We’re looking to hire a sales person to focus on selling into the “Entertainment” vertical.  We’ve already done campaigns with: National Geographic, Comedy Central, MTV, and movies…BuzzFeed is growing like crazy and we need more sales help! This person can live and work in NYC (out of BuzzFeed Global HQ) or in Los Angeles (where Hollywood is big!) Here’s the [...]

I was at the GE Chief Marketing Officer Summit this past week, and Professor Ranjay Gulati gave a great talk on price competition and disruption.  He pointed out that most companies ask customers, “what do you like about my product,” as opposed to focussing on their needs or underlying issues.  He used one of my favorite examples: salad in a bag, [...]

There’s an important phase in product and business development called noodling. Some refer to this marinating, but I think the sense of unravelling knots makes noodling the right phrase. Running somewhat in contradiction to a “bad decision being better than no decision,” in some cases a period of thinking is indeed called for. In my old age, I find myself [...]

Slide decks are like pets. They live, breath, and adapt to their environment – or at least they should. In each of my roles, I’ve have 2-3 decks at any time that I use to pitch a deal or sell a product. At Buzzfeed, I use an advertiser deck and one for publishers. I customize these decks, in many cases [...]

I’ve talked to about 3 entrepreneurs over the past week about making revenue a product line. Each was excited by the liberation that comes with that idea but expressed an undefined hesitancy. Check out the original post for context. I think the hesitancy from most entrepreneurs about experimenting early and often with revenue is fear of it killing the dream. [...]

Deals and sales are a lot like commercial crab fishing.  Everything I know about crabbing, I learned on Deadliest Catch, but that doesn’t seem like a good reason to dismiss an analogy that I find myself frequently resorting too. The likelihood of any one deal or any one sale happening is extremely low.  This is not unlike crabbing, where the [...]

[cross posted from blog.buzzfeed.com] BUZZFEED LAUNCHES UNIQUE CONTENT PARTNERSHIP WITH AOL We’re thrilled to announce our related content partnership with AOL.  Now, whenever you’re on a Buzzfeed viral image, video, link, or list page, you’ll see the most viral and related content from Aol.  Effectively, due to the depth and wealth of Aol content, this allows you to “read more” [...]

When I saw that Posterous allowed for easy migration for WordPress, I decided to give it a try.  I’d grown tired of my WordPress theme and issues with self hosting, and decided that in lieu of a new theme, I’d give the service a try for my core blog.  I’ve been using Posterous for about 18 months as the site [...]

When I was at Google, I was asked daily by partners what number was a good search click-through rate (CTR). After a year, my personal opinion was that a 1% CTR on search was good. I thought it was a good stake in the sand; stakes in the sand are always better than no stakes. Data is always helpful in [...]