The weekend move.

I was helping a friend(Wes Funk) move this weekend and it was like old times. A bunch of former MyFamily.com employees were there, specifically representing the Marketing and IT groups. In catching up with some of my former coworkers I realized just how sharp of a group existed. Mike Chertudi, now a director at Omniture, Wes also a director at Omniture, I am at PointeCast now a division of Helius, Ben Brutsch a SR. manager at TGN (Formerly MyFamily.com. Also recently I had lunch with Teague McKnight a Sr. Director at Cirrus Data and then today I had lunch with Corey Davis, the VP of Internet Marketing at in2m. It makes me realize that I have had the opportunity to learn from some exceptionally sharp people. At lunch today we were talking about how cool it would be to set up an agency and bring in all of the big hitter that we knew. At Myfamily we each had our speciality...since then we have all broadened our knowledge base and expertise, but still would be a great compliment to each other.
Since joining PointeCast and now more recently Helius I have been able to tap into this network of friends and hence knowledge to really help me out. I have used their background in SEO and SEM to further increase my own knowledge. Also I have been able to solicit best practices advice in a very new industry. IT does really go to show that it is not what you know but WHO that is most important. I will continue to post about my marketing life here at Helius, especially as I market in the hyper competitive PowerPoint to Flash and Learning Management System (LMS) as well as I start to take on the Digital Signage and IPTV Markets.

Seth Godin

So it has been a couple of weeks since my last post. I have been sown in bed with Strep throat for the last week...lets just say that it is nice to be able to swallow, a little thing I know. Well the day I got sick was a pretty amazing day. I rode up to the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City with Wes Funk, a DIrector of marketing at Omniture. He and I have been great friends since I hired him 7 years ago or so at Ancestry.com. We headed up to SLC to hear Seth Godin speak. Yes that is the same former Yahoo Exec, now author and founder of Squidoo.com. Prior to Seth arriving, there was approximately 60 minutes of networking...yes that aweful word. To my surprise, I saw many faces from my past. I caught up with many of them...and dound many hard at work doing amazing things...either for themselves or for a company that they had recently landed with. The thing thta shocked me was how many people I didn't know. Now given, this event was organized by a bunch of tech geeks and so there was that crowd (Kind of wierd to organize a marketing guru to speakat a tech geek event...ah who am I to pass judgement) But that being said, there were a ton of marketers who I didn't know...and this is comming from a person who thought he was fairly well connected in the area.
So after the networking Seth showed up and started right in with his speach. While first listening to him, I was pretty impressed with his overall presentation. He is able to consolidate the obvious points that we should all know and probably do, down into bitesized chuncks thta fit well together. The main part of the presentation was great, however the best part of the entire event was the live Q&A. We started with about 30 mins of Questions and it was like watching a Magician at work. Seth was able to field the questions synthesise the underlying issues and then answer with amazing clarity and insight. I was blown away by his seemingly polished responses to off the cuff questions.
So to say the least, while I was on my death bed last week and had a bit of time to read, I spent an afternoon reading THE DIP. I would reccomend it to anyone...not just in business, but for application in all aspects of their life.
So now with the help of a little antibiotic and a weeks worth of rest, I am back in the saddle tackling a new job. The Helius acquisition of PointeCast was completed June 1st and so I am now officially a Helius employee. I am going to be working on all things marketing but with a specific emphasis on interactive marketing and all of the reporting and analytics that go with that. More later this week about Helius and Pointecast and what I am working on.