digitalCMO.com

Seattle Interview #3: Jeff Bell, NCT Ventures

Seattle’s Jeff Bell is investment partner at NCT Ventures, and talks with digitalCMO about his recent investment and exit from ClearSaleing, working in a remote office, his time at Microsoft and Chrysler, digital marketing, and other fun stuff.  This is part three of five in digitalCMO's Seattle interview series. digitalCMO: You are on the investment team at NCT Ventures, a VC firm. You are based in Seattle, and NCT is based in Columbus, Ohio. NCT is not well known in Seattle, can you tel...

Seattle Interview #2: Rand Fishkin, CEO SEOmoz

This is the second in a series of interviews with Seattle-area digital leaders. Last one was Chris Devore. Rand founded SEOmoz in 2004 in Seattle, where he still leads the company. Only on digitalCMO can you discover: How Rand thinks about  transparency, leadership, and hiring Annual revenues and margins of SEOmoz.org (a privately-held co.) Mean things and hard stuff How crappy is www.digitalCMO.com from an organic search perspective and what can I do about it? The interview belo...

Seattle Interview #1: Chris DeVore/ Founders Co-op

Chris DeVore co-founded Judy's Book and currently operates Founders Co-op, a early-stage venture fund and community of entrepreneurs in the Seattle area, focused on web-based and software services. Chris graciously agreed to share his thoughts on start-ups, capital, and innovation: digitalCMO: What inspired you to start Founders Co-op? Chris: In late 2007 my business partner (Andy Sack) and I sold our previous company, a venture-backed local search business called Judy's Book.  We knew ...

Two Wacky Lists for Managers and Analysts

First List (for Managers):  25 Oddball Interview Questions, from GlassDoor.  1. “If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?” Asked at Goldman Sachs. 2. “How many ridges [are there] around a quarter?” Asked at Deloitte. 3. “What is the philosophy of Martial Arts?” Asked at Aflac. 4. “Explain [to] me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years.” Asked at Boston Consulting. 5. “Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 how we...

Four Digital Marketing Predictions for 2011

Not quite relevant to digital marketing, but we are expecting our third boy in February. What is related to digital marketing is that I crammed in a bunch of late November/ December meetings with agencies, advertisers, and media specialty companies before going under house arrest.  Having visited six cities in five weeks, I spoke with folks across the digital marketing world who, already having made decisions around the holiday season, were focused on 2011 execution. I did not hear any surprises...

Beware the Wounded Dog

Happy New Year. It’s harder than I expected to come back to a neglected blog.  I haven’t posted since May of last year, when I wrote on conversion attribution. The longer I wait, the harder it gets – I think I was waiting for that great flash of an idea for a luminary post that would justify the 6 month wait. Well, this ain’t it.  But here it goes. Beware the Wounded Dog This has been on my mind for a while:  how to recognize – and avoid – the Wounded Dog at work.  As unpleasant as t...

Digital Sausage (for Managers)

Good digital marketers know to value  output over the input. As a matter of fact, the input “hits” is a term that got the industry so much trouble that we don’t even call it that any more when we talk about impressions. Impressions, clicks, conversion rate, average sales amount, lifetime value of a customer are all inputs that go into the most important output: profitable revenue (ROI).  [Note, this can be over time (LTV) or transactional]. This accountability for output vs. input is not news...

Like Data for Chocolate

In my career, and often at home, I use data to answer key questions:  At work: "how much should we charge...how should we allocate resources...what is the right incentive compensation plan...how do we measure the financial impact?" are some examples. At home: "should I buy or lease...should I clean my own gutters...should we get a season ski pass"? These questions are pretty straight forward, and I know that for many of you, upon reading these questions, you immediately see the Excel formu...

Brent Turner on Management: Digital Leader Project (part 2)

This is the second installment of the digitalCMO Digital Leader Project. The objective: to hear perspectives on leadership and management directly from some of the most senior digital marketers. (The first installment is here, where we heard from the CMO of The Vitamin Shoppe Lou Weiss.) In this installment we hear from Brent Turner. Brent is EVP of Call Products at Marchex. Before that, Brent held executive roles in digital advertising product management at Microsoft Advertising and aQuantiv...

Manager Focus: Career Discussions

Microsoft requires all people managers to conduct Midyear Career Discussions (MYCDs) with each direct report. These include a discussion between both parties on the following:  Assessments on trend toward completion of annual objectives; Assessment of the level of employee’s competencies in the role; Choices, decisions, and considerations around the employee's next career move Like many internal things at Microsoft, this process is supported through several workflow tools, templates, ...