I started with Meltwater News in September 2006, joining the most common entry-point into the company, the International Management Trainee program.

Starting out in the Silicon Valley office, I can’t honestly say that I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew from the interviews that I liked the people and that a sales role was going to be challenging. I learned soon after joining the office, that Silicon Valley was the breeding ground for most of the current leaders in the US Meltwater organization. It was a hot office; people were fired up and there was a difficult-to-describe energy and pulse in the office. For example, after my first month, a sales team based in Silicon Valley was deployed to Washington DC to start up a new Meltwater News office on the East coast. Within my first three months, three of my colleagues were promoted to Sales Managers. By December, one of my colleagues was promoted to head up the R&D unit, another colleague was preparing for recruitment in Vienna, where he would soon start an office, another (NickyD) was packing his bags for Philadelphia, and another was packing his bags to join the German operation in Munich. With all this advancement going on around me, I decided I wanted to take off too, and expressed a desire to move to Singapore and open an office.

I had my sights set on moving to Asia, but things quickly took a turn. After 6 months in sales, I realized that with my communications background I wanted to push for something more public facing. There were not any PR or communications roles at Meltwater yet, so I started lobbying for a public facing role. Soon I got the chance to start an entirely new department within Meltwater Group called University Relations.

University Relations was more than recruiting; it actually isn’t recruiting at all. My colleagues, Nora (based in Berlin), Victoria (based in London) and I were given a mission: develop the Meltwater brand at the university level and build relationships with top universities across the world. The University Relations team sponsored symposiums, forums, entrepreneurial competitions, and got involved with all things student-and-entrepreneurship related. We launched a Meltwater Scholarship competition, which ultimately awarded students from UC Berkeley with a $30,000 prize. We sponsored Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford. We had the opportunity to launch the Teaching Fellowship program, a whole new position helping out Meltwater’s non-profit organization, Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) based in Ghana. We were charged with hiring young, accomplished student-leaders for a fully sponsored live and work abroad year in Ghana. I had a chance to build a team that I believed would challenge the corporate philanthropy paradigm. This was the embryonic stage of our very first marketing and communications efforts at Meltwater.

Through Meltwater, I have had the opportunity to travel to Monaco, Accra, Amsterdam, Lillehammer, Oslo, Bergen, Jamaica and London. My work and our communications efforts are catching fire. I now oversee the development of some of our Corporate Communications initiatives. I still get to be creative and take ownership of my work. My name is still on the line, similar to how I had to tag my news stories back in my TV news reporter days. The difference now is that my work challenges me, I’m inspired by the people I have the opportunity to work with, and I’m proud of the place I work and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Here are some pictures:

University Relations in Oslo 2007

Meltwater News Oslo Football Team

Kimling and Ylva at MEST

Teaching Fellows 2008

MEST classroom discussion

With the Ghana Team at Kick-Off in Lillehammer, Norway

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