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It was also my first weekend after returning to work from three months of paternity leave. (A side note: I was on paternity leave for three months – a fraction of the time many Canadian moms are away on leave. That (I’d like to think) changed when our son was born, but either way my career and my work has been part of my self-identify and self-worth for as long as I can remember. That doesn’t mean I’m not fulfilled at work or that I’m not going to continue to hustle, but it’s no longer so central to my sense of self-worth.

I’d write about whatever was going on with social media – new tools, new platforms, new developments… and as I did, people started to listen. Then I discovered the internet, and that moment started me in a new career trajectory which brought me to Canada and to a gig in communications, and that turned into five fulfilling years learning about social media. I won’t pretend every day is full of roses, but I look forward to coming to work more often than I don’t. Since then I’ve risen to the top digital role in Canada, at the world’s largest communications marketing firm, with a team of more than 60 people.

Every role is important to an organization but as the National Practice Lead for Digital this one especially was important to me – as part of the leadership group on my team this role would help set the direction for the ongoing evolution of our digital practice and would be an important partner for me in the years ahead. For example, in the case of this role, we looked for strong digital-first client counselors, people who had exceptional backgrounds in digital strategy, and who were also new-business hungry, with the right mix of sector experience for the market in which they were hired. As our HR lead put it to me today, “A job is a job and skills are skills but if the fit to the company’s values aren’t there, they won’t last six months. In this case, for me, I knew I wanted to be able to trust a person to get the job done to an exceptional level with a good level of independence, who could make me uncomfortable by challenging me, and be a true partner – even when it isn’t easy to be one.

It has changed the way companies communicate, the way they operate, and the way they connect with people. People like Lionel Menchaca and Richard Binhammer at Dell, Frank Eliason at Comcast, Zena Weist at H&R Block and others paved the way for large companies to use social media to connect with customers directly. For me, the opportunity for businesses to connect more closely with their customers was what drove me to embrace social media when it first emerged – and the shift towards an ad-driven approach pained me as I saw the industry move away from that mindset. Recently I’ve been pleased to see more companies returning focus to their existing customers – a practice that harkens back to the early days of social media and recognizes that social media provides a unique opportunity to manage customer service issues at scale.