I am really rather late in getting this post out the door, but life has been a bit…I’ll say ’stretched’…as of late.  Earlier this month I accepted a position with Ripple6, a great company based in New York City  that develops white label websites built on a great integrated social media platform.  So, my time here in St. Louis will be coming to an end this weekend when I fly out to New York on the 26th of October to start my new job as an Account Manager at the Ripple6 offices in Chelsea.

I have had an awesome stint here at Outrider with some great people forging social media mindsets in the midst of an agency-controlled industry that is just starting to accept the idea of social media as an important aspect of the future of online engagement.  Before joining the team here I had never been exposed to the world of search marketing and SEO but I come away now with a few more tools in my belt.  Building a team from scratch is never easy and the importance and challenges of internal evangelism coupled with external justification of this ‘newfangled social stuff’ has presented the social team at Outrider with a few impressive hurdles.  I think we made progress on a great many fronts and I have great confidence the team here will do nothing but grow as a contender in the agency landscape.  I leave a great team of people, not just on the social side of the fence but throughout the company as a whole.

That being said, I leave one trove of excellence for another.  The great people over at Ripple6 have created an amazing social media platform that enables content management, social marketing, user engagement and insightful analytics in one integrated system.  This new position will allow me to evolve my role in the social media space to be more client-centric, working with clients to develop effective and comprehensive strategies to fit their needs while also providing the bridge between those needs and our development teams at Ripple6.  Essentially I get to be the translation service between ‘code-speak’ and ‘business-lingo’ with a little bit of statistics and brainstorming mixed in.  I feel it will be a great hybrid position that will allow me to integrate my eclectic background of experience and learn quite a bit along the way.

Not only does it feel like a great fit, but I will also be relocating to New York, which is promising to be quite the life change for me, considering I’ve spent my entire life in states on the Mississippi River.  Despite my recent frantic preparation and planning for this move, I am actually very excited about the prospect of being more central to the social media and cultural worlds.  The most distinct way moving has affected me so far is when I realized that I might actually be able to attend some of these events I keep coming across in my RSS reader… A Mashable event next month with Gary Vaynerchuck and the Social Times 1 Year Anniversary in Washington DC in December are the first two social events I realized I can actually attend now that I will be ‘in the neighborhood’.  And all the NYC art and gallery walks I keep seeing plugged on swissmiss (see the blogroll)… I can now check my calendar rather than whimsically say ‘That would be cool…”

So, I’m incredibly excited to move to Manhattan and join the Ripple6 team next week, though a little bit of me will always want the openness of a cornfield and the shade of a tree-lined street that can only be found in the Midwest…but I think its time to venture to the Coast for a few years.  See you in the city…
-ac