When asked today what I think a Marketing Executive would need to have that they may not have needed a few years ago, my answer was simple. "A Marketing Executive must be a social media expert."

Employees are the heart and soul of any organization. I once named a recruitment company in Australia "Human Directions" because it is the human direction of a company that ultimately determines whether your company is going to be successful or not.

I learned a lot over the past 16 years of being in business about people. I have had employees lie, steal, manipulate, gossip and conduct unethical practises that are not within the company's core set of values let alone my own.

Jeff Bullas describes the age in which we currently reside as the Age of Visual Culture; in this period of time where everyone has a camera phone and selfie stick to capture one of life’s many moments, the label certainly stands true. 

Visual content is now a universal language. It is Esperanto in image form. The image may be of a dog named Pippa with her own Instagram account or it could be an infographic detailing the complex nature of how to bone a fish Masterchef style. It may be a moving image of someone repairing a car engine or attempting fine tapestry.

The only thing more powerful than a big idea is the team that can see it through. 

Many of us have big, huge, gigantic ideas - but how many of these ideas actually see light of day. Statistics show that not many do. 

If you are anything like me, you live and breathe ideas and the very essence of your being is celebrating the fact that you are an "ideas person". But an idea is just that unless you do something about it.

The sun is shining and we have all gotten over the winter blues, but with that comes the mid-year, summer holidays slump.

There is so much to do, yet all that many of us can think about is the long-waited summer holiday that is imminent.

Perhaps you have gotten out of the normal rhythm that your sales and marketing efforts have been in, or maybe it's not quite working like it use to.

Don't fear! You are the norm.

What you do next will really set the mark on how you will end the year from a sales and marketing perspective.

5 Ways to get over the mid-year marketing slump

Marketing Eye is an international business. With our expansion to Atlanta and then other locations throughout the US, we had to really think about what our organizational structure was going to be like moving forward. After a lot of investigation, and research, we decided to work as a flat organizational structure and give people the power to make important business decisions.

Every Friday is different. Some days we are so busy, we can't scratch ourselves. Other's we are creating great brands, and needing to free ourselves from the shackles of everyday work life and think outside the square. 

Our environment is transformative. I say this because each of our offices has their own unique personalities. They seem to encompass the culture that has fostered from an environment free of layered management and flat in structure.

Recently I shared a presentation about the value of marketing automation implemented correctly in a business. I gave the presentaton at Cebit 2015 and rather than use a generic case study, I focused on my own company, Marketing Eye, as an example of how to implement marketing automation and gain immediate results.

To give perspective to this, Marketing Eye has a substantial amount of traffic coming to our website each month, mainly due to the popularity of this blog and the effectiveness of our SEO team.