I am a 20-plus-year veteran of the digital biz. As a copywriter, blogger, and social media manager, my focus has been on storytelling and giving my employers’ brands an uncontrived human voice. My talents as a reliable multitasker, thorough researcher, problem solver, and quick study additionally find me ably managing such essential duties as web analytics reporting, bookkeeping, marketing email management, and day-to-day executive/team support.
I’d like to, if possible, forego the expected tone and language for a page of this nature. Forgive me my hopes of bypassing the hollow and summarizing my strengths straightforwardly. I’m highly creative, competent, agreeable, and an all-too willing wearer of many hats. I am always at the ready to fill all manner of roles (often concurrently). Conventional job-seeking wisdom suggests that an eclectic work history wounds a candidate’s appeal as a potential hire. I beg the question, why?
I’m an inherently curious sort and quick study, skilled in a variety of ways which I’m certain would serve you and your, no doubt, glorious organization quite well. (Too much?)
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THIS PAGE
Freelance Work - Link to highlights
StatSocial - Summary of position with link to highlights
Condé Nast Digital - Summary of roles, duties, and accomplishments
PeekYou - Summary of roles, duties, and accomplishments
Vaganza - How I spent my 20s
As I was beginning to attempt some kind of summary of my time working as a freelancer, it quickly became clear that doing so is a fool’s errand. You already know the kinds of things I do and are acquainted with freelancing.
In summary: At various points, during my life in the working world, sometimes concurrent with, in-between, or in lieu of W-2/headcount gigs, I’ve freelanced.
I’ve freelanced as a writer, a copyeditor, a QA manager, a personal assistant, a tutor, a bass player, and so much more. If you’re one of the great many with whom I’ve crossed paths during this life, consider reaching out. I’m massively inclined to respond to opportunity’s knock at this stage in my existence.
Like all other matters addressed here, it is a subject about which I’d be only too pleased to elaborate, for those curious.
The degree to which this area of my professional life is most relevant here is explored at the below link.
Click here for writing samples from, and elaborations on, some of my more notable freelance work
STATSOCIAL
Throughout my five-plus year tenure—starting in October 2015 and ending in May 2021—I reported directly to the company’s founder, putting his vision into words for every conceivable context (site copy, ad copy, UI copy, press releases, social media postings, blog entries, and so on). This I did in addition to an eclectic and extensive array of research and analysis projects.
My copy could be found throughout the company’s website, blog, and flagship (B2B, subscriber) platform. In addition, much of the language used by the company’s leadership, sales, and marketing teams—when summarizing and pitching their services—was of my coinage.
In maintaining the StatSocial Insights Blog throughout the year, I always created content specifically tailored to timely needs, as communicated to me by the company’s leaders. My blog entries were frequently used by sales, both as a calling card and as guidance to help them better articulate pitches to specific clients.
Starting in 2019, the company began to undergo a shift in both focus and function. To call it a pivot would not be quite accurate. It was something closer to a rebranding, occurring in tandem with a change in what aspects of the product were being emphasized. While I did continue to contribute copy, run the company’s social media accounts, and maintain blogs throughout this period—accommodating and developing the company’s changing voice—I was also heavily involved in a number of offline research projects.
StatSocial.com’s landing page (during the last 18 months, or so, of my tenure)
CONDÉ NAST DIGITAL
From 2004 to 2008 I worked for Condé Nast Digital, which was the dedicated digital arm of the publishing giant.
During the majority of my tenure, Condé Nast Digital (or CondéNet, as it was known then) functioned as something of a subsidiary, and was primarily focused on a lineup of online brands, distinct from (but nominally related to) the company’s widely-known print titles. This family of lifestyle sites included Style.com, Men.Style.com, Epicurious.com, and Concierge.com.
I served a “utility infielder” role for the immensely resourceful and talented Creative Services department. This 30-ish person team functioned as an in-house ad agency—conceptualizing and executing sponsored campaigns that ran on Condé’s sites.
The department was staffed by a scrappy and visionary roster of creatives, designers, coders, client liaisons, and project managers. Our prolific (and award winning) output generated, and required, the timely completion of a number of ancillary tasks, on both the front and back-ends. These fell outside of everyone’s job descriptions.
This is where I came in.
My daily workload entailed, but was by no means limited to:
1. Assembly, set-up, and deployment of all sponsored html email blasts—whether related to Creative Services’ campaigns, or not—sent to the users of Condé’s sites. These mailings, of which there were many hundreds each year, went out to hundreds of thousands of recipients at a shot. This could easily have been a full-time job in itself and after my departure was staffed as one.
2. Extensive web traffic and ad unit analytics reporting—related to the many campaigns the department had running at any given time—which was shared with sponsors, and throughout the company.
3. Tracking and keeping an up-to-date record of the status, and progress, of every project with which the department was involved at any given time.
4. Tracking and recording all departmental spending on freelancers and third-party vendors. Processing all invoices and incoming expenses, and allocating all charges to the appropriate job budgets. This also found me serving as the main point of contact for freelancers, and their liaison for dealing with accounts payable.
5. Working closely with the department’s executive director in my de facto budget manager role.
6. Assisting the executive director with travel arrangements, composing correspondence, planning birthday/maternity/farewell parties and on-site meetings, and much else.
7. Creative Services ran dozens and dozens of sponsored sweepstakes annually, and I handled all aspects of fulfillment. This entailed contacting winners, making certain I received signed and notarized affidavits from them, and then arranging for every aspect of the prize to be delivered. This often found me working with the sponsors and winners, arranging very precise and detailed vacation packages, or projects such as upgrading, and remodeling, a kitchen with exclusively top-of-the-line appliances and fixtures.
8. Traditional departmental support and admin tasks—running all manner of errands, making certain we were properly stocked with supplies, water, snacks, and such, pestering the right people about fixing, or even replacing, faulty office equipment, and so forth.
PEEKYOU
From 2011 until 2015 I worked for PeekYou, a “people search” company, the primary product of which was a search engine. The company’s patented matching algorithm was devised to compile all public web links—social media accounts, blogs, news articles, etc.—related to any given individual, into one easily navigated profile.
During my tenure, the site came to be ranked by Quantcast as one of the top 250 most visited on the internet. The site remained in the top 300 for years. My contributions played a vital role in traffic increasing from 25k daily users, when I started, to eventually over 300k.
(A quick parenthetical aside: The PeekYou site now sits as a sort of lifeless husk—albeit one with enduring SEO as it still comes up all the time, unexpectedly, when I do Google searches—and hasn’t been meaningfully updated since the time of my departure, in 2015. I believe they keep a couple of devs on staff to prevent the site from breaking, and have remained profitable in this skeletal state, off of what are essentially affiliate links. More power to all involved, but it was once a vibrant, ambitious, creative company, with one of its core products being spun off into the still successful StatSocial venture, detailed above, and a number of my colleagues from that time—including the hiring manager who first brought me on board—currently serving as executives for companies such as Google and Apple.)
During the first half of my tenure, I worked closely with the PR team, prolifically churning out content intended to inspire press. I primarily created blog entries centered on “internet friendly numbered lists,” generated using the company’s proprietary digital footprint measurement metric, PeekScore.
Some of the hundreds of pieces I created included, ‘The Top 50 Most Influential Comedians on the Internet,’ ‘Which Major League Baseball Umpires Have the Largest Digital Footprints?,’ ‘The Living U.S. Presidents—As Well As Their Children, Spouses, and Vice Presidents—Ranked By PeekScore,’ and so on. These lists inspired regular write-ups in such places as Politico, Huffington Post, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, FastCompany, Forbes, Bleacher Report, Mashable, and most of the era’s other major online publications.
Below is a small gallery that does not even scratch the surface of the constant online coverage my content generated. There was strong SEO value to the PeekScore blog itself, but these third-party links back to the site, from trusted sources, helped keep PeekYou comfortably on the first page of countless Google search results.
In 2013, there was a change in the day-to-day leadership at the company, as well as a significant reduction in staff (going from about 20 employees to 5).
A slow pivot was attempted. To start, there was a complete rethink of how the site was marketed, hoping that the nature of the site itself, and why people visited it, could evolve. The content I created, both on the site’s blog and social media accounts, became much more focused on a given day’s trending topics (particularly on Twitter, but Facebook had a trending feed during this time as well). Engagement on the blog and social media, and the site’s traffic, remained strong throughout this time, whatever the ultimate fate of the hoped-for rebranding.
The greatly reduced staff of this latter portion of my tenure birthed an “all hands on deck” environment. This found me tapped to routinely chime in on many areas of the company’s life, including site design, potential spin-off ventures, and site functionality.
VAGANZA
Vaganza was a theatrical, art-rock-pop music project, and it was also how I spent my 20s.
It is worthy of mention here, as it was an all-consuming, labor-intensive, wildly ambitious undertaking, and one that very nearly succeeded… Possibly. It is a good conversation piece and it was my full-time job for many years.
We were self-managed, self-produced, and—while funded by major labels (as well as a lucrative deal with EMI Music Publishing), and assisted by many other musicians over the project’s duration—self-contained.
It was the collaborative brainchild, and at the time dream project, of a gentleman named David Longworth Wallingford and I. We were both very nearly 21 when we first embarked upon the endeavor, in earnest, and were 28 when it ended (we remain friends to this day).
We were signed to Elektra Records in 1994, for a ludicrously large advance, but with that contract eventually purchased, finally released an album on Geffen Records in 1998.
All but one of the songs on our self-produced album features full orchestral accompaniment (along with a billion other elements), and—although the act was only the two of us—we performed live as a 10-piece band.
You can learn a bit more by visiting this link and then, if intrigued, visiting the links you find there.
L-R: Me, David Longworth Wallingford