the USA – Sohu contains many of the world’s most populated sites.

Zhang Minhui managed Sohu’s brand advertising and commercial content across its digital platforms during the key years of growth from 2002-2010, which makes him one of the most influential pioneers of digital.

Minhui negotiated how marketing would work through search, social, gaming, mobile, news and interactive media. Where Sohu created the formats, Minhui made it commercial.

A chapter profiling Zhang and Sohu also traces the four key periods in China’s recent and groundbreaking digital history.

Pioneers of Digital launches in October – pre-order your copy now by visiting Buy Pioneers of Digital Bookand check back soon for the next ‘reveal’.

PS: If you liked this snippet from the book, please share it with your friends and followers using the buttons below and help us spread the word!

Thanks,

Paul & Mel

Denzyl Feigelson – Apple iTunes Visionary & Artists Without a Label Founder

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Number 4 in our series is Denzyl Feigelson, the iTunes Store music visionary who came up with the 99c download and devised a way for Artists Without A Label to drive their own careers .

In earlier careers, he helped African artists working with singer-songwriter Paul Simon to break the US and became the first online florist to make a fortune with endorsements from Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. For Feigelson, his radical ideas for the music industry preceded technologies that allowed them to happen.

The story of how they came about owed much to timing, persistence and an amazing life journey.

Our chapter profiling Feigelson traces his rise from music graduate and producer working in South Africa during volatile times, through to quitting the music industry, buying a farm in Hawaii and, several eureka moments later, paving the way for acts such as the Klaxons and Arctic Monkeys to find their audiences online. 

Pioneers of Digital launches in October – pre-order your copy now by visiting Buy Pioneers of Digital Book and check back soon the next ‘reveal’.

Thanks,

Mel & Paul

P.S. Please help us generate awareness of the book by sharing this post using the buttons below!

Danny Sullivan – Helping Search Marketing Be “Legitimate and Valuable”

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The third in our series of posts revealing our Pioneers of Digital is Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land.

A trail-blazer in the very important but often misunderstood (and underutilized) area of digital – Search Engine Marketing – Danny fell into journalism and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) through a burning passion to “understand things” by taking those things apart and reassembling them, helping anyone keen to learn from him understand the essence of whatever “it” was in a much more accessible way.

The chapter charts from 1996 the inception and success of his former brainchild Search Engine Watch, how he launched some of the best attended digital conferences in the world, what happened when he invited a representative from Yahoo! to attend the first one in 1999, what he does with his Lego, and his mantra for success in a fast-paced industry like online advertising and internet marketing.

The book launches soon, so pre-order your copy now by visiting this page: Buy Pioneers of Digital Book and check back soon for number four out of our twenty digital pioneers.

Thanks,

Mel & Paul

Jess Greenwood from R/GA on Creativity & “Being Interested”

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Last week we revealed Avinash Kaushik from Google as one of our Pioneers of Digital.

Today, we’re pleased to say Jess Greenwood, formerly from Contagious Magazine and now at R/GA, also agreed to be interviewed about her fantastic work at the London-based magazine and the growth of the publication and off-shoot divisions as “must go to” sources of industry creative inspiration and trends.

During a career that has had many twists and turns, Greenwood first became aware of the power of digital through a BBC comedy and the online community that grew up around it.

In her chapter, we’ll tell you what that show was, give you her sound advice for measuring the effectiveness of advertising online, and let you have some strong pointers as to what personal traits are needed to get into and survive in the industry.

To order the book visit this page Buy Pioneers of Digital Book and check back soon for insight into our next Pioneer!

Thanks

Mel & Paul

Avinash Kaushik from Google “A Magnificent Opportunity”

As we promised last week, from now until the book’s launch, we’ll be giving you a more detailed sneak peek into the Pioneers of Digital we chose to profile and why their contributions to digital have been so important.

Today we kick off with Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist and author of hugely successful books on web analytics and an incredibly helpful blog.

One of the best presenters in the business, Avinash has inspired thousands of marketers around the world to grasp the “magnificent opportunity” we all have to succeed in our business goals through digital.

In the chapter about him we reveal his colourful career journey from a tiny town in India, via the Middle East to Mountain View and his current role at Google, documenting more than a few hair-raising & “ah-ha” moments along the way!

We thank Avinash and Google for letting us tell his story. You’ll enjoy reading it we promise!

To order the book visit this page Buy Pioneers of Digital Book and check back soon for insight into our next Pioneer!

Stay tuned….

Mel & Paul

Meet the Pioneers of Digital and Pre-Order the Book!

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Click to see the updated site!

With a little over two months before the book launches in the UK and three before US readers can get their hands on it, we’ve been busy working with the fabulous team at Bronco to update the Pioneers of Digital website and start answering the question we’ve been getting everywhere we go: Who exactly are these Pioneers?

If you click through to the homepage, we’ve added a gallery where you can get a sneak peak as to who we’ve picked to tell their inspiring stories.

Between now and the 3rd of October when the physical book is released, we’ll be showcasing each Pioneer one-by-one on our blog, giving you a bit more insight into their background and including an exclusive fact or word of wisdom we gleaned from our interviews with them.

In order to make the launch as successful as possible, it’d really help if you could pre-order the book and encourage your friends to do the same. It will be coming out on the Kindle, but we understand that option won’t go live until early September.

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So please click on the button above to get your copy from your favourite retailer, please share this post either by email or by using the social media buttons, and know that we’re very, very grateful for your support.

We can source discounted copies of the book for bulk buys from Kogan Page, so please Contact Us if that’s something you’d like to do!

Check back soon for the first deep-dive in our series about the Pioneers and have a great week.

Thanks very much!

Mel & Paul