Making A Change: Leaving Ignite, Joining Pace

A bit of news on the personal front: Today is my last day as Director of Strategic Innovation with Ignite Social Media. As of next Tuesday, November 1st, I’ll be joining the team at Pace Communications (@PaceComm) as Director of Digital Strategy.

Working at Ignite for the past two years has been incredible, both in terms of the daily experience and the insane growth and change the agency has gone through – such as growing 4x in staff count and picking up ridiculously cool clients like Samsung, Microsoft and Chrysler, among many others. I have no doubt that their already impressive client list will become even more enviable as time goes on.

I also had the privilege of working with insanely smart and funny people and getting a crash course on how social media marketing for large brands is *supposed* to work. Throw in all the behind-the-scenes stuff that truly makes Ignite Ignite - like Mystery Trips (Jamaica anyone?), Nerf wars, sarcastic Yammer threads, pups in the office, out-of-context quotes, inspirational and occasionally disturbing brainstorms – and it all adds up to not so much a job as a slightly crazy and very inspirational home away from home.

All of it has been wonderful, and all of it will be missed.

Sometimes however a great opportunity pops up that you just can’t pass by, and that’s the case with Pace. It’s a combination of the right team, role, timing and circumstances that’s making this move happen, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to get started.

Content drives conversation, offline as well as on, and as a content marketing agency Pace is in a unique spot to help companies spark and nurture conversations around their brands, products, experiences, and communities. I get to help drive and shape those efforts across both digital and social – all in all, it’s a pretty cool challenge.

As a bonus, Pace is located just a few minutes from my house, shrinking my daily roundtrip commute from nearly 3 hours to less than 20 minutes. My wonderful, and very patient, wife and kids will get to see a whole lot more of me in the near future (ready or not!).

I’ll share more here and on Twitter (@kevinbriody) as I settle in. Thanks again to everyone at Ignite, and to my future colleague at Pace I’ll see you next week!

Photo by delphwynd via Flickr an CC License