Interview with a Superhero: Lianne from The Heavy Chef Digital Marketing Course
by Fred Roed on 15/04/10 at 11:00 am
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Today, we’re sipping coffees with Lianne Byrne-Hammacott, our pal from sister site, The Heavy Chef Project. Lianne is the new lecturer on the team and will be spearheading the Heavy Chef’s digital marketing courses in 2010. Lianne comes with a wealth of experience from the United Kingdom and has just settled back in our sunny shores.
Lianne, how did you get involved in Digital Marketing in the first place?
I used to work for Internet Solutions as one of their corporate trainers and had my formal education there around how the web worked, what you could do with FrontPage and Photoshop. I then discovered Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing book and it literally changed my life. I became fascinated with email as a relationship building tool and the tracking of email campaigns plus integrating it with CRM systems. After that it was a slippery slope down into the geekiness and excitement of the dynamic and ever changing world of digital marketing. Don’t even get me started on web analytics!
Who and why should someone do The Heavy Chef Course
Unfortunately digital marketing is filled with hype, jargon, people trying to sell you all singing, dancing websites and social media cowboys. I think the course is ideal for someone who wants to cut through the hype and jargon that’s out there and find practical and clever ways of aligning digital tactics with their overall business strategy and creating profitable campaigns/ websites. Also someone who wants to understand best practice on the web. They are marketing managers, account execs, entrepreneurs, PR’s or traditional marketers looking to make the leap into the digital unknown.
How has the reception to the course been to date?
I’m new to the course, but since the first course in the latter part of 2009, we’ve had stellar feedback from delegates – many of whom are marketing managers and business owners. The course is very practical. We put a lot of emphasis on taking out the complexity and making the concepts of digital marketing easy to retain in the minds of our course attendees.
Have you had much experience in training?
Yes! I used to train corporate clients for Internet Solutions and have managed to train colleagues, project stakeholders and clients across an entire spectrum of digital projects that I’ve been fortunate to work on, both in South Africa and the UK.
Naais – and now you’re back to teach us a thing or two! Since you started training people, in your opinion, do you think people are becoming more receptive to all the new tools of digital marketing than before – or do you think there’s still resistance?
I think there’s a curiosity now to try out social media… Having a Facebook profile is a lot less intimidating than developing a website yourself. I think the social nature of the web has encouraged people to try their hand at blogging, setting up a Twitter profile or having their CV on LinkedIn. What’s sometimes missing though is the thinking and strategy to bring it all together, make a profit for business and use analytics effectively to track activity. I think people are heartened by the fact that digital is so accountable and there are countless excellent case studies to see that it does work but that understanding the medium is essential to achieve similar results.
Awesome stuff Lianne, thanks for your time. We’re loving the take-up on digital marketing education. Ideate readers, anyone interested in the course, contact Lianne at lianne@heavychef.com and ask about the 20% discount that’s running currently. Go! Go! Go!
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.
Tags: course, development, digital marketing, training
