About Engagement Alliance
Our Mission
The Engagement Alliance champions the cause of reciprocal value in free markets, based on the belief that both customers and shareholders can get maximum value out of a voluntary exchange. We help marketing, sales, communications, and customer service professionals get closer to the individuals who make up their key audiences.
Led by an advisory board of big-picture thinkers in business, media and marketing, our goal is to identify, research, and promote highly effective, customer-aware business practices across a range of disciplines.
What’s with the strapline?
These days, finding businesses that are making full use of truly effective and engaging methods of reaching their customers and potential customers is like trying to find needles in a haystack. The same could be said for trying to find companies for whom individuals feel real affection. Our goal with the Engagement Alliance is to turn those haystacks into needlestacks.
Who’s who
Founder & Director Jackie Danicki
Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Swiss Life’s niche community e-commerce site, Propeller, Jackie is the founder of the Engagement Alliance and was one of the world’s first blogging and RSS consultants with the world’s first specialist blogging consultancy, the Big Blog Company, with whom she advised companies in the US and the UK on successful social media.
Jackie was in 2005 appointed Head of Marketing for Latitude, the UK’s largest and most successful search engine marketing agency, where the social media initiatives she introduced saw the company’s press coverage increase sixfold, website traffic increase 7000 per cent, and sales enquiries via the web increase tens of thousands of percentage points. Latitude was also named the UK’s fastest growing media company during her time there.
Jackie founded the non-profit organisation Engagement Alliance in 2006, and currently consults companies on their marketing, customer service, internal and external communications. In addition to her personal blog, Jackie is the co-creator of Jack & Hill, a beauty blog that has won raves from media outlets such as the New York Times, the Sunday Times Style magazine and Women’s Wear Daily’s Beauty Biz magazine. She is also a contributor to Samizdata, ranked by Blogstreet as one of the world’s most influential blogs.
As well as producing and hosting the What MySpace Means conference in London, Jackie has also been an open space leader at VNU’s Blogs & Social Media Forum. She helped to curate the event as a member of its advisory committee, in addition to serving as editor of the official conference blog. In 2005, she produced the acclaimed Online Marketing at the Crossroads event in London, as well as several Latitude Intelligence Network events around the UK. Jackie also presented to BASDA’s member companies at their AGM on the applications of blogging for their businesses, and at ValueClick’s Commission Junction University, for the company’s top tier advertisers and publishers, on the commercial application of blogs and RSS feeds. She frequently presents to internal corporate groups on social media, blogging, podcasting, and communications, and co-produced and co-presented the Big Blog Company’s popular 2004 series of blogging bootcamps for editors and journalists.
Advisory Board
Tomi T Ahonen
A best-selling author and independent consultant in the area of next generation mobile telecoms, Tomi lectures at Oxford University and has presented at over 100 telecoms events on six continents. He is considered the world’s pre-eminent new mobile services evangelist, already having discussed more than 500 in the public domain. Tomi’s current customers include the biggest global telecoms players, such as Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens and Vodafone. Previously Tomi worked for Nokia where he headed its Global 3G Business Consultancy department and oversaw Nokia’s 3G Research Centre. Earlier he worked for three telecoms operators in the USA and Finland, where his accomplishments include creating the world’s first fixed-mobile service bundle, and setting the world record for taking market share from the incumbent. Tomi has been active in telecoms standardisation since 1997 and currently contributes to work on how mobile services evolve from 3G to 4G. In 2005, he launched Forum Oxford for mobile telecoms with Oxford University. His books are 3G Marketing, m-Profits, Services for UMTS, and Communities Dominate Brands.
Adrian Bailey
Adrian, founder and director of PeopleFanClub graduated with a PhD in Communications. He’s good at getting a point across.
Before PeopleFanClub, Adrian was Director of People, Strategy & Organisational Development for AEGIS plc’s multinational media specialist firm, Carat. His remit also included HR, and his team’s work landed Carat in the Sunday Times Top 100 Best Places To Work - the first in their sector to do so. During Adrian’s time there, Carat also jumped to the Number 1 spot in industry revenue and became a National Business Awards finalist - proof that investing in people and business success can go hand-in-hand.
A strategy and change expert and project manager with KPMG for five years, Adrian led large and successful programmes for Kimberly Clark, HSBC, P&O, GE Capital and others, and an SAP project at Australia Post. Prior to that, he worked in the public sector for five years with NATS, liaising with HM Treasury and the Department for Transport, specialising in human factors and financial investment.
A founder member of the BPS Coaching Psychology Group, qualified professional leadership coach, and an accredited mediator, he’s the man to call in to ‘fix(!)’ your senior team. Adrian succeeded Lord
(David) Lipsey as Chair of ITV’s Regional Advisory Board, so is also the man to go to if you want to complain about (or praise) British television programmes.
Previous to his work with organisations, Adrian was a musician who played with the likes of The Clash and The Jam, and then became an honest to goodness rocket scientist. Some say he was just trying to prove that he could be whatever he wanted, while others suspect he was simply indecisive.
Antoine Clarke
A former political and economic strategist to the finance minister of the Slovak Republic and member of the prime minister’s policy unit, Antoine was also Deputy Editor of Conflict International magazine. After serving several London boroughs and Transport for London as a senior communications specialist, he joined the Centre for the New Europe as a contributor to the think-tank’s online publications dealing with healthcare, the environment, and global competition policy. In 2005, Antoine joined the weekly Pharma Marketletter as International Editor. His own Antoine Clarke’s Election Blog analyses and comments on worldwide political campaigns and elections.
Adriana Lukas
Since founding the Big Blog Company, the world’s first specialist blogging consultancy, in early 2003, Adriana has advised companies in Europe and the US on how to integrate blogging, RSS, and other social media into their online marketing activities. In July 2005, Adriana orchestrated the first ever motion picture release via blog for Hollywood producer Kamal Aboukhater’s film Blowing Smoke. She also advises PR firms on strategy for their clients in the Web 2.0 environment. A former KPMG management consultant, broker, and risk analyst, her clients include Johnson & Johnson, the Adam Smith Institute, National Opinion Poll, Social Affairs Unit, and Kable. Adriana is on the expert advisory board for VNU’s annual Online Information conference, has spoken at events including AdTech, the IAA IAB European Interactive Advertising Forum, the NMA Online Marketing Show, Marketing in a Digital World, South Africa Online Information in Pretoria, Johnson & Johnson’s Global Communication Technology Conference in New York, and the 6th Marketing Summit 2005 in Istanbul. In addition to being co-editor of one of the world’s top 100 most influential blogs, Adriana writes about the application of emerging technologies to online marketing and external and internal communications at mediainfluencer.net.
Hillary Johnson
The founder of Kerabu, Inc., Hillary is a frequent contributor to Inc. Magazine, and consults with small businesses on internal and external communications and planning tools, as well as blogging about entrepreneurialism at www.kerabu.com. As editor of the Ventura County Reporter, she grew a small-town weekly into a multiple-award-winning paper, doubling ad pages in two years’ time. As founding Editor-in-Chief of Arroyo Monthly, she co-created the first lifestyle magazine for philanthropists. A New York Times bestselling author, Hillary has published Physical Culture, a novel, and Super Vixens’ Dymaxion Lounge, an essay collection, and has just finished a book on entrepreneurialism.
Alan Moore
A founding director of SMLXL (Small Medium Large Xtralarge), the marketing specialist firm based in Cambridge and London, Alan has 16 years experience as a creative brand strategist, representing global brands at leading international marketing agencies including: Publicis London, DDB Needham Vienna, Hasan & Partners Finland, HHCL & Partners in London and Lowe & Partners Worldwide. Alan’s notable projects include the brand strategy development and integrated communications program for a Pan-Nordic 3G mobile service; Saab’s global brand communication strategy; H&M’s store opening strategies in the US, and a number of existing brand and NPD projects for The Coca Cola Company. SMLXL has also recently been working on innovative marketing communication projects with Nokia, Masterfoods, the communications group IPG, Diageo, Red Bull, the investment company Talpa Capital in Holland and the Nordic state broadcasters TV2 Finland and TV2 Norway. Alan recently published a critically-acclaimed book, Communities Dominate Brands, and addresses conferences in the UK, the Nordics, and most recently undertook a speaking tour of the US.