Job Posting: Director of SEM/SEO for MySpace!

Editor’s comments: what could be hotter than running SEO/SEM for a leading social media portal? This looks like a cool job . . .

If you are interested, send me an email at davidrod (at) g mail dot com and I’ll forward it along to the hiring manager.

MySpace Director of SEO/SEM

General Description

MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends. Create a community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends! See who knows who, or how you are connected. Find out if you really are six people away from Kevin Bacon.

MySpace is for everyone:

Friends who want to talk Online

Single people who want to meet other Singles

Matchmakers who want to connect their friends with other friends

Families who want to keep in touch–map your Family Tree

Business people and co-workers interested in networking

Classmates and study partners

Anyone looking for long lost friends!

MySpace is looking for a Director of SEO/SEM who will be responsible for managing the SEO/SEM teams within MySpace. The position will work with other stakeholders in identifying and implementing online marketing solutions along with creating strategic decisions that will impact MySpace’s overall business goals and requirements. The position requires an individual who is an online marketing enthusiast, well informed in cutting edge techniques as well as standard industry best practices. This individual will manage all aspects of the SEO/SEM team including measuring & reporting on traffic gains of both organic and paid campaigns. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience leading a multi-million dollar search marketing program in a complex category, with a demonstrated track record of driving change, setting strategies and superior execution that have had material impact on the bottom line. The candidate will also have deep technical experience in driving organic search (SEO) traffic from all major search engines. Working with both internal and external stakeholders to foster continual improvement and innovation, the Director of SEO/SEM is the definitive expert within MySpace on all matters relating to Online Marketing.
To succeed in this role requires a combination of technical and marketing savvy, which enables him/her to scope the landscape, define a vision & strategy, win acceptance of that strategy, and execute against the approved plan. This requires a combination of entrepreneurship and business savvy.

Responsibilities

Salary will be based upon the candidate’s experience. We offer a unique and rich array of benefits, including a flexible work schedule and an assortment of health coverage options. We’re always looking for talented individuals to join our team.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Full P&L responsibility for paid & organic search, meta-search, search feeds, and a suite of online marketing channel partners.
• Setting objectives & strategies to exceed sales and profitability targets, forecasting & budget management
• Set up and champion centralized SEO strategy throughout the entire site including
• developing a roadmap of best practices
• defining common product & technical requirements for all platform-related initiatives
• setting milestones & delivering financial results for centralized projects
• evangelizing SEO with key internal and external stakeholders
• Drive innovation to keep MySpace paid search program at the forefront of Search Engine practices, technology and structure
• Champion scalable tool procurement/development which can be leveraged to deliver EI benefit
• Develop robust analytics capabilities to increase efficiency of paid search investment & scale campaigns further into the tail
• Become the worldwide center of excellence for paid search in the Social Networking space.
• Oversee and manage SEO/SEM team (7 individuals), including their development and growth
• Paid search team responsible for all major search engines, as well as meta-search and feeds
• Organic search team of both direct reports, and dotted-line responsibility with product management
• Identify & manage network of agency/vendor relationships (including contract negotiations)
• Establish and manage senior relationships with internal, cross functional stakeholders, as well as external stakeholders
• Work with the Director of Analytics to establish a vision for web analytics, data sharing, and tools and techniques for driving site performance improvements.
• Manage SEO/SEM activity including site traffic reporting and setting team direction and goals
• Stay on Top of Current Search Engine Trends and Practices and keep the Team up to date
• Implement and execute strategies based on actionable analysis of team performance
• Monitor Competitor sites to Ensure Competitive Advantages in SEO/SEM initiatives

REQUIREMENTS

• A minimum of 8-10 years of prior experience in SEO/SEM, web marketing background with at least 4 years in a senior role or with prior experience in managing a team
• Must have solid experience in analyzing and optimizing web sites
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills
• Experience working with online media sites, social networking, social media or community websites with knowledge and understanding of top players
• Proven ability to optimize websites, Images and Videos for Organic Search
• Thorough understanding of SEM campaign optimization, conversion. split testing and ROI
• Excellent presentation and interpersonal communication skills
• Strong Understanding and Ability to Communicate SEO/SEM Standards and Best Practices!
• Strong project and people management skills.
• Proven ability to work across all departments to reach company goals; a real team player
• Demonstrated excellent business judgment and ability to delegate efficiently, both internally and externally
• Understanding of HTML, DHTML, AJAX, JavaScript, and Web Technologies including Online Video, Flash, CSS, RSS
• Ability to inform, educate and engage marketing teams in emerging digital marketing methods.
• Ability to strategize, implement and execute online marketing plans company wide.
• Must be able to think outside the box and creatively. Proven skills in managing under tight deadlines in a very fast paced environment
• Bachelor’s Degree required
• Ability to have fun!

 

Online Procrastination Businesses: Trend or Fad?

The couch potato watching TV for five hours a day made TV networks billions of dollars. These days, couch potatoes are still not getting exercise, but they gotten up from the couch and moved to the computer.

When you think about all the “in” online businesses these days, many of them revolve around mindless ways to pass time online. Here’s a few examples:

• Twitter.com: A site where you send people short updates on what you are doing at the moment. For example, if this was a Twitter post I might write: “I’m writing a blog about Twitter.” Apparently, people really like this site.
• Virtual Goods on FaceBook. My friend Jeremy at LightSpeed Venture Partners estimates that FaceBook makes $15 million a year selling “virtual goods.” For example, for $1 I might buy a picture of a flower and email it to you. Not a real flower, mind you, a virtual flower. Amazing.
• LinkedIn Groups. As I just noted in a prior posts, there are apparently hordes of people obsessed with joining as many groups on LinkedIn as they possibly can. Many of these people probably once also collected Garbage Pail Kids.
• Virtual Worlds. Second Life is the most obvious example.
• FaceBook applications. Be a pirate or a cowboy; takes movie quizes; etc, etc.

A lot of these ‘businesses’ have received significant investment, media coverage, and users in the last few years. The question I have is whether they are actually sustainable businesses.

My analysis of potential long-term success is based on the classic marketing distinction between a “trend” and “fad.” A trend represents a sustainable change in behavior. Increasing usage of the Internet is a trend. Couples having their first child after 30 is a trend. Hybrid vehicle usage is a trend. A fad, on the other hand, enjoys a sudden and significant spike in popularity, but then quickly fades into near oblivion. Think “New Kids on the Block”, The Pet Rock, mullets, and The South Beach Diet.

You can make a huge amount of money exploiting both trends and fads, but successful exploitation requires different techniques for each. Exploitation of a trend requires an investment in infrastructure, branding, and long-term planning. Think of the Toyota Prius as an example. In the first few years of its existence, it was sold almost exclusively to fanatical environmentalists, many of whom were willing to wait months or years to get one. Toyota sold only 15,000 Priuses in 2000-2001, the first year of sales in the US. In 2007, they sold 181,000 (up 69% over 2006!). Toyota didn’t make money in these early days, and then didn’t sell many cars. But each year of the Prius‘ existence, demand grew, production costs declined, and the Prius progressed from niche car to well-known brand.

Had Toyota executives spent billions on Super Bowl advertising in the first year of the Prius launch – and expected to sell 500,000 cars every year starting with the first, they would have lost a lot of money and cancelled the project immediately. Toyota, however, understood that hybrid cars had the potential to be a long-term trend and opted to introduce the car slowly and wait for demand to intensify.

A fad, on the other hand, needs the exact opposite approach. When the latest teen band gains stardom on the Disney Channel, the marketing objective is to exploit the band as quickly and as frequently as possible. As far as I can tell, Hannah Montana is the current “it” teen band. As such, the singer is touring constantly, they’ve created a tour movie, and the toy aisle at the drugstore is loaded with all sorts of Hannah related products (kids makeup, karaoke devices, etc). Marketing execs at Disney know full well that Hannah Montana probably has at most one or two more years of popularity before the next generation of kids become infatuated with another teen sensation.

So let’s apply these lessons to marketing online procrastination businesses, like Twitter or a FaceBook application. My sense is that the majority of these businesses are fads with little chance of ever becoming a trend. The novelty of reading a text message diary of your friends will likely fade away, as will the novelty of getting your friends to sign up as ‘pirate supporters’ on FaceBook. Indeed, the novelty of Friendster and MySpace seems to have faded significantly. It’s not out of the question that FaceBook may someday suffer some of the same fatigue.

Whether you are talking about a rock band, movie star, video game, Internet site, or social media application, if the point of the business is to provide entertainment and procrastination, there is a very high chance that your business will be a fad, soon to be replaced by another fad. How many rock bands are true dynasties? How many video games make it past a sequel? How many social media sites have shown more than one year of continual growth?

One important note: there’s no question that there are social media applications that currently have (or will have) an application beyond entertainment. Consider Flickr (photo sharing), LinkedIn (networking), and even FaceBook itself (contact list). All of these sites – though considered to a greater or lesser degree entertainment by many users – also have an element of utility that may enable them to be trends instead of fads.

But when we are talking about virtual Texas Hold ’em on FaceBook – with no value beyond entertainment – the assumption must be that we are witnessing a fad. In such a case, the best thing to do from a business perspective is exploit, exploit, exploit and hope that you sell the business ASAP.

 

Attention Facebook: Sell! Sell! Sell!

Good news for Facebook this week. Microsoft is rumored to be interested in buying a stake in the company at a valuation of up to $15 billion. On top of that, the press is preparing for the inevitable passing of the traffic torch between MySpace and Facebook. And, indeed, if you look at the Alexa rankings for the two companies, you can see that it is only a matter of time before Facebook is the social media king.

So does this mean that Mark Zuckerberg was right to reject Yahoo’s $900 million offer? Are the 20-somethings at Facebook HQ the future leaders of Silicon Valley? Should we start counting the days until Facebook surpasses Google?

To quote ESPN’s Lee Corso, “not so fast, my friend.” Yes, hindsight has shown that that $900 million offer was too low, and yes, Facebook will soon be the #1 social media site and one of the top Web sites in the world. But things may not be as rosy as they seem.

For starters, the mere fact that Facebook has so rapidly eclipsed the once-dominant MySpace goes to show how fickle Web users are when it comes to social media. Indeed, it almost seems like every generation develops an affinity to their own social media site, making yesterday’s site old news.

Consider what happened to Friendster (now for the 35+ crowd) when MySpace arrived, and what happened to MySpace (now for the 25+ crowd) when Facebook arrived. New sites – targeted to younger generations – such as Hi5 (now for the under 16 crowd) are popping up. What’s to prevent these upstarts from upstaging Facebook?

It’s also worth repeating the apparently-forgotten adage to never look at gift horse in the mouth. Frankly, despite the fact that $900 million has turned out to be a low ball offer, I still think that any start-up that turns down $900 million has a lot more hubris than it does intelligence.

Indeed, I once worked for a company that was (allegedly) offered something north of $450 million from an acquirer, turned that down, and (again, allegedly) is now being sold for something south of $50 million. Hindsight is indeed 20-20. Did we think we were going to be worth a billion? Of course. I remember fantasizing that we could be worth $10 billion.

How many times have you heard this story: A guy walks into a casino in Vegas, throws a few quarters into a slot machine and wins $1500. He immediately walks out of the casino and spends the rest of his vacation sitting near the hotel pool. Have you tallied your count?

OK, now count how frequently you’ve heard this version. A guy walks into a casino in Vegas, throws a few quarters into a slot machine and wins $1500. Over the rest of the weekend, he spends $2000 on slots hoping for that next big strike. He leaves town wondering where his money went.

Humans are hopeful animals. We almost always look the gift horse in the mouth and opt for the two birds in the bush. Young humans – say 23 year old CEOs – are especially hopeful. Some may go so far as to even say naive. They assume that what goes up can only go more up, and they presume that their predecessor’s failures were due to their incompetence and nothing else.

Sometimes, these CEOs get pretty lucky and seem to prove naysayers like me wrong. Most times, they don’t.