About

Welcome to The Culture Mind. This blog has been named in tribute to the author Iain M. Banks and his ubiquitous future perfect as personified by his loose group of novels premised around -

“The Culture”.

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I have a varied background and upbringing – having grown up in metropolitan inner city Melbourne, Australia with a fantastic family, moving to the outer burbs in my early teens and embracing a much more “Australian” existence of “get on with it”. I now have my own family – baby son & lovely wife, who are my contribution to the 2+1 existence of this world.

My first job baking bread at 1am on the graveyard shift at the local bakery when I was 15 entailed “get on with it” in the most literal sense – if you missed the bake, you lost money and customer good will and expectation for what you didn’t make. From here, I entered University, worked towards attaining my degree and whilst completing this odyssey, I moved into retail which ended up consuming me for the next few years. This state of existence was basically a paid extended university education where I had a few wins, made a few mistakes, and got taught an extraordinary amount of useful stuff. Most importantly, it taught me more than anything the one immutable fact – I don’t know everything nor could ever profess to possibly be in such a position to ever claim that. In other words – it taught me how much I don’t know.

In my late 20′s I got into automotive for a few years with Subaru, and then wound up to where I reside now – a node in the digital space – working for Areeba, a high end Digital Services agency based in Melbourne, Australia. In my role, I’m responsible for the pitches, proposals and strategic consulting for our clients across the business and ensuring the staff are covering all the bases in all aspects to do with our clients.

I often get asked what my job is – usually by people that have little to no interest in the mechanics and minutiae with which I and my colleagues find such a joy in our day to day. This often makes me think of how is it that an engineer, accountant, doctor or similar “profession” gets by with a simple comment about their field of endeavour and people nod sagely in understanding? How to make digital, new media, interactive media, online media rise to the same level of acceptance, understanding and ultimately the sage nod is one of knowing as opposed to polite ignorance and acceptance? With that, simply put, I present that I help businesses achieve their business goals, with online as the medium. Online is neat, I explain because it is cheap, (substitute inexpensive for cheap in each instance I use the word here), anonymous and measurable. The problem our industry faces is that executed poorly digital is a nightmare for all concerned – user, owner, sales team, shareholder and our industries reputation. I spend much of my job advising and consulting with business who have been burnt by the black hole of online – money has been sunk into the bottomless pit of despair and little to no understanding, accountability or measuring of effort or gains. A messy job at times.

So this blog is an insight and a glimpse of the way I work and how I rationalise much of the business advice we articulate everyday. There are links to my colleagues – they hold my respect and admiration for their craft and most importantly, they are a good bunch of people to work with.

Together we are working toward that ideal of the description my grandma would have nodded sagely at and muttered: “He works in digital” and everyone nods sagely back in understanding.

I have a great life – it is really good and I’m thankful for the people I meet and interact with every day.

Thanks for looking, and enjoy my observations. I encourage you to comment on any of my posts, as I am genuinely interested in hearing the thoughts of people from all walks of life.

Best regards,
CY

Colin Yeung, Director of Client Services
Areeba, Level 1, 121 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, VIC, 3000, Australia
Telephone: +61 3 9629 3111
Facsimile: +61 3 9629 3122

• Iain M Banks Science Fiction: http://www.iain-banks.net/science-fiction
• Wikipedia – Mind (The Culture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(The_Culture)
• Areeba: http://www.areeba.com.au
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/theculturemind
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/colinyeung