Professional
Sony’s #CatchTheTablet social media campaign; its most successful in history
Atomic PR and Sony developed and executed their most successful social media campaign to date to promote the launch of the new Sony Tablets, dubbed #CatchTheTablet. With the online elements anchored via Facebook and Twitter, and driven via a number of real-world events and street teams in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Seattle, we helped drive nearly 10,000 contest entries and gave away 60 tablets in total.
Atomic PR Agency Reel
It’s been four years since I joined Atomic, and in that time we’ve tripled in size, went global, and led numerous clients to exits totaling several billion dollars. Since being brought on to head our digital group we’ve went from a seedling to the AOR handling social media for Sony. Quite a ride.
Google+ Consultant
With Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” update, Google+ data is now being integrated into the search results. Now optimizing for search directly includes one’s social graph, which is a fancy term for your network of friends online.
So what exactly is a Google+ consultant? With a social network so new it’s a stretch to claim to be any more experienced than my peers. Instead it takes someone with a deep understanding of the industry overall – and a strong sense for its future direction – to help set you up for the best possible positioning on Google+.
I’ve been working with Google for some time. My first SEO exposure came in the late 90′s before Google even existed, when I noticed that playing with the meta keywords tags of an HTML page and using a term more frequently affected my rank. I’ve been doing it professionally since 2002, and for clients such as Ford and General Motors as early as 2004.
Being involved with social networking since its inception, and the general social media world for that matter, I have a unique perspective as a Google+ consultant. After broadening from search specifically, I’ve spent years focusing on algorithms of all sorts, from the Facebook news feed to rankings on news sharing sites.
I’m a dedicated white hat, feeling that not only do black hat tactics damage the communities and properties they seek to manipulate, they ultimately come back to damage the brand seeking to benefit from them.
Atomic PR acquired by Huntsworth
Very exciting time to be at Atomic – last week we were acquired, and with that became a truly global shop. There’s an excerpt from our announcement below, read the full post on the Atomic PR Blog.
On Wednesday, March 23, AtomicPR was acquired by our global joint venture partner, Huntsworth, plc in a deal capped at $50 million with $13.3 million in cash up front. Atomic will be associated with Grayling, Huntsworth’s largest global agency, with whom we will open additional Atomic offices in Europe and Asia, and will serve as a US home for Grayling clients from other parts of the world.
Grooveeffect
Grooveeffect is a profitable urban/indie culture media site dedicated to curating the best in emerging style, music, and trends. Originally launched in late 2004 as a small web store, it was re-launched in late 2005 as a content site to capitalize on the explosion of blogs and independent media, and quickly grew to be one of the leading sites in its niche.
We’ve reached millions of readers over the years, with about 200K regular readers and 100K highly active readers. This success enabled us to interview some of the biggest acts out there, as well as press access to some of the biggest events nationwide, such as New York Fashion Week, SXSW Music, Coachella, HARD, Treasure Island Music Fest, and hundreds of smaller events.
Over the years Grooveeffect developed into a thriving small business with the majority of its revenue generated via advertising and site sponsorships. We’ve worked with several major ad networks, as well as directly with youth brands such as Scion and a number of independent fashion labels and music publicists. The site was marketed primarily via word of mouth (everything from grassroots spread to the occasional “viral” post), event sponsorships, advertising, and SEO, having been architected from the ground up to perform well in Google and other search engines.
We’ve had over a dozen staff writers contribute to the site, as well as outside contractors such as Six, a UK branding and identity firm which produced an award winning rebrand in 2008, landing the site in numerous design showcases and galleries online and off. Beyond staff, we managed relationships with dozens of brands, publicists, PR agencies, musicians, and promoters.
In addition to management, I have personally contributed a large percentage of the content on the site, including many of our most successful posts. Content responsibilities included authoring posts, producing photography and video, and ensuring an aesthetically pleasing post layout.
Aside from the business itself I managed all technological aspects of the site – everything from the xHTML/CSS and JavaScript UI, the content managed backend, LAMP server admin, and various SEO features. To be friendly to our writers, the content management system has been engineered to allow even novices to dynamically manage additional features such as the image carousel, page color schemes, and lightbox photo/video popups.
All good things must come to an end though, and as my personal interest in the niche has began to fade I decided it was better to retire it gracefully, and the site was unofficially closed November 2011. The site served as a central focus of my life for several years, giving me deep exposure to all aspects of the online media, editorial, and independent journalism worlds. It’s been great fun but I look forward to making room for something bigger and better in the future.
Random Animal
I’m a founding member of Random Animal, a mutant digital agency life form whose mission, strategies, and methods are amorphous, adaptable, ingenious, and rapidly evolving. Specializing in social media, content creation, and creative online engineering, 2011 is looking to be a big year for this growing agency organism. Random Animal is part of the Theorem Communications Group.
Check out the Random Animal website here.
Send me a note if you think we might be able to help you.
Let Me Google That For You
I was invited to speak on search at the San Francisco “Connect5″ networking event about a year back, and when deciding on what specifically to talk about, I realized I didn’t want to give another iteration of the ‘make your site rank higher’ presentation I’d seen hundreds of times.
With that in mind, I decided to look at the broader aspects of search, including how search can influence brand, the effect of 3rd party content on the results, and search outside of the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. After all, search has evolved into one of the most critical pillars of the modern web ecosystem – search engines don’t just send people to websites, they can make or break brands, influence opinion, and take the pulse of the world in real-time.
The deck below is what I presented at the event, take a look and let me know what you think.
ArcSight – State of Cybercrime
Produced at Atomic PR, the ArcSight “State of Cybercrime” is an ongoing video depicting the magnitude of cybercrime attacks and threats in the world today. This video shows our spot playing on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square when ArcSight rang the opening bell at the NASDAQ on October 13, 2009.
ArcSight is a leading global provider of cybersecurity and compliance solutions that protect organizations from enterprise threats and risks, recently acquired by HP for $1.5B.
GAP Kids Video Wall
WINNER – American Advertising Foundation, Gold Addy Award, 2005
A silent video wall created for Gap Kids stores for the 2004 holiday season.
Production Notes
This piece was commissioned by Gap Inc. to serve as a video wall for their Gap Kids stores during the Christmas 2004 shopping season. Because we could not interfere with the store music, the piece was entirely silent, though for demonstration purposes I’ve added an ambient score to the clip above.
To meet the goals of the creative brief, we decided to create moving art that incorporated various Gap product throughout the piece. We created a variety of compelling yet soothing visuals to keeping kids interested and calm during the shopping experience without distracting from the products within the store.
Shot on 35mm film and high resolution digital stills, art direction was led by director Erin Sonnenschein, and I provided editing and motion graphics for the piece.
Crew & Credits
Director – Erin Sonnenschein
Director of Photography – Ian Takahashi
1st Assistant Cinematographer – Dawn Nakamura
Motion Graphics Artist – Sean Mulholland
Video Editor – Sean Mulholland
Still Photographer – Diane Rondeau
Colleen Quen Documentary Short
Licensed by Current TV
A documentary short about an up and coming San Francisco fashion designer during the weeks leading up to her headline appearance at San Francisco Fashion Week.
Production Notes
I came into this piece about halfway though production. Originally intended as a pilot for a reality TV series, I was brought on as the video editor, to contribute my expertise on general production, and to help with other post production work. I also became the official cameraman during the filming of the fashion show, performing all backstage and interview camerawork. Video editing was performed on AVID Composer. The project was shot on MiniDV using a variety of cameras.
Crew & Credits
Producers – Melissa Sun, Martin Bui, Yealee Song
Director – Melissa Sun, Sean Mulholland
Cinematography – Martin Bui & Sean Mulholland
Video Editor – Sean Mulholland
Sound Designer – Sean Mulholland
Also check out this video on YouTube: Colleen Quen Documentary Short
BeautyHype
BeautyHype is a visually-driven beauty site dedicated to bringing you the best in premium, luxury, eco-friendly beauty brands, and innovative makeup looks.
The idea for BeautyHype was developed by Ivy Rashid. Ivy’s passion for makeup started with a red lipstick she insisted her mother give to her as a birthday present when she was only a few years old. Since then she has been interested in beauty and the science behind it. As a teen she developed an interest in photography and retouching images of her friends and family using Adobe Photoshop.
Atomic PR Website
The Atomic PR website was designed by Method and developed in-house by our Digital Ops team. Part of the Theorem Communications Group, Atomic PR is a premier tech PR agency that provides alternative PR energy to its clients, with offices in SF, LA, NYC, and London.
The goal of this site was a lightweight experience – both in terms of design and the underlying technology – fused with a clear yet innovative user experience. I think we achieved that goal with an AJAX paneled homepage, social-enabled newsroom, blog, and case study area, all of which is fully content managed.
http://www.atomicpr.com/
Send me a note if you think we might be able to help you with projects like this
(legal & profitable) BitTorrent Peer to Peer Seeding
Back in 2002, I helped design a technical marketing plan around BitTorrent, at the time a small but growing P2P protocol. As far as we know, this was the first successful commercial use of the BitTorrent network.
At the time I was working with Trymedia Systems, a DRM company focusing primarily on casual games. Their ActiveMARK technology allowed publishers to distrubute full, downloadable versions of their games in a trial mode. Once the trial expires, users could then instantly purchase and unlock the full game with no additional downloads.
The unique thing about ActiveMARK was that copied games would automatically revert to trial mode, even if previously purchased. For example, I could purchase a full game, give my friend a copy, and his would revert to a trial.
Because of this, we recognized that P2P networks provided a great opportunity for our games, and in 2002 a new P2P technology was beginning to gain prominence – BitTorrent.
I was tasked with designing our P2P distribution. I developed a seeding plan, built and configured a seeding server from the ground up, installed it in our datacenter with a dedicated 50Mbps line to ensure uptime and bandwidth for our seeds, and began seeding torrents to the major P2P networks and BitTorrent trackers of the day (Kazaa / FastTrack, Limewire, eDonkey, Gnutella, Suprnova, TorrentReactor, etc).
End result – we opened a new channel that generated many thousands of dollars in sales each month, with minimal maintenance costs after the initial setup.
Send me a note if you think I might be able to help you with projects like these.
The Hollywood Sign Generator
Seeing the growing support for the Save Cahuenga Peak campaign was an inspiration for me to try and contribute my own little fun side project to the cause. So I created a Hollywood Sign Generator that allows users to put their name on the sign and share the image with friends as a way of getting the word out!
Go ahead and try it out! An example image is below. In the future there may be more iterations, in the meantime let me know any feedback you have.
