About

Hi. I’m Katy Lindemann and Seemingly Unconnected is a home for things that interest me, which I hope may also interest you – bits ‘n’ pieces from on and off the interweb and my own thoughts about planning, communications, media, music, art, geeky stuff and so on.

It’s so-called because of a great quote from William Plomer: “Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.” The fun is in finding the connections amidst the randomness. Randomness is good. It’s where the good stuff comes from. But the great stuff comes when you start to join the dots.

You might also have first come across this blog in its previous incarnation at kitschbitch.com, which was the blog’s home from May 2000 until July 2009. It had been my personal domain for so long I was quite loathe to move the blog, but as it had become much more professional-focused it seemed appropriate to move it to a more work-friendly domain. (Also, you wouldn’t believe the amount of spam I was getting after 9 years of that domain. Ahem).

 

Stuff I do

I’ve recently left the wonderful Naked Communications to strike out on my own as a freelance communications strategist and creative problem solver [full work page in development]. I’m still working on becoming an Emma Peel-stylee international woman of mystery, or forming the new A-Team, so we’ll call that work in progress.

At Naked, I was lucky enough to develop creative and social communications strategies for clients like COI, Nokia, and Vodafone, amongst others. Before that, I was a Media Manager at PHD, where I worked on strategic planning for brands like Sainsbury’s, Simple, Harrods and BMW.

Years ago, during my gap year before I went to university, I also spent 6 months working at the Guardian in their Ad Planning department, which is how I first found out about this thing called planning.

I’m not a big fan of the traditional way of thinking about advertising. Talking about marketing like warfare isn’t very cool, is it really? Strikeweights. Target audiences. Guerilla tactics. Bursts. Campaigns. Launches. Data Capture.

[ image courtesy ]

I mean, do we really expect people to want to listen to anything we have to say if we keep on treating them like enemy combatants?

I learned a lot from the smart people at Naked, who like to think there’s a much better way. Treating people as your partners. Realising that everything communicates (not just the stuff you put out as part of your marketing activity – yes, your call centres, in-store, customer service, all of that counts). People’s time is valuable. So why are they going to want to spend it with your brand or service? Make all your communication count by making sure it’s interesting, engaging, useful or relevant. And ideally all of the above. And that’s what I aim to do with the clients I work with.

My aim is to make awesome stuff. One of the awesome things I’m very excited about making is being asked to working with the wonderful team at Mudlark as an advisor for their game Chromaroma, a pervasive social game which uses your Oyster card to make commuting magical. My role is going to be to help with the strategic development of the game and especially thinking about working with existing and potential partners. I’m stoked to be involved and really excited about the opportunities we could open up. Hopefully, awesomeness will ensue…

If you’d like to know more about me and my work, you can download my [slightly out of date but being updated] CV here, or view my Linked In profile.

 

Speaking

I sometimes speak at conferences, unconferences and events – predominantly about social communications, but also on topics as diverse as playful design and robotics, to what we can learn about creativity from children. If you’d like to talk about me speaking at your event, please do get in touch – details below.

Upcoming events:

Previous events:

 

Contact

If you’d like to say hello, I can be emailed at katy [ at ] this domain, or found on Twitter or on Skype.

 

Stuff I Like

I like gigs, chocolate, clubbing, gin and tonics, sunshine, the muppets, most stuff made by Apple, geeky shit, the delicious combination of duvet+sofa, football (for my sins I’m a Man Utd fan, but in my defence I am a manc!), gadgets, nintendo wii, street art, taking photos, drooling over sexy japanese import trainers and eating & drinking things that are bad for me.

Disclosure – I’m a member of the Open Rights Group, who I wholeheartedly endorse and would recommend as a fantastic bunch of people. I’m also a member of Liberty, if that’s relevant.

I live in London, but also spend a fair bit of time splashing around on the south coast with my Brighton-based other half, where I can usually be found dodging dive-bombing seagulls trying to nick my chips.

I can be found in various other places online, including:

»tumblr
»flickr
»linked in
»twitter
»facebook
»dopplr
»delicious
»upcoming
»slideshare

I also keep a separate Twitter feed for blog posts if you like to use Twitter as an RSS reader:

»blog posts on twitter

 

About the Site

This site was chopped together on a Macbook Pro and runs on WordPress. The author runs on Diet Coke and chocolate biscuits.

In a past life – before I went on a rather extended blogging hiatus – in its past incarnation as ‘kitschbitch’, this blog was actually one of the first british blogs, and was the subject of a few articles (guardian, evening standard, CMJ) about this strange new phenomenon. Those of us who were amongst the first ever UK bloggers – or webloggers (as this was back when it still began with a ‘W’) – were considered really pretty weird for publishing stuff about our lives online (and even weirder for meeting up in real life!) and this weblogging thing was probably just a fad and would never take off…how times have changed! This blog was also one of the nominees for ‘Best European Weblog’ in the First Annual Weblog Awards in 2001, (now known as the Bloggies). And one of my proudest moments, was being one of the bloggers featured in ‘blogtrumps’, alongside other early bloggers like Meg Pickard (now head of Social Media at the Guardian) and Ev Williams (who founded some little startup called Twitter).

I finally got around to importing the old blogger archives* and it’s frankly quite terrifying to read the postings of my 18 year-old-self. But hey, that’s technology for you…

 

 

* when importing posts over from my previous domain, the blogger posts went a bit stripey and double posted. I haven’t got round to fixing this yet. Although if you’re bored enough to be browsing my archives from 2000-2004, this is probably the least of your worries…