About
Short Bio
Gavin is the author of Servant of Chaos, one of Australia’s leading marketing blogs and is the co-publisher (with Drew McLellan) of the ground-breaking collaborative marketing book series, Age of Conversation. Gavin has worked in agencies (leading the global digital strategy for McDonald’s), but is currently holed up on the client side where he is the Director of Social Media for the SAP Premier Customer Network, North America. In what little spare time is left to him, he works with young people as president of local non-profit organisation, Vibewire.
Longer Bio
Based in Sydney, Australia, Gavin leads the social media strategy and execution for SAP North America’s Premier Customer Network (PCN). The PCN includes the world’s largest and most influential companies and includes members from every industry vertical from Google through Valero Energy to ConAgra Foods and Nike.
Recognized as a thought leader, Gavin is actively involved in the marketing industry worldwide, as publisher and author of the ground-breaking Age of Conversation series of publications, as a blogger and as a speaker. He heas spoken at conferences such as ConnectNow and AdTech on digital strategy and social media and recently participated in the GE Global Leadership Summit on digital strategy, sharing his insights and experiences with the next wave of GE’s global leaders.
Within SAP, Gavin is an active participant in the social media community, provides input and advice to social media marketing, social media governance teams and contributes to the 2 million strong SAP Community Network. He has recently completed a chapter for the book Intranet 2.0, on the topic of intranets, knowledge management and the role of collaboration in the process of innovation. He is also quietly concocting ideas for his own book, tentatively titled The Social Way.
Connect with Gavin Heaton
- For more casual conversations, connect with me via Twitter
- To see my work history, view my profile on LinkedIn
- I was recently interviewed for The Fetch’s Sydney Local and previously on Ian Kath’s YourStoryPodcast
- Sean Howard and Eric Portelance took me into a challenging space when discussing risk taking and imagination on the AttentionSurplus podcast
- Read an interesting background interview with Denise Shrivell on Digital People
Some of my projects
Where can you find some of my work?
- The SAP Premier Customer Network’s closed community platform – PCN Connect
- An analyst’s eye view of our strategy and implementation efforts for SAP’s Premier Customer Network
- Creative and digital strategy + implementation services for North America’s largest online promotion – McDonald’s Are You Mac Enough promotion
- End-to-end strategy and implementation and rollout for McDonald’s Happy Meal site (and global variants)
- Establishment of an Asia Pacific Knowledge Factory for IBM
- Global rebranding for DMR Consulting + Fujitsu
- Co-instigator and publisher of The Age of Conversation book (1st edition, 2nd edition, 3rd edition, 4th incarnation currently being planned)
- Strategy and launch for Learning on Demand by SAP
- Slideshare - a combination of infographic style presentations along with decks that I have presented at conferences
Speaking
I am available for speaking engagements and have recently spoken at the following events:
- SocialMediaPlus - From Space Invaders to Angry Birds – Innovation and SAP’s Premier Customer Network
- Marketing Week – Digital Strategy that Works
- Hargraves Institute / MGSM – Open Innovation
- GE Leadership Summit - social media and innovation
- MarketingNow! – lead generation, community and social media
- ADMA - diving into social media
- AdTech - the relevance of twitter
You can view most of my slide decks on Slideshare which are released under a Creative Commons license.
Gavin’s writing online
You can read/purchase the following books that I have been involved with:
- Servant of Chaos marketing blog
- The Age of Conversation
- The Age of Conversation 2: Why Don’t They Get It
- The Age of Conversation 3: It’s Time to Get Busy
- The Perfect Gift for a Man – crowdsourcing stories to help prevent suicide in young men
- Project 100
- The Dialup Guide to Blogging
- My Amazon Author page
I also write/contribute to the following blogs:
- Servant of Chaos – this is my main blog on marketing, branding and storytelling
- Marketing Profs Daily Fix – one of the world’s leading marketing blogs
Long Bio
For the last 12 plus years Gavin has worked from Australia in global roles for a range of companies. While working with global marketing agency, Creata, he was responsible for the digital strategy and implementation of the HappyMeal.com brand in the USA and its subsequent global rollout. He has also built and grown business units for companies like IBM. He evenly balances creativity and business know-how with a passion for the chaos in which we live — and strives to transform his teams into focused and enthusiastic micro-communities. A classic “early adopter”, he works to identify emerging innovative technologies that can stabilise, scale and deliver value to businesses.
Gavin is the Director of Social Media for SAP North America’s Premier Customer Network where he is responsible for establishing, building and engaging a community of SAP’s largest global customers. In this role he consults and collaborates with C-level executives around the world to activate business focused social media initiatives.
He is the co-publisher of the ground-breaking collaborative marketing book, The Age of Conversation, which brought together over 100 marketing bloggers from around the world for the first edition, and over 230 writers for the second. He is also actively involved in a variety of marketing/advertising-related efforts, from Planning for Good through to the Interesting South conferences. He is the driving force behind the Sydney Social Media Coffee Morning meetups and can be regularly found sipping a long black coffee at the tables of Single Origin cafe in Sydney.
In what little spare time left to him, Gavin serves as president with local non-profit, Vibewire whose vision is to ensure that young people part of the “conversations that matter” at local, state, national and even global levels.
