Had a...very strange journey to marketing: started out in print journalism, but that industry died (and is now something of a shambling zombie.) Saw the writing on the wall during the first few rounds of layoffs over the course of a couple of years and decided to formalize my computer knowledge. Succumbed to the great journalism purge of the mid-2000s. Went into secure data management while heading back to university to study how digital interaction was affecting societal organization, influence and change—but since the study of digital communities hadn't been formalized then, I just had a weirdly specialized liberal arts degree.

In order to move to the West Coast, I found a job that combined online community management and data management, but the company went under and, looking for a job I took an 8-week consulting gig to help a brand establish an online community for their marketing department. On the second week of that gig, the brand had an international publicity crisis, and I was the only person who knew anything about data, so they threw me into marketing to help manage the crisis from a digital perspective.

And I just never left.