My name is Darren Barefoot. I’m a digital strategist, writer, technologist and marketer, raised in Vancouver, Canada. I’ve been immersed in the web since I built my first website in 1999. I started my career working as a technical writer for software companies, but shifted gears to doing digital marketing work. Since 2003, I’ve been a partner at Capulet Communications, the company I co-founded. These days at Capulet we mostly do digital strategy work, helping organizations like Mountain Equipment Co-op, Mobify, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Ecojustice and Global Zero get better at communicating on the web.
Here are some personal and professional accomplishments that I’m proud of:
- 2001: Started CapeScience, an early corporate blog.
- 2003: Launched Capulet Communications.
- 2004: Launched Flowers for Al and Don, a crowdsourced fundraising campaign to buy flowers for same-sex couples waiting in line to get married at City Hall in San Francisco.
- 2004: Imagined and co-founded Northern Voice, a personal blogging and social media conference. It was the first of its kind in Canada, and is now in its ninth year.
- 2006: Wrote a play called Bolloxed, which toured to several Fringe Festivals in Western Canada. It generally received positive reviews.
- 2007: Nearly a million people visited one of my favourite pop-culture-on-the-web projects, Get a First Life.
- 2007: Co-wrote and self-published one of the first books about social media marketing, Getting to First Base.
- 2009: Co-wrote Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook, published by No Starch Press.
- 2010: Working with Mountain Equipment Co-op, we helped to expand a national park, and to protect the Flathead River Valley from oil, gas and coal exploration.
- 2011: In this year, I only consumed Canadian products, services and ideas.
- 2011: For the third time at Capulet, one of our clients gets acquired.
- 2012: Completed original research on how NGOs are using Facebook.
- 2012: Published The Noble Arsonist, a web strategy e-book for the NGO sector.
- 2013: Launched a new digital strategy and web marketing conference.
If all else fails, you can also google me.
In the Media
On occasion, I’m approached by the media to talk about projects I’m working on, web marketing and digital strategy. Here’s a sampling of that coverage dating back to 2004:
- CBC Radio, On Blogging and Northern Voice
- Wall Street Journal, Attention Bloggers
- Guardian, Get a First Life…No, Really
- Georgia Strait, Geek Speak
- Toronto Star, Viral video stars should sit back and enjoy the ride
- Calgary Herald, What to do if your Twitter account is hacked
About This Site
I started DarrenBarefoot.com back in 2000, mostly as a place to host my resume and writing samples. Since then, it has evolved through two redesigns (it originally looked like this, and more recently like this). In 2002, I added a blog to the front page and that’s become the site’s main purpose. I’ve written almost 6000 blog posts for over nine million visitors.
The current version of this site was built by Tzaddi Gordon, with help from Christine Rondeau and sixty4media. The photo of me in the header was taking by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. A previous version of this site was designed by vanderWoning.
DarrenBarefoot.com 