Last week I, along with Greg Davis and Kurt Illian from my team, had the pleasure to attend the first web.com E-Commerce Marketing Summit held at company headquarters in Jacksonville, FL. As the newest member of the web.com “family” it was great to learn about what the other divisions of the company offer as well as meet the key people in charge of marketing.
At Solid Cactus, my role is to spearhead the marketing efforts we do for our various products and services such as e-commerce store programming and design, Internet Marketing, Call Center & Virtual Office and our various Software as a Service (SaaS) products.
Over the last few weeks my department has grown a bit, and now may be a good time to introduce members of the Solid Cactus Marketing Team. Some of their names may be familiar to you as they have worked in other departments and some may be new, but here’s the lineup:
Greg Davis is the department leader who is responsible for the day-to-day operations within the group. While most of his work is managing projects and people, he’s a “hands-on” guy as well, assisting with projects and working with me on campaigns and brain-storming sessions.
Kurt Illian I like to call the “Charts & Graphs Wizard.” I often joke that the only time Kurt e-mails me is when he has a new pie chart to show me! Since all the marketing we do needs to have a level or return, it’s Kurt’s job to decipher the numbers and determine what works and what doesn’t. (In case you even encounter the trivia question, “Who was the first Solid Cactus employee?” The answer would be Kurt.)
Jeff “Spike” Li is Batman. Our super-hero webmaster who is in charge of maintaining the various Solid Cactus customer facing websites, and we have a lot of them and they’re on all different platforms. Jeff has been immersed in launching micro-sites for our various services such as Yahoo! Store design and programming and Call Center Services and is currently working on launching our new Internet Marketing and corporate websites.
Randy Llewellyn is the guy responsible for the great designs we put out in marketing. When I say “designs,” I mean more than just great looking Cactus websites. Randy is the designer of our bi-monthly customer magazine, eBiz Insider, and designs all our print material such as sell sheets, brochures, business cards, logos and so much more.
Karen Snyder is our technical writer who translates all the “programmer speak” that our talented programmers give her when a new product or feature is released. She then creates documents for both internal and customer use that documents the features, benefits and installation instructions in simple, easy-to-understand “English.”
Scott Carey came to us as an intern and loved the place so much he decided to stay! He is our “jack-of-all-trades” and is responsible for everything from content writing to putting together Power Points for our bi-weekly webinars.
New to the marketing team are Greg Paone and Donna Talarico. Greg’s sole responsibility is product development for Yahoo! Store features. It’s something we take very seriously and to have someone dedicated to this task shows our commitment to the product. Greg not only does the product research but also the product development, something we call “full circle development.” Two really big home runs for Greg lately have been our Flash Sequence Banners and our Scratch & Save. Be on the lookout for many, many new and exciting features from Greg coming soon.
Donna Talarico is like “Julie” from the television show, “The Love Boat.” She’s our social director. No we don’t have karaoke Tuesday’s or high-tea in the afternoon, Donna’s socializing takes place online on the social networking sites. It’s Donna’s job to spread the Solid Cactus message in forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc. She’s also our chief copywriter who’s responsible for writing the creative content for our websites and sales collateral and works hard as wordsmith for our bi-monthly magazine, eBiz Insider.
So next time you get a copy of eBiz in the mail, an e-mail in your inbox or you visit one of our websites, you’ll know the members of the Solid Cactus Marketing Team who worked hard to make it look and sound just right.
