Muses of an Internet Marketer

The weekend move.

2007-06-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Helius to Acquire PointeCast

2007-05-16T08:18:00.000-07:00

So here is the news that I have been sitting on for a couple of weeks now. A week after joining PointeCast in the end of April, a company meeting was called to inform everyone that we were being Acquired by Helius an IPTV solutions company...I am sure many of you now are wondering just what an IPTV solutions company is. Essentially, they build software and hardware that enable large enterprise accounts to more effeciently communicate with employees or even clients. Helius has focused on two main sectors, the Training and Learning space and the Digital Signage industry. The PointeCast rapid authoring tools fit well with both of these sectors, allowing end users to rapidly create, deploy and modify their content. Further PointeCasts Portal product will supplement the existing Helius Training and Learning solution. You can find the official press release on the Helius site or on the PointeCast site Not a bad way to start out with a company!

One of those side Projects

2007-05-14T16:09:00.000-07:00

So as promised I am following-up the second post with a few deatils about some of the projects I have been busy with. The first of them being Pression. Pression was the offspring of 10Speed Media. As 10Speed Media was winding down, I was tasked with unloading the company/IP. I tenatively negotiated two diffeent deals, each which would have put a little coin back into Provo Lab's coffers and would have provided equity in the new company. Unfortunately both of these offers were rebuffed and so Pression was born. What I didn't mention was that Pression was actually a group of my friends and I who saw the opportunity in the Video advertising space. So we decided to engage a local developer, Scott Lemon and build the product ourselves. We took things slow and now are the proud owners of an amazing video delivery system that can be coupled with any backend tracking system. Additionally for those who don't have the backend tracking system, we have partneres with a leading service providr and have white labeled a robust tracking system. For the time being we are beta testing the product and will soon be shopping the technology around. The video advertising space is still very young, but moving and growing quickly. I look forward to report more in the near future.

So life is a little hectic...

2007-05-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

Since I posted last I have changed jobs twice, started two side projects (which became larger than a side project), and have been near a nervous breakdown :) Well maybe not that bad, but I am sure I came close to causing my wife to have one. So a little detail to that opening ramble. When first creating this blog, I was working for a start-up company 10Speed Media which focused on video affiliate marketing. A very novel idea, but one that ultimately wasn't managed appropriately and ran out of money. The technology just wasn't able to get out of idea stage. I ended up being the last man standing, trying to sell off the assets. I put together two potential deals for the company, unfortunately both were rebuffed by the owner, Paul Allen. So in January of this year, I left 10Speed for QualitySmith. QualitySmith is a lead gen company that specializes in the Home Improvement and automotive categories. I had been consulting with them since November as 10Speed started to wind down, but couldn't turn down the position of VP of Marketing, even though the company was head quartered in Walla Walla Washington. So starting in January I was traveling back and forth between here and there. I was officially home for 5 days (weekends included) in the month of January...as you can guess this started to drag on my home life. Additionally, the work environment was not optimal, with my management chain continually looking to second guess decisions and crowd my decision making ability. These things combined to my leaving the company in April of this year to join a local start-up by the name of PointeCast I have officially been on the job a little over 2 weeks and am really just now getting my feet wet. I have been tasked with both customer acquisition as well as conversion marketing. I plan to keep up a regular (or at least a much more regular) posting schedule. Stay tuned to hear about some of the other cool ideas that I have been working on. (Consulting projects as well as Pression

The first official post

2006-08-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

So after months of prodding and probably over a year of setting up this blog, I have finally gotten around to writing the first entry. The course of the last year has altered and changed for the better some of my long held beliefs and ideas concerning online marketing and its global nature. I have recently returned to the US after living in London for the last year and a half. I opened up the first international office for Myfamily.com...and it was a roaring success. Exceeding the success metrics set up by over 400%. After accomplishing what I had set out to do, I headed back to Utah where the corporate offices of MyFamily are...not to return to work, but to resign. Many, including my wife thought I was crazy. I had spent the last 6 years with MyFamily and was going to leave behind a lucrative offer and a stable company....but that was just it. It was stability to the point of boring. I had accomplished what I could at MF and it was clear that they weren't going to do what it took to retain my services and keep me interested in working for them long term. (Seems to be a trend around with all of the best minds heading for the door) So I returned from the UK on a Thursday and promptly resigned the following Monday. This was a major leap into the dark for me...I had become so comfortable at MF that I was a little uncertain of my Skill set. This only lasted a short while as I had three job offers immediately upon return, and then have had 2 others since accepting a position at 10Speed Media Along with focusing on the marketing and development of our video affiliate platform, I have switched some of my efforts to the other side of the fence. I have started a company called Digital Summit, partnering with an amazing developer, Jason Clinton and we are jamming on affiliate sites. We are first focusing on the genealogy space with sites like Vital records Vault, Birth Records Archive, Death Records Archive, and Marriage Records Archive. These sites, while focusing specifically on certain genres of genealogy, will provide a great service for many budding family historians. All in all I am extremely excited about the future...it is no longer the known grind day after day, but filled with promise and adventure. For instance tomorrow, I will be pitching around 30 Angel investors on 10Speed Media, then be on a client pitch later in the afternoon, then back to the office to work on contracts and do further testing on the beta 2 product we just released today. Then for the icing on the cake, I will probably go home and finish a review for my Genealogy Review site.Keep posted as this blog will get frequent updates into my life, the life of an internet marketer.