Summary

• Domain expert: Click fraud detection, search engine marketing / optimization for web sites.
• Qualified Google Advertising Professional.
• Business seminar presenter, trainer, coach.
• Freelance writer.
• First-hand business knowledge of the Asia-Pacific region.
• Degree qualified in business, marketing and computer science.
• Excellent verbal and written communication.

Informal Resume/CV

I have been a professional grade Member of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMAMI), the Australian Computer Society (MACS) and bring my computing expertise to Internet marketing.

Current: I am the Traffic Manager for the online edition of the Yellow Pages® directory at Sensis. I look after organic and paid search. I also work with other Sensis business units with large online properties, notably White Pages®, WhereIs®, Citysearch® and Trading Post™.

Public Speaking: I last spoke at the Webmasterworld Conference in Las Vegas in December 2007 and APCUG CES in Las Vegas in January 2008. I  have been invited back to Webmasterworld’s Pubcon in November 2008. I have spoken about SEO at other events in Australia and India.

Past:

I have parked my own Search Marketing consulting and training business trainSEM for the time being.

The SEO training service fills a need in the Australian market – there is very little credible classroom-based training available for SEO or PPC management. You can find a few such courses overseas, but many of their trainers lack credibility by way of personal experience and expertise. Unfortunately, SEM is an unregulated field where anyone can call themselves an expert. Having hired and trained a top-notch SEM team at Melbourne IT, I know it is near impossible to find qualified people. trainSEM can fix that problem.

Private Research Project: With a friend who is based in the US, I built a click fraud detection service called Visitlab. It was never commercialised, but it provided invaluable research material on click fraud. With the right funding, it can become the best service of its kind. Contact me if you want to discuss this.

I was Product Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Melbourne IT Ltd. My team delivered SEM success to customers in Australia and New Zealand. Although Melbourne IT is better known as one of the 5 largest domain name registrars in the world, SEM was a growing department within the company.

I owned a search engine marketing practice and most of my consulting work came from Internet marketing clients, so I set up www.sem911.com. I managed the PPC advertising and search engine optimization/optimisation needs of these clients. They were very happy with my work and will provide references upon request.

SEM911 was conceived as a CRM consultancy CRM911, which specialised in Sales Lead Management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) but the SEM work took over. I had clients in the UK, United States, India and Australia.

I was previously the customer relationship and campaigns manager (CRM Manager) at Macromedia Asia-Pacific. I managed the database and relationship marketing activities for the regional headquarters and travelled regularly within Asia. I defined and implemented an ambitious CRM solution based on Onyx while also using Pivotal mainly to drive an ongoing leads-management campaign, which included a Web-based partner portal.

I was the technical sales director for the Asia-Pacific region at Selectica in San Jose. I was also briefly managing director of its Australian subsidiary. They make enterprise e-commerce software that is used by the world’s leading B2B and B2C sites (Cisco and Dell) to conduct their core business.

I was the product marketing manager at Tennyson Technologies. They designed the fantastic SOX CTI product, which incorporates a PBX, LAN hub, IP router, unified messaging, etc. It was a world-class product and we also used it at Macromedia. I also managed two of their older ISDN terminal adapters.

I was a product marketing manager at Hayes, the modem inventors. I looked after their modem, remote access server, and ISDN TA range in the APAC region. My first role at Hayes was as marketing communications manager.

At Unisys (ACUS, its software development arm), I was originally hired as a senior editor, then I was a product manager, and finally a release manager. This was a true SDLC project environment but sadly, they closed down the Melbourne operations.
My earlier employers were the Royal Australian Air Force, Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers) in Perth, Abraham & Strauss in Woodbridge, NJ (vacation job while on student exchange), Champion Appliances (later Sanyo), in Dunedin, and Buddle & Co (later Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu), Auckland.

My formal qualifications include a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) and a Graduate Diploma of Computing from Deakin University. I completed two Internet related courses through the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School: e-Commerce (2001) and Intellectual Property in Cyberspace (1998).

Other Interests

• My favourite radio station is KKSF in San Francisco, although KYOT in Phoenix is pretty cool too.

• I have built award-winning, interactive web sites since 1994 and understand the Internet in a business context. In 1996, one of my sites was ranked 25th in the world in the Computing category by the erstwhile Iway magazine.

• I wrote a weekly newspaper column “On the Wire” in The Age on data communications for two years and freelanced for Australian Personal Computer, Computerworld, PC User, The Australian Financial Review, The Herald-Sun, and others.

• Built and ran a Web-based RSVP service in 1997.

• Conducted numerous marketing surveys for my employers and user groups. Here are some samples that are still online:

• A survey on behalf of US computer vendors. (This is only a sample. The real survey was conducted at another site)

• A real survey of PC Update readers

• A needs survey for APCUG of its member groups

• Owned two publishing businesses that were sold as going concerns and have co-authored five books. They are all out of print, but Amazon still lists one of them.

• Previously held an unrestricted radio amateur licence (VK3CIT/ZL4LM). My most rewarding contribution to that field was to help design a positioning beacon for the Earth-orbiting high-altitude research balloons launched by the University of Melbourne and Case-Western Reserve University from Alice Springs.