Between 2012 and 2014, I blogged regularly at BuzzFeed's Community vertical (a/k/a Internet finishing school). During this time, I learned how to craft sticky headlines, cut funny GIFs, and package different types of content for a viral platform.
Highlights from this period include:
• Published to the BuzzFeed homepage more than 150 times
• Totaled 5,500,000+ page views, which ranked in the top 1% of all Community members
• Featured on a wide assortment of the site's content verticals including Animals, DIY, Geeky, Music, Rewind, Sports, and Videos
• Reported from the 2013 Internet Cat Video Festival for BuzzFeed's Animals team; the resultant "listicle" was shared by Fox News ("The Internet Cat Film Festival. It will make you say MEOW!"), Grumpy Cat, and the event's host and creator, Minneapolis's Walker Art Center ("Press")
• Crowned "King Of Cute" (twice!) and "King Of Cats", both of which were triggered by a combination of page views, social engagement, and reader-awarded "badges"
• Authored a pair of deep dive tutorials that caught the attention of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab (and later convinced an editor at Yahoo to hire me for her social team)
• Quoted by Gawker ("BuzzFeed says sloths are 'a thing' that 'we need to talk about'") and rock & roll party prophet, Andrew W.K.
• Linked by major news properties like The Wall Street Journal ("a more likeable role"), National Geographic (#10, "Kitten Contortionist"), and Team Coco ("The Simpsons" Are Transformed Into Spider-Man's Rogue Gallery Of Super Villains")
• Tweeted by the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and Netflix
• Translated into French and Spanish by BuzzFeed's local editors
• Recruited to freelance at The Dodo, HelloGiggles, and The Pet Collective, where I contributed daily blog posts and ghostwrote their BuzzFeed account.
In 2010, I was promoted to Site Manager at BunnySlippers.com and Found Item Clothing, partnered ecommerce sites with shared origins. From sales, SEO, and social, to content, creative, and product, I oversaw all elements of their operation.
During my tenure, I managed a team of graphic designers, photographers, PPC specialists, interns, and fulfillment staff (4-12 in number, typically) and revenue grew steadily. Benchmarks include:
• Increased number of annual visitors from 125,000+ to 500,000+
• Boosted yearly sales from $150,000+ to $600,000+
• Guided BunnySlippers to its first $5,000+, $10,000+, and $15,000+ days
• Programmed homepage and nav bars to reflect most popular products and categories
• Set record Halloween, Black Friday / Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Q4 sales in 3 of 4 years (the 4th was beyond my control, but I'm happy to talk about why!)
• Dislodged a competitor from the top spot on Google's SERP for "animal slippers" (a ~crucial~ search term) by seeding product pages with customer reviews / product suggestions and optimizing the living sh*t out of the anchor text
• Quintupled the number of styles for sale (from 80 to 400) by working with existing vendors and identifying new ones; built, edited, and maintained internal product taxonomy and inventory tree
• Created a digital egg hunt to spur Easter sales and teased the idea for what would become this March Madness-styled promotion
• Researched and edited a "supercut" of film's greatest rabbits that got picked up by MTV
• Wrote, edited, or proofed all product copy and image assets, including monthly email bulletins (which averaged a 40% open rate)
• Founded the site's blog and honed its content strategy (spoiler: lots of cute animals!)
• Opened and curated social feeds, including Facebook, which grew to include more than 9,000 followers
• Added or designed products that trended onto Smithsonian.com (#5, S'mores Slippers), Woman's World, Rookie ("Seniors" jersey), Laughing Squid, Mashable (#2, 3, and 7), Thrillist, and more
When I'm not reblogging cat memes, I moonlight as a journo and photog for outlets such as Spin, Tampa Bay Times, and WhatCulture. In 2014, I reviewed Weezer's concert at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas for Amazon's official music Tumblr, Front Row, the opening passage of which is reproduced below:
"For all the fame and fortune afforded it, Alternative Rock’s Class of ‘94 has had a tough time staying on the playing field. Beset by bitter creative squabbling (Smashing Pumpkins), abject personal tragedy (Nirvana), and the ravages of both celebrity and chemical indulgences (Hole), a majority of the principals have found themselves on the long slide toward the State Fair circuit and obscurity. So what then to make of Weezer, the plucky power-pop underdog with their original lineup and creative spirit largely intact?"
Read the full review here.
In 2014, I was invited to join Yahoo's Search team. The particulars varied from day to day and week to week, but core tasks included classifying online content of literally all manner (ask me about the time I had to grade "Bengal kitten" and "blow job" videos on the same day ... no, seriously), building and editing taxonomies, and analyzing user behavior.
Keen editorial skills were required and responsibilities grew progressively throughout the duration of my one-year contract:
• Tested and ranked thousands of search elements — headlines, abstracts, titles, videos, images, URLs, etc. etc. etc. — for relevancy, freshness, intent, formatting, and user experience
• Captured taxonomic data to train categorization and attribute extraction programs; collaborated with project leads, engineers, data scientists, and other stakeholders to analyze testing needs, methods, logistics, and results
• Tasked by project leads with spot-checking the work of my peers and fellow Search Eds
• Moderated keywords and summaries for the "Trending Now" module on Yahoo's homepage, blocking malformed terms (misspellings, bad capitalizations, poor punctuations) or those otherwise in violation of the site's style or community guidelines (see 'Deez Nuts' screencap, left)
• Developed editorial content using historical search data; lists about home gym equipment and Valentine's Day gifts were published to Yahoo's homepage and read hundreds of thousands of times
• Edited entity cards attached to the Yahoo Search API to reflect breaking news and current events (marriages, deaths, births, etc.); confirmed that those live edits were accurate and displayed properly
• Wrote headlines and descriptions for PPC ad campaigns
After a stint as an analyst with Yahoo's Search team, I joined two of the company's content verticals, Yahoo Real Estate and Yahoo Shopping, as a writer, editor, and social strategist.
Charged with increasing referral traffic from verified Facebook and Twitter accounts (both with 100,000+ followers) that were posting only intermittently, I instituted a more aggressive publishing calendar — 12-24 Facebook updates and 18-30 tweets, daily — that balanced original Yahoo reporting with the stickiest content from best-in-class partner publishers such as Curbed, Zillow, and Consumer Reports.
This had the desired effect of driving engagement, including shares, comments, and clicks. Metrics of note:
• Spiked weekly Facebook impressions ("reach") from 175,000+ to 1,500,000+
• Spurred the number of weekly inbound visitors ("post clicks") from 7,500+ to 125,000+
• Increased number of weekly post "Likes" from 1,000+ to 12,500+
• Boosted number of weekly comments on Facebook from 100+ to 2,000+
• Grew accounts (Facebook and Twitter) by 1,000+ new followers weekly
• Shuffled programming daily so as to feature diversity of content, including direct links, photosets, polls, and calls to action (see "pink appliances", left)
• Policed community for spam and personal attacks, while upvoting and responding to constructive comments (see "hangable orb", left)
• Previous experience with social includes founding and curating the brand page for BunnySlippers.com, an ecommerce site; over a three-year period, I built its audience up to 9,000+ followers
Additional work samples available upon request.
Edited around common tropes in film, these so-called "supercut" videos have been curated for a pair of humor channels, an ecommerce site, and just for funsies (because traffic is my drug, ya dig?).
Between them, they have totaled roughly 825,000+ views on YouTube and surfaced at some of the web's most popular destinations for viral content: A.V. Club, College Humor, Digg, Flavorwire, Funny Or Die ("Best of the Web"), Kotaku, Reddit, Slate, Sports Illustrated ("Mashup Video of the Day"), USA Today, VICE, Vulture, and Wired.
Spun around the best prop shirts in movie history, this montage triggered a 800% sales spike for the month of August (2013) at Found Item Clothing, my erstwhile employer.
Developed as a special content project for my former employer, this gallery of illustrations found a viral audience when Weezer shared it on Facebook. After trending on Tumblr (20,000+ notes) and Twitter, the project crossed over to leading aggregators like BuzzFeed, Complex, Laughing Squid, Nerdist, and 22 Words.
Refreshed with additional sketches one year later, it experienced a successive wave of buzz at Esquire, 9Gag, Cheezburger, and Design You Trust, and has been viewed in excess of 5,000,000+ times as a result.
From conception and curation to publication and promotion, I owned every stage of the creative process.
Commissioned for an ecommerce site with a pop culture focus, these pixelated illustrations filter iconic elements from Star Wars and Indiana Jones through a Donkey Kong-inspired template.
After trending on Twitter and Tumblr, they spread virally by way of tech and cool hunting sites such as Gizmodo, BuzzFeed, Cheezburger, Neatorama, io9, Geeks Are Sexy, GeekTyrant, /Film, Stuck In The 80s, and Technabob.
Tasked by an ecommerce site with creating something authoritative that would add value for customers and capture search traffic, I researched and wrote a six-part tutorial on how to age new t-shirts. From optimizing the image file paths and url architecture to proofing and editing the photo assets, I walked the project from conception to completion.
Published in 2011, it's been shared by fashion-focused sites such as Thrillist (listen to me ramble on about it here), Readymade (R.I.P.), ManMade, and xoJane ("take a sandpaper block") and continues to rank at the top or on the first page of related Google SERPs.
