Company Announcements Archive

Positive momentum has been building since our acquisition of Delightful Communications back in February.

Drew and I have been “delighted” by how well the transition has been going working with Mel Carson and Ashley Seffernick on our plan to integrate some parts of the Prime 8 Consulting and Delightful businesses and work together to ensure the very best results and experience for our clients and our people.

Today, we are thrilled to announce that Alex Mercer will be joining Delightful as Global Strategy Director.

Alex has a rich history of success in marketing and communications. More than a decade ago she managed some of Microsoft’s communications portfolios in global PR, public sector, and citizenship and also spent time at Gates Ventures, working on the Giving Pledge initiative.

Back in New Zealand, she launched an investment organization focused on funding women founders of start-ups and, more recently, global marketing and communications roles at Xero and Datacom, where she will continue to support their brand strategy.

Harnessing her global experience coupled with a superpower for building excellent teams and utilizing the latest technologies and trends, we have asked Alex to work with Mel, Drew, and myself to build a global plan that takes the successful Delightful Communications blueprint and scales it up and out to the world.

As the months have passed since we acquired Delightful, we have seen steady growth both in terms of client asks across our Integrated Marketing, Executive Communications, and Creative Studios service areas, and hiring new team members to join the company and reap the rewards of learning and growing in a business at the cutting edge of marketing and communications.

As I said back in February, our goal is to grow Delightful’s marketing and communications services so more brands and leaders across industries can benefit from their creativity, tenacity, and realize even greater results.

In a fast-moving business environment dominated by AI and a need for greater efficiency AND creativity, Alex’s appointment is just the catalyst our business needs to help take Delightful through to the next (global) stage and help us realize that goal.

Please join us in welcoming Alex to Delightful Communications.

– Nicolette Sharp / Owner at Delightful Communications / CEO at Prime 8 Consulting

As dawn breaks at the start of a second decade in Delightful’s history, Ashley and I have decided it is time to pass the helm of our business to new owners.

Starting from humble beginnings working out of Seattle coffee shops back in 2012, we have since built a 35-person organization with global reach. We help some of the world’s biggest technology brands and their leaders be more discoverable, shareable, and memorable.

After 10 years of adventures (tripling in size since March 2020), we started to think deeply about what was next for us and our business.

We have a successful formula helping our clients with integrated marketing, executive communications, and content creation, and the constant asks for more capacity meant we should think about scaling purposefully and sustainably.

As a people-first business driven by our Delightful principles, we also wanted to ensure our amazing team has plenty of room for learning and growth, as well as the stability provided by a larger business infrastructure.

Recognizing our own limitations, we started to seek advice on how to take our business to the next level and through pure serendipity were introduced to Drew and Nicolette Sharp, Co-Founders of Prime 8 Consulting.

Prime 8 is a Bellevue-based consulting firm that has 150 consultants working in various business roles across clients like Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, and others. Over the past few years, our team has worked with many of their employees, partnering on successful projects for our mutual customers.

When we came together to discuss a potential union, it was evident their management team had the experience, drive, and passion to help integrate our services into Prime 8’s portfolio and provide our employees with a continuous passage of career opportunities.

After careful consideration, Ashley and I decided to sell Delightful and believe this is the best way forward for the company, our clients, and our employees.

Drew and Nicolette are keeping the Delightful brand, and Ashley and I are staying on for the foreseeable future to help with the integration. There is much work to do both on the client side and in assimilating our operational infrastructures to create the powerhouse we believe is possible.

There are a thousand stories we could share about our voyage to this time and place, but one conversation Ashley and I had stands out at this moment.

It was about the summer of 2017, and we’d just signed a big contract to help Microsoft with the IoT in Action global event series for which we won an award. We made a pact that our work with Delightful had to be more than just for the paycheck. We wanted to grow something with people at its core who would be part of a legacy we could all be proud of.

As we look across our team, many of whom have been with us for several years, we are so proud of the work they have done for the company, their clients, and themselves, and we are confident that as Drew and Nicolette take Delightful’s helm and chart a new course, they will continue to learn and grow.

There are so many people we need to thank for help and advice along the way and we will reach out over the coming weeks in appreciation.

For right now, though, it’s business as usual. We have live workstreams and trailblazing projects to maintain and grow, all while helping our clients and their leaders be even more discoverable, shareable, and memorable.

Onwards……

Mel Carson – Founder & CEO – Delightful Communications

Ashley Seffernick – Director of Operations – Delightful Communications

Winning an award for your hard work is always a pleasure, but to receive recognition towards the end of the year, just short of the holidays, has added extra bang to our festive crackers.

Last week we became the proud recipients of The Drum Social Media Award for Best Use of User-Generated Content for our work with Microsoft and the Excel Creator program.

I have outlined the entry below, but really this post is a shout-out to our incredible team who have worked so hard on this project:

• Bianca Hu and Amber Martin for guidance and strategic oversight
• Wayne Pua for splendid all-up leadership of the program
• Guillermo Garcia for meticulous research and analytics
• Hunter Hill for creative video and design materials
• Eric Fetters-Walp for engaging copywriting
• Chelsea Slocum for writing the winning award entry

Huge thanks too to Cuong Pham from Microsoft for believing in our team and the program and for being such a delightful client and partner on this project!

The Winning Entry – Public

Microsoft Excel has been a mainstay in the business application world since 1987, and its engineers are releasing new product features, hacks, and innovative ways to use Excel all the time. Delightful Communications was asked to position Excel as a fun, productive solution while reaching new, relevant audiences and driving amplified awareness across social media platforms. We did this by building an Excel Creator community of global experts who were already leveraging Excel as a tentpole in their own social strategy. These individuals were releasing content about Excel and making it incredibly easy to digest and engaging for a young, global audience, and we wanted to help them take it to the next level. To do this, we developed a symbiotic relationship with Excel Creators that promoted innovative ideas, highlighted product features, and helped them continue to create that emotional response that Excel can be fun. To date, we are working with 31 Excel Creators representing 16 countries and 6 languages. Excel Creators work with us to hear information live that’s fresh and relevant, and to be on the cutting edge. Reciprocally, we have an opportunity to highlight key features that are targeted based on what Microsoft wants people to know about. The end result is amazing, original user-generated content published by a robust community of global Excel Creators that are invested in learning about the latest Excel product innovations and driving awareness throughout their own user bases

Well done to all the award winners and those nominated. We thought the fine folks at The Drum did a great job with these awards and we look forward to sharing our great work with them next year.

Cheers, Mel Carson – Founder & CEO at Delightful Communications

Crafting and reinforcing high-quality, custom B2B marketing messages—whether in words or via visuals—requires insight, experience, and that sometimes elusive quality called creativity.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our Creative Studios to enhance what we’re already doing for our clients: creating persuasive and detail-oriented text and eye-catching, innovative graphics and digital content in a variety of formats.

It’s just another way in which we’re striving to help your message stand out, connect, and endure.

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It isn’t surprising that people want more from the companies they work for and buy from. Recent research has spotlighted this as a ‘Millennial’ trait and certainly, we are seeing this more today thanks to the various platforms’ companies have to promote this notion.   

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It’s always such a joy to be asked to speak at conferences, and thrilled that our old friend Jonathan Allen (Former Search Engine Watch editor) asked me to come to his inaugural EQ Leadership Labs event in St. Louis, Union Station, next week.

I’ll be speaking about the importance of entrepreneurs to have tip-top personal brands as leaders and sharing tips on how they can have their wisdom and experience be more discoverable, shareable, and memorable.

If you are in the area, please drop by – you can register with this discount code – and looking forward to seeing and hearing from some other past industry friends and peers like Mike Grehan, Simon Hestletine, and Thom Craver.

Should be a marvelous event!

@MelCarson – Founder & Principal Strategist at Delightful Communications

Don’t forget to: subscribe to The Personal Brand Lab, follow @Delightful on Twitter, like the Delightful Facebook Page, and join us on LinkedIn. 

Delightful Communications expands into UK & EMEA

I’m Simone and happy to introduce myself to you as the Delightful Communications Digital Marketing Strategist based in EMEA. I live South of London in the Surrey Hills in a town steeped in literary history with links to Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, E.M Forster and more. As you may gather, I love literature and writing. I have a BA in Communications, Journalism and PR.

I truly enjoy the work I do. Digital marketers are communicators with a fascinating toolbox. They have the tools to be endlessly creative but also have the equipment to test whether communication strategies and executed plans help solve a customer’s goals.

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After 8+ years in the world of online advertising, working at both Microsoft and AOL (Oath), I would like to introduce myself as the newest member of the Delightful Communications team.

As a Digital Marketing Specialist, I employ several skills I have gained over the years: Establishing relationships, operationalizing workflow, and providing laser-focus to customer needs. I believe in treating the customer with respect, going above and beyond and ALWAYS looking to surprise and delight.

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They say lightning doesn’t strike twice, which is why we thought THREE times about submitting another campaign to the Content Marketing Institute Awards after our Majestic in Space win last year. Are we good enough for another award, we thought? Have we really done anything to match 3D printing the internet on the International Space Station, we pondered?

After much cogitation, we submitted an entry anyway.

So, imagine our utter joy when we were notified late last week that the work we have been doing with Microsoft on the IoT in Action event series has been so well regarded that we’ve won an industry gong from the CMI for the Best Integrated Corporate Event (in-person)/Digital Content Strategy

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While we have many combined years of industry experience, Delightful Communications itself is a newer company. Founded in 2012, I started the company to help businesses capitalize on continually emerging trends in marketing and PR like social media, influencer marketing, employee advocacy, content marketing and personal branding.

Understanding that while our primary medium of communication may be digital, our focus on business has always made clear that true success depends not just on digital pixels, but also on people.

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