Lara Littlefield Community organizer, ceo

I've been designing digital user experiences and mobile since 2002, and bring a crispness, lightness, and whimsy (usually in the form of minimalist symbolism) to each UI built with my team as a creative director. I have helped build and direct the complete development of apps for iOS and Android in the fashion, e-commerce, lifestyle, and fitness sectors. I also enjoy creating never before imaginable user experiences, especially as we move closer into the VR set for consumers on a more everyday level. In the last 2 years, my media and software co. BWD inc. has produced 100s of campaigns, lately focusing heavily on a mixture of Instagram and Facebook ad buys and highly creative and authentic placements.

Today's most successful marketing campaigns are truly authentic, and typically never before seen in their uniqueness and alternative channel approach. Furthermore, content marketing is the only way to get to that point. Millennials simply will not engage with content unless it's authentic, and at my software and media co. (BWD inc.) we produce campaigns for our clients that are typically never within the bounds of a cookie-cutter-approach and usually appeal to the "weird" and "different" in all of us. Forget about "social engagement," what we strive for is immediate community evangelism of our client's products with especially young demo sets.

From January to February 2014, I helped lead an anonymous group of Ukrainian diaspora activists in constructing an entire hashtag activism campaign just as the concept of participating in greater popular movements online through hashtags were reaching average American consumers. In our first, highly orchestrated digital protest event, we managed to reach the #1 global trending spot for #digitalmaidan on Twitter (a hashtag I coined in November 2013), achieving 3 million exposures for the hashtag and gaining real traction with policy makers and influencers in the U.S. who had previously remained unaware of many of the many atrocities ongoing, and these individuals actually continued to work with #digitalmaidan campaigns throughout early 2014. [Complete case study to be published late 2014.] Previously, I produced the first academic paper on the role of the Internet and Ukraine in April 2011 at Columbia University entitled, "The Battle for a Genuinely Post-Soviet Age: How the new Ukrainian “netizen” will free Ukraine from its neo-Soviet bondage."

I have been coding professionally with WordPress since the platforms release in 2003 (at the age of 16). Since then, I've created multiple businesses with WordPress, and have helped to launch 100s of small businesses on it as well. I write about WordPress often at my blog http://laralittlefield.pub and am an organizer for WordCamp Boston.