The Journo Grill: Vikki Chowney, Econsultancy

This month we?re introducing a new series of journalist grillings, garnering insight into the stories that get them going and where they usually look for them.

We’re kicking things off with Econsultancy’s new News Editor, Vikki Chowney, who explains why ‘customer insight’ is marked as her hot topic and who tells us that Facebook and LinkedIn are old news…1. What attracted you to Econsultancy? “I love working on 'new' things within well-established businesses, so the opportunity to come here and work on launching a new operation was an ideal opportunity. I was given a blank canvas and am totally rebranding our blog/news offering as a result.”2. Describe your typical working day.“There's not really such a thing, but I have blocks in my diary for writing. We will publish at 10am, noon and 3pm, so I'm at my desk during those periods, everything else is a heady mix of meetings, events and strategy sessions.”3. What's the best tech story you've ever read?“Wow, what a question. I've been doing this for a while now, so I'm going to have to limit that to the past year. In which case it would be Steve Jobs' rebuttal of Flash . To see something so punchy, attributed to him, was pretty phenomenal to read.”4. What's the next big news for tech? What will be big in 2012?“Customer insight is the name of the game. It's ALL I'm hearing about. Suddenly it's not just, 'We know where your customers are and what they're saying about you', it's 'We know how your customers behave outside of the context of your brand and what that means to you.' Pretty exciting.“F-commerce and social commerce will continue to grow, affiliate will evolve to performance, collective consumption will continue quietly to develop - and reputation will trump all as a measure of worth.”5. How important is social media in sourcing stories?“Hugely. I use Twitter and GReader religiously. I do not use LinkedIn or Facebook, because once something's popular enough to find there, it's old news.”