Internet Marketing Consultant

I'm a freelance consultant who also serves as Chief Strategist for Converseon, a leading digital media marketing agency based in New York City. Prior to this position, I spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position. I held various roles in my IBM career, including eight years at IBM's customer-facing Web site, ibm.com, most recently as the Manager of ibm.com Web Experience, where I led 65 information architects, Web designers, Webmasters, programmers, and technical architects around the world.

My consulting centers on:

• Internet Marketing Training. Many companies have been very successful over the years, but struggle to excel on the Web the same way they have previously. My experience training IBM employees and clients has prepared me to handle your training needs.
• Creating a Listening Organization. The Internet creates new opportunities for listening to customers at very low cost. I can show your team how to take advantage to learn more about your customers than ever before.
• Attracting Traffic to Your Site. I "wrote the book" on search marketing and I work with Converseon, a leading social media agency, to help companies worldwide to draw visitors to their Web site at the lowest possible cost.
• Maximizing Your Web Site's Value. Most companies have no experience with direct marketing and can't determine how to measure the value of their site, especially when your sales occur offline. They also don't know what usability, testing, and other techniques to employ to improve that value (by increasing the persuasiveness of the site). My experience at IBM and with clients can be easily applied to any Web site.
• Applying Advanced Technology to Improve Web Sites. Many Web sites are unable to make use of Web analytics data, unable to personalize their site, or suffer from poor results from their site search engine. They also find it difficult or impossible to update the site frequently or to determine the value of IT investments. By taking a business approach to these problems, I can help determine the ROI of such projects and advise on agile devlopment techniques that keep projects short and costs low.
• Improving Large Web Sites. My experience with IBM taught me that big Web sites are different. Larger organizations have different challenges to coordinate their resources with policies and other corporate governance to make sure that all employees execute the improvement plan. In addition, corporate cultures are critical in assessing the right steps to improve web performance.
• New Product Consulting. I have extensive experience creating new software and Internet-based product and service offerings, and I'm a certified product manager from Pragmatic Marketing, having served as a Product Manager with IBM for Lotus and Content Management products. Since leaving IBM, I've consulted on several offerings, including the MatchPoint public relations service.
• Search and Text Analytics Technology. I retired from IBM as a Distinguished Engineer specializing in search and text analytics technology, in which I hold several U.S. patents. I have been working in search and text analytics since the 1980s and continue to help Converseon on other clients today. One of the chapters of the Second Edition of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is devoted to enterprise search applications, and I have long experience at IBM and with clients on Knowledge Management applications, including Web-based product support, technical documentation, intranet search, internal blogging and wikis, and many others.

One of my recent clients, Jon Victor, President of eNR Services, had some kind words about my consulting work, "Mike joined our MatchPoint team in the early stages of product development. We believed that his expertise in search technology would help guide the development of MatchPoint's contextual search algorithms. And we were right. But, even more valuable than his technical contribution was the practical business judgment that Mike brought to bear on MatchPoint's evolution. He has contributed to all phases of the MatchPoint project, from user interface to launch strategies and marketing, and has become an invaluable, and valued, member of the team."

I hope to have the opportunity to help you in similar ways.

Contact Me

If you're interested in talking to me about a consulting opportunity with your company, I'd love to hear from you, so please contact me.