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About Maarten Verkoren

HomeAgencyAbout Maarten Verkoren - Fan Base - 36 Rules

Maarten Verkoren is founder of Audiences Now, the creative agency for interactive brand-communication that helps connect the way brands communicate to the way people consume media.

Bio Maarten Verkoren 
Maarten was born in Amsterdam on the stunningly beautiful Singel canal-street. Even as a kindergartner, he engaged in social media. He used to beat the other kindergartners in his Amsterdam kindergarten, simply because he did not dig his mom leaving him there each day. This rudimentary form of communication, however primitive, were his first steps on the social media front. Anti-social communication after all, is communication nonetheless and it taught him that although it got him what he wanted, it did not make people listen to him better.

Since then, Maarten has developed into a socially stable person who, soon after his discovery of Twitter, decided that this medium was not for him. He deleted his account within a week. A year later, in a bus traveling through China, a conversation with Marc van der Chijs made him change his mind about Twitter and Maarten opened a new account. 

As he happened to report on the Turkish Airlines crash near Schiphol Airport, CNN asked him to check in and pushed him live on Breaking News. His message to the journaliverse that they would soon become old news if they would not embrace Twitter and other social media would not go unnoticed. Tweeting and supplying all his new followers (already 225.000) with value adding content gave him a day job next to his regular job while also answering all the journalists asking him: “How the heck should we use social media in our work?” He should have started his consultancy firm right then and there, but instead, Maarten remained hypnotized by Mickey Mouse.

The Peter Pan Syndrome still had a hold on Maarten. He has always remained a child – albeit not as aggressive as when he was a kindergartner – allowing him to enjoy doing marketing for the stunning Pixar and Disney movies. The New Media Consultancy Business kept calling him though. People kept asking him for keynotes on the subject as well as advice. On 5th June 2012, he founded Audiences Now. Why? To finally hatch his dream of bringing to life all the ideas that keep sprouting up in his volcanic mind. To shape, create and keep playing.

Whatever business you are in, the longer your organization keeps running in circles, however challenging new media seem to be; I love to take on your challenge with and for you and lead you to a new concept or idea. Let me be your sherpa to guide you to the summit of re-inventing your business. Renew, create, dare, live, play! Do! Do not be an anti-social company, yet open up to your target audience. Do not wait for the mass, do not be a follower, do not copy exhausted concepts, but take a peek into the brains of your target audiences. Think how you can change their lives, and do it! Audiences Now!!

HomeAgencyAbout Maarten Verkoren - Fan Base - 36 Rules

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