Making Sense of Diversity in Digital Messaging - Discussing Stupid Podcast

The digital world of today challenges marketers to carefully craft their messaging or risk causing the type of public relations nightmare most don’t want to think about. Now, digital marketers have to not only appreciate the power of the words and imagery they use (or choose not to), but also recognize the need to elevate their messaging to tell a much broader, more diverse story around our brands and products. To help shed some light on some of these challenges, Virgil is joined by the always delightful Heather Newman from Creative Maven. Heather is not only an experience marketer, but is also known for her endeavors in the promotion of better diversity and inclusion in the workplace, especially in the field of technology.

During the discussion, Virgil and Heather ‘get real’ on how the conversation around diversity is changing the digital marketing landscape and share some big (and sometimes funny) screw-ups and successes along the way. In the end, the conversation explores the complex topic, pokes fun at many of our predisposed ideas about how diversity in messaging works (its not just about your person count in images) and gives real world examples on the dos and don’ts we should all try to follow.

Resources discussed:

Cook

Heather Cook is an award-winning marketing maven, technology entrepreneur and an epic connector that brings many worlds together. She has extensive experience marketing products and services for Enterprise businesses, startups and emerging markets. Heather builds plans and processes that are nimble, human and different. She is an adept storyteller and is passionate about growth for both employees and the corporate bottom-line. Heather hails from the arts and the bulk of her career has been working with the largest technology companies in the world (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, NetApp, Hewlett Packard, and Dell). Her nineteen years of experience working at technology companies and building global high-tech marketing strategy has driven millions of dollars of revenue and multiple award-winning campaigns. She has led global marketing teams for many technology companies including AvePoint, IT Unity & KnowledgeLake. Heather was a part of the original Microsoft SharePoint Marketing team. During her tenure, she helped launch multiple versions of the product, build the SharePoint Partner Ecosystem and conceived of and produced the first three Microsoft SharePoint Conferences. Creative Maven has produced thousands of global marketing campaigns and events. Currently CM is focusing on go to market strategies for Microsoft and its partners as well as a new site sister site launching in 2015 called Marketingfixer.com. Heather also serves as Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Content Panda, an innovative technology startup looking to actively disrupt how content is delivered inside software.