LinkedIn has many benefits; you can showcase your whole work history on one platform and share with the world; you get job offers regularly if you have bothered to fill in your profile properly; you can connect with people you would not ordinarily have access to; and you can find the right person in the right position to pitch yourself to to get a job or to sell a product or service.

It's invaluable. No-one can argue that.

I will make myself feel old writing this blog. It is a reminder of how long I have been in this industry. But during this time there has remained a sense of achievement with each and every issue of the thousands I have helped put together, including the latest issue of Marketing Eye.

When I first started in this industry back in 1996, Tupac was still alive, Trainspotting was released into cinemas and the French halted nuclear testing in the Pacific. A lot has changed in magazine production in that time, but the principles have stayed the same.

 It's been a rollercoaster of a ride the past 18 months. We've expanded successfully into the US market and built a profitable operation, hired a leadership team to take our business into the future, launched a magazine and built some technology. We have also started our rollout of licensing our brand to other successful marketers to expand our global footprint.

I gave the team a small project, and even before they started i knew the result. It had something to do with our company so it was experimental in every sense of the word. But I knew deep down it would fail, and I knew why.

Normally, I would be the first to say "that won't work". However, this wasn't the time. It was a small project and it wouldn't harm anyone by being a failure. Instead, it would be a lesson learned and I was willing to pay the price.

What makes some marketers more successful than others? Is it that they tend to be smarter? Or do they have a secret sauce? Are they just in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right people?

I've seen some mind-blowing marketers in my time, and I've also seen some marketers that are just terrible and give marketing a very bad name. But there are some particular things that stand out in successful marketers that we all can learn from. They have some basic fundamentals that they live by; either intentionally or not. Their behaviours are consistent and without exception.

 The challenges of running a professional services firm are many. What most of my counterparts would say is that it's people that determine whether you are successful or not - and this is correct.

For six months we searched for a VP of Marketing to run our Atlanta operations, and after searching Australia, US and UK/Europe we found Shara Atkinson. She is from Atlanta but for the past 10 years has lived in the UK. 

Hiring Shara has been a game-changer. Prior to her appointment, I was overseeing the US market and managed staff from afar. Let me share with you, "it's not the best idea". Running a new company remotely is very hard. It's easy for Marketing Eye to get business, but hard to keep employees and train them from a different continent.

I've recently changed the narrative of my business. It's not something I took lightly. Re-defining what value you provide to the market place can be game-changing, or business destroying. 

If you look at Uber for instance, they could have failed, but yet they succeeded. Is it sustainable? Most probably. Is it worth the market value associated with the business? Not really. Did they not only change their original narrative, but create a new narrative for the entire industry - disruptive in design?

The Urban Dictionary defines the Kardashian effect as “The practice of caring about D list celebrities who have no talent and contribute nothing to society.” However there is another more positive way at looking at this phenomenon, and that is to examine how the Kardashians became so popular on the first place.

In April this year, China’s Tencent bought a 14.6 percent stake in Glu Mobile for $126 million. The purchase has been put down to the Kardashian effect after the mobile game publisher struck gold last year with Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a game that has the endorsement of reality TV celebrity Kim Kardashian.

 18 months ago, I decided to employ my niece who was 18 at the time, to work at the Marketing Eye Sydney office.

I spent alot of time thinking through this decision, and did not take it lightly. I decided that given how young she is, I would have her answer the phone and do administrative duties with the hope she would show aptitude for an area of the business, and we could further train her.