Focus on them

About Focusonthem

This is a new home of my riffs on conversational marketing, putting users in the driving seat and being co-founder of a startup, pepsmedia, in one of the most fertile and creative industries this side of the millenium.

I’ve always had a fondness for online marketing and community-based projects, and have been blogging since 2002 about topics ranging from techno-gadgets to social software and online marketing.

I want to make this blog a bridge between marketing and the developers, designers and other geeks who make our ideas happen. It’s a sore point for most techies: Marketing doesn’t understand us and it’s their fault if projects fail. We can’t take all the blame, but there’s no doubt that understanding each others’ alien language can only be a positive step forward.

We need to work together, not against each other.

About me

I’m Vero, and I’ve worked in marketing within the print publishing and online travel industries for over 5 years, but I really my biggest kicks out of helping small businesses feel empowered and communicate better with their users, regardless of the size of their budgets. Out with the shiny marketing buzzwords that attempt to hide a failing product, in with the fresh ideas people believe in.

I strongly believes that more can be achieved with a small budget, a good product and an understanding of the community than with a cracking big budget. For this reason, email marketing and blogging are, in my eyes, some of the best tools for small businesses to gain visibility and credibility in their community.