A great post by Oscar Del Santo, The Day That Influence Became The New Online Currency, reminded me I had meant to write this post for some time now.

Oscar is talking about the emerging standard of influence and that though there’s still much debate on what the standard is, how to measure influence, and on undeniable black spots in current solutions, there’s no debate that influence has imposed itself as the new online currency.

As one of the early players in the space (want to hear us speak about clout before Klout came out?), we have seen this industry go a very very long way already experimenting, figuring out repeatable patterns of success and investing more and more money into influence communication. That said, even though the field of influence is still in its infancy, budgets for it and ‘earned media’ in general are still only a fraction of the money invested in more traditional media.

This may all be about to change… a few months ago, I attended a P&G Alum talk in New York with Bob McDonald, CEO of Procter & Gamble. Bob is a very traditional P&G Sr Exec, who grew through the ranks of the company from assistant brand manager to CEO. I was stunned at the time to see that Bob decided to spend most of his time with us talking about the online social phenomenon created by the Old Spice ad campaign and that more awareness was generated for the brand from online spoofs and repurposed content by users than the ad itself, and how this was changing the role of the brand manager at P&G.

Procter & Gamble is the mecca for marketing, advertisement and media buy: pouring the most money and spending a tremendous amount of energy tracking ROI. I thought at the time that P&G’s CEO saying  that brand managers should shift their focus to earned media could be an industry shaking piece of news.

Two month after I attended this event, the other shoe dropped: P&G announced that they will be cutting $1 billion from their marketing budget by 2016 and doing so with a renewed focus on digital media (earned and paid).

If we’re looking for signs of change in the industry, this news is as big as it gets. P&G’s direct impact on the ad industry (being the largest spender) and their tremendous influence on brands and agencies ought to be a waking sign to all communication professionals that the marketing industry is about to undergo a major shakedown. Those already involved in influence communication are on the frontline of this revolution. My advice? If you were walking, run, and don’t look back. The further along you are in this new promising space, the more likely you are to grow with the market.

Rosebell Kagumire: A journalist and blogger from Uganda, whose voice has influenced the media's coverage of the Kony 2012 campaign.

In the last week, the Internet erupted in conversation about Kony 2012, a film created by Invisible Children to promote their “Stop Kony” campaign. It is an effort which aims to make war criminal Joseph Kony known by the global community with the hopes of leading to his arrest. While the idea that an organization wants to stop a war criminal sounds like a just and worthy cause, the film itself sparked much controversy, as people from all corners of the globe reacted in drastically different ways to IC’s call for justice. The conversation which started as a result of the Kony 2012 film, marks the complexities of the issues in the region the film speaks of. While many around the world showed support of the campaign, many others responded with statements that Kony 2012 was an oversimplification of the events being portrayed.

In addition, others out there have been carefully studying the pulse of this conversation sparked by Invisible Children.   The folks at Social Flow have provided their analysis from the inception of the campaign, IC’s strategy of targeting key individuals, via “Invisible Networks” over a broad geographic range, and have mapped out the conversation here.

But amidst the global conversations, we wanted to take a look at what the people from the region were saying. Who are the leaders in the conversation who are actually from the areas affected, and what opinions are they sharing with the rest of the world?  We ran a search for influencers in East Africa who are speaking about the topics in this global dialogue, and this is what we learned:

We see  yet another case of technology becoming a resounding megaphone into the global ear. A video by Rosebell Kagumire has been linked to and commented on by major publications and networks as one of the leading critics to the Kony 2012 campaign. Her words have impacted public opinion, and others join her in this quest to start digging deeper into the issues raised by the film, not only for this particular issue with Joseph Kony and the LRA, but in general how “developed nations” deal with issues pertaining to countries in the developing world.  Meanwhile, others like Norbert Mao, the highest elected official in Gulu, Uganda, the region that was first affected by LRA mobilization many years ago, has shown support for Invisible Children and Kony 2012.

Taking a look at the influencer list, we see many more people who are critical of Invisible Children’s efforts, than those who are supporting it. Does it mean that this list reflects that the majority of people in the region are against the Kony 2012 movement?  Not necessarily.  Those with access to technology are the ones who have the advantage of having their voices heard.  Unless a mobile phone or computer is put in the hands of every person in the region, we don’t necessarily get a complete picture of the entire population’s response to Kony 2012.

Regardless, it is a fact that one must have the means to broadcast to get your voice heard, and it is becoming increasingly more possible to steer public opinion if you have an audience, a compelling piece of content, and a strategy for getting your message out there. From one single video, we have seen a firestorm spark on the web and immediate, passionate responses from key individuals who have continued to give shape to the dialogue surrounding the issues at hand. Issues that were never discussed or known throughout the world until now.

To view the Kony 2012 A-list, just go to http://lists.traackr.com/kony2012.

Let’s get one thing out of the way before we start: this post is not an attempt to disparage HBase. HBase is an extremely powerful tool; applied appropriately and skillfully under the right scenarios, it can move mountains. This post is about the evolution of Traackr’s data storage needs and how MongoDB ended up satisfying them. It’s also a tip of the hat at the MongoDB team and 10gen and the tremendous work they have done.

Back in late 2009 early 2010, Traackr was designing the foundations of its’ search engine and hunting for an appropriate datastore to back it up. Some of the requirements were:

• Built-in support for storing terabytes of text: that meant that we shouldn’t have to use or modify the software in an unconventional fashion beyond its’ original design to get it to store and retrieve the quantities of data we wanted.
• Flexible schema: Traackr deals with heterogenous data sources from the web, constantly discovering new content and new properties that characterize that content. The database had to allow us to model those properties across all stored content without requiring extensive schema migrations that would take the system offline.
• Ability to batch process the data: Traackr’s scoring algorithms take into account statistical measurements derived from our entire active data set. Those computations need to be run at least once a week to account for the continuous growth and shifts in data samples. We therefore needed a system that allowed performing computations on the whole data set in a “reasonable” amount of time. We didn’t have an exact number for “reasonable” but our goal was to keep those processes running under 6 hours early on Saturdays and leave enough time for other batch jobs that depended on these refreshed computations to run the remainder of the weekend hours.

Some of the contenders in our product selection matrix were:

• Traditional enterprise packages such as Oracle: ruled out because they were way out of our budget.
• MySQL: our content sizes vary from 140 character tweets to multi-page articles and using one size fits all BLOBs would be a tremendous waste of space. Granted, storage is cheap or one could design the schema to split content to different tables accordingto size but that would add needless complexity when there were other solutions that didn’t. Also, the flexibleschema requirement would not be fulfilled as every new column added or modified in a multi-million row table would require a time consuming migration. There are ways to mitigate this by creating attribute tables but those tables become very large on their own (think a dozen attributes per post times millions of posts). And while MySQL can be sharded to split large tables and data sets it requires the code the be cognizant about it while other solutions don’t. So we passed not only on MySQL, but also on most other open-source RDBMS solutions for the same reasons. Enter NoSQL.
• Cassandra: It fit the bill in terms of schema flexibility and storage capacity. The model of having the same deployable for each cluster node was very enticing; it made for much easier setup and maintenance for a small team like ours. But in late 2009 / early 2010, it still lacked batch processing options like MapReduce (those were introduced later on in 2010). It also seemed that there had been some period of inactivity around the project afterits’ initial 2008 release, so at the time, we were uncertain about its’ future adoption.
• MongoDB: it was still new at the time, so we had concerns about its’ stability and adoption. The document-based schema flexibility looked great but auto-sharding was still not available (came out mid-2010) and there were no out-of-the-box options for batch processing. So we made a note of it and kept looking.
• Riak: it was a serious contender for us; most of our requirements were being met and it presented the same promise of ease of use and deployment as Cassandra did. The team was an impressive bunch from Akamai that really seemed to know what they were doing. To top it all off, they were local to Boston and startup-friendly. Despite all of this, we ended up shying away due to questions of adoption. It was still too young of a project for us.
• HBase: back then, it was one of the most polished solutions with quite a bit of traction. The requirements were all there: ability to grow with large data sets, flexible schema, built-in batch processing with MapReduce, healthy community for support.We had our pick. It also provided “out-of-the box” secondary indexing through a contrib package that came with the source. This allowed us to avoid writing our own app layer indexing code or so we thought. Those secondary indexes ended up being a lot more critical in the longer run than we originally anticipated.

So we picked HBase and started running with it. We had to deal the learning curve of its’ setup and the various components and configurations. This pretty much took most of my time which unfortunately detracted from working on features. But we eventually got there and were able to get it humming (most of the time). Our weekend batch scoring requirements were met as expected: we were able to re-score our entire database in less than 30 minutes. We even contributed back to the code base (HBASE-2438 and HBASE-2426). Things looked good.

Then came the upgrade from HBase 0.20.x to 0.89.x/0.90. The code base was changing fast and we wanted to keep up with the latest speed and stability fixes. But there was one problem: the secondary indexing contrib packages were moved out of the main code base and as a result, our HBASE-2426 customizations were becoming stale. This was also signaling that indexing was in fact about to fall even further behind in priority instead of making it to the core source. Bad news for us since we depended on it; we had no choice but to keep our customizations up to speed. We eventually ended up dropping the contrib packages all together and completely re-wrote our secondary indexes using a more generic approach to avoid running on unsupported 3rd-party code. Even then, we still knew that app layer indexing was going to be slower and more brittle than any DB layer solution. This became even more apparent when we needed to evolve our domain model.

The basis of our data is built on 3 core entities: influencers, the channels on which they post content and the posts themselves. We had originally de-normalized the relationship between influencers and their affiliated channels, admittedly to be more inline with how our NoSQL datastore was intended to be used. While we knew that a given channel could be shared across multiple authors, we chose to repeat some channel data across influencers to simplify runtime random access. While this decision simplified queries, it ended up putting more strain and complexity on our content attribution logic. With more complexity come more bugs and those started rearing their ugly heads in the form of some mis-attributed content. The issue was compounded when we cranked our content tracking up a notch and introduced our daily monitor feature in mid-2011. To add to this challenge, we had also discovered after months in production that we needed a better approach for modeling the details of the relationship between an influencer and a channel as each influencer interacted with a given channel in their own way. So after a year and half of running on our original assumptions it was becoming clear that our model needed revisiting.

All of this was happening around the time we created an opening for a big-data engineer. The 2011 Santa Clara Hadoop Summit was also being held. We ended up attending the conference hoping to meet some talent. We even showed up at the HBase Contributor meetup where we mingled with some of the great minds behind the scenes. The trip was both exciting and revealing. The two major take aways for us were:

• Big-data engineers came at a premium: good luck competing with some of the big pocket books in the valley.
• Experienced HBase engineers were even more rare and the good ones where all strategically positioned around firms in the valley, so we would be better off either hiring on the East Coast or developing the capabilities in-house.

For a shop our size, there is a limit to how many of your resources you can take away from feature development to dedicate to infrastructural concerns. We had already spent a lot of dev time on the datastore infrastructure and our impending model changes were about to call for some more. Adding this up with the seemingly slim odds of us attracting an experienced HBase developer, it became apparent that continuing down the HBase route would be akin to trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It was time to move on and look for a more appropriate solution. The tool was just not built for what we were trying to do and we could not afford to try to get it there. So we went back to re-evaluating NoSQL solutions. This time, solid support for secondary indexes was added to the requirements. The round two contenders were:

• Neo4j: a very powerful graph database capable of efficiently traversing complex relationships; too much for what we needed and primarily designed to be used in an embedded JVM mode, we would have to make some significant changes to our system to integrate it.
• MongoDB: it had matured by leaps and bounds since the last time we looked at it, with increased adoption from many shops and great support from 10gen. It came with advanced indexing out-of-the-box as well as some batch processing options (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/MapReduce, https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-hadoop). To top it all off, it was a breeze to use, well documented and fit into our existing code base very nicely.
• Cassandra: it had matured as well and now had support for secondary indexes but those seemed more restrictive than Mongo’s and Mongo still had an edge over it in terms of developer friendliness.
• Riak: still a strong contender and supported secondary indexes since release 1.0 but still lacked the traction that MongoDB had.

This time, the choice was much more straight forward. Many of the solutions had come a long way to meeting our needs, so we were able to make a selection not only based on specs but also based on ease of adoption. MongoDB was hands down the most approachable solution for us.

Having worked with it now, it’s no wonder why MongoDB is currently enjoying such growth. While the migration from HBase took us about three months the integration with MongoDB itself was achieved in just a couple weeks since we already had a DAO layer abstracted from the rest of our applications. The rest of the time was spent tweaking our new model and re-writing our content acquisition and attribution services. And at every step of that refactoring, we found that MongoDB was making things easier for us:

• Normalizing channels and influencers became a straight forward exercise as we were now able to model the associations as influencer collection sub-documents.
• Creating indexes for fast random access queries no longer required specialized code. We still had to be mindful of the memory implications but the implementation was much cleaner and easier to maintain.
• Ad hoc queries and reports became easier to write: there was no longer a need for a Java developer to write map reduce code to extract the data in a usable form. The plethora of admin UIs meant that our own product manager could use his JavaScript skills to whip out reports using the the powerful out-of-the-box query facilities.
• Basic things like backups became a breeze again. While HDFS has built-in redundancy within a cluster, replicating data in a backup cluster is still advisable but becomes expensive from a hardware and network point of view. For the longest time, our approach consisted in exporting the HBase tables to S3 on a regular basis, which took a lot of time and far from guaranteed data consistency on restore. With MongoDB, all our data currently fits on a single instance with a hot replica that we can switch to if the master goes down and a third backup machine whose EC2 EBS drive we snapshot on a regular basis after freezing its’ XFS file system to ensure data consistency. While such a setup is of course possible with HDFS/HBase, support for it comes out-of-the-box with MongoDB and it can be done more affordably with a lot less hardware.
• The documentation was fantastic. Leaps and bounds ahead of the other solutions we evaluated (although the Riak folks are doing a great job as well), it was very well organized and the disqus comment integration meant that the dev community could easily pitch in if there were specific gaps.
• The speed was really impressive. We found that we were able to replace our weekly influencer re-scoring MapReduce jobs with straight MongoDB cursor iterators and still get the final results faster than before. Our data may of course outgrow this approach at some point but we are confident that we will be able to adapt using the available hadoop integration if we need to.
• The community was within reach and the feedback was consistant. We attended Mongo Boston and we were pleased to see that the size of the crowd confirmed what we were hearing and reading about the adoption of MongoDB. The sessions were super informative with great tips about how to optimize one’s setup and what the major gotchas are. What’s more, the suggestions and advise were consistant with what we were reading on line from separate sources, which was a refreshing change from some of the blind trial and error experience we had with our previous setup.

Looking forward, we think that we have finally nailed the solution that fits out needs for the foreseeable future. We no longer feel that we are fighting our datastore every step of the way. On the contrary, all our developers have given nothing but positive feedback on their MongoDB experience thus far and report being a lot more productive with it. This is a testament to the thoughtfulness the MongoDB engineering crew and 10gen have put behind the solution and we are looking forward to working with them in the months and years to come.

Bobby Llew in action

Traackr was born out of a passion for finding the people who were making a difference online.  We were very excited by the notion that “regular”, everyday people, in all walks of life, had a ubiquitous platform (ie – social media) for affecting change.  And we wanted to find them.

In our early work, we were always amazed by the great people that would show up in the searches run by our clients.  Not journalists, not celebrities, just seemingly regular folks with a very unique point of view and a talent for generating a loyal audience.  Some really great people.

One of our favorites was Bobby Llewellyn.  We found Bobby in a search for Honda UK, looking for hybrid car influencers to help promote their new hybrid Insight (case study from the Honda project here).

The Traackr search for this project yielded a lot of great, highly targeted people.  Most belonging to two distinct groups — ‘car’ influencers and ‘alternative energy’ influencers.  And then there was Bobby Llew.  At the time, no one involved had ever heard about Bobby.  He had a YouTube show in which he would interview B/C-level, British celebrities in his car while driving around London.  He literally set up a small camera (might have been a Flipcam) on his rearview mirror and record 20 minute interviews while cruising through the city.  He recorded ~one show per week.  It was simple, but really entertaining.  He gained a big following and millions of views.  He was also, at the time, the most retweeted person we had ever seen.  He was driving action.

But when he showed up on a list of top influencers for Hybrid cars, Honda was very confused.  How could this guy influence purchasing decisions around hybrid cars?!?  He’s not a ‘car guy’ or a ‘green tech’ guy.  He didn’t make any sense for this list.  They thought our technology was flawed.

Admittedly, we were a bit dumfounded as well, until we took a closer look at Bobby’s profile and content.  As it turned out, Bobby drove a Prius.  And he loved his Prius.  He featured it in all his YouTube shows and talked about it a lot on Twitter (and his blog).  He was a big advocate of hybrid technology and the environmental impact of cars – in his own way.  The point being…as we looked into Bobby more, we realized that he was definitely an influential, and potentially very powerful, voice in driving awareness and sales of any hybrid car.

Honda (and their PR agency) were still very confused.  They understood what to do with traditional journalists, but they had no idea what to do with Bobby.  We told them…um….”He produces a popular YouTube show — from his car.  Send him a car!”  Eventually…this is what they did.  They sent him an Insight and sponsored his show for two weeks.  Bobby ended up using the Insight in his show and talking about it through all his channels – generating a ton of awareness and, no doubt, sales.

Ultimately, this particular influencer campaign was a huge success…and Bobby played a big part.  He quickly became everyone’s favorite influencer.

SO, WHY AM I TELLING THIS STORY NOW??

Because I recently checked in on Bobby.  For some random, unknown reason, I tapped in his video blog site, llewtube.com, a couple of weeks ago.  And I was so happy with what I found.  As you can see (below) — he not only still has his traditional show (now called Carpool)…sponsored by the Prius, but he also started another show, Fully Charged, dedicated to test drives and reviews of all new hybrid, electric, clean fuel vehicles.  Do you think Bobby Llew is an influencer for hybrid cars now??  I would say so…

When I saw Bobby’s new site and all the progress he’d made, I couldn’t help but smile.  Bobby Llew done good.  These kinds of stories are still exciting to me…

DS

I was excited by the header of an article in PR Week last week, “The Battle Between PR and Ad Agencies Heats Up!”, thinking I’d be reading about the social media land grab taking place right now. Not so… the article was a rant about Ad agencies stealing business away from independent PR through the first-tier PR firms they bought over the years. Next article? How PR still struggles to get on CMO’s radar. Really??!?

I read this and wondered in what world do people still whine about an old battle, already decided a decade ago (advertisers won that one btw)? Besides, going after PR firms owned by WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, or IPG to defend your PR dollars is not just the wrong battle to fight but, whether owned by advertisers or not, all PR firms are on the same side of the media war.

Many of TRAACKR’s clients are PR and I can tell you that none of them complain about getting their lunch money stolen by advertising. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: instead of fighting off advertisers to keep their budgets, for the first time PR firms can now compete for advertising dollars!

SOCIAL IS WHERE THE BATTLE IS BEING FOUGHT

For generations, mass media has governed marketing. TV alone would represent over 80% of an average marketing budget. Ad agencies have made a living of charging brands obscene amounts of money for creative and media buy.  A senior exec at one of the top ad agencies told me just a few months ago, “when I meet with a CMO for an hour, do you think I sell them a $15M ad campaign or $200k in social media?” This is still today’s reality in an ad agency. The truth is that the economic model of an ad agency is based on big dollars and social media is small dollars – ad agencies haven’t figured out how to earn money on it, and this is their Achilles’ heel.

For better or for worse, PR firms have experience working with small budgets. They have also cultivated the art of the two-way communication with their target required to perform on social media. In many ways, social media is very much an extension of PR’s existing business model that only requires tweaks to succeed, not a business overhaul. This is the edge PR has over advertising in the land grab for social media ownership and budgets.

SOCIAL IS ELEVATING PR TO CMO-LEVEL

As much as advertising agencies have a basic economic problem dealing with social media (not enough money going around to make the effort worthwhile), brands don’t. Brands owe it to their shareholders to create the most value for each dollar invested. If Social yields better results than other media, it becomes a priority. The ‘warm and fuzzy’ feeling you get for having a Facebook page with tens of thousands of ‘likes’ only gets you thus far in spending real dollars though… but social media is changing fast and as social media communication develops and more companies gather metrics, we are discovering some fascinating facts:

1. Well-targeted and executed social media campaigns can yield much higher results and ROI than ad buys. In influencer marketing (our field of work and study), we found that less than 3% of the participants in an online conversation yield over 90% of the results (depending on the campaign, measured as reach, sales leads, viral distribution of a message). Considering only their reach, these same 3% even beat TV programming.
2. The social media component of marketing campaigns is growing. According to Forrester Research, the US market for social media communication doubled last year to reach $1.5B and will keep expanding at the same pace. As the practice of social becomes less of an experiment and more of a component of success for marketing, brands can focus on result-oriented initiatives, measure performance and tune their practice of social media.
3. Brands look for expertise in social media as a key component of selecting a marketing partner. Though anecdotal, I can’t tell you the number of brands we met with who decided to take social media away from their main AOR and gave it to PR or a ‘next gen’ marketing firm and have started transferring budgets from advertising as they see results materialize.

CMOs are now starting to pay attention to social, and as a result to PR. The simple equation each CMO constantly runs in their head (sales per marketing $ invested), has gotten premiere brands like P&G or Pepsico to multiply their investment in social while shrinking their involvement with traditional advertising. External factors, like the economic crisis we’re going through have also contributed to accelerating this transition.

If budgets for social media communication are exploding,  success stories from social campaigns keep coming out and advertising agencies are still chasing their tail in social, why on earth doesn’t PR own social by now?

SOCIAL RELATIONS IS THE NEW FRONTIER

There are really two main reasons why Social is still up for grabs. One legitimate, one not.

Historically, PR firms haven’t been early technology adopters (I see some of our clients cringing here: of course there are exceptions!) and the move towards social media has required PR to embrace new technologies, use new tools in order to perform the work, and learn how to navigate an ocean of data. Mainstream PR is slowly  going over the technology hump, but it’s taken a while. Early technology adopters in PR have long passed that point and can maneuver technology and social media tools easier than I ride my bike.

The second reason why PR has yet to ‘kill it’ as an industry in Social very much relates to the content of the PRWeek article I was quoting at the beginning of this post. I’ll call it the ‘post-traumatic mass media era disorder’ or PTMMED Much of PR still feels like the step child of marketing and fears the mighty advertisers with their lavish lifestyle.

No more! Our PR clients, all early adopters of technology, paving the way to what the PR industry should become, are proving to their peers that through Social they get access, they get budgets, they get more work than they can handle, and they are not afraid to tell advertisers to bring it on!

Interestingly, the fact that mainstream PR has yet to fully embrace their social practice has created a void on the market and a new breed of agencies have emerged as a result to fill it with some success. What innovative PR firms and these ‘next gen’ marketing firms have in common is that they have both understood that the new frontier for communication is Social Relationships. Call it SR, call it PR 2.0, these firms are defining a new industry where much of the money spent on social media is pouring in. My advice: you want to be on that train before it leaves the station…

To TRAACKR’s loyal blog readers, I want to pause the influencer conversation today and take a moment to remember September 11, 2001.

Ten years ago, I was working at a technology consulting firm in NYC, called Viant. Along with other Vianteers, I set-up an office at our client’s on the 38th floor of World Trade I. I was lucky enough that Tuesday morning to be late for work and only made it as far as a few blocks away from WTC to witness the catastrophic events of the day unfold.

In the days that followed September 11, 2001, our team and the New York office received so many notes of support. I especially recall one that came from Charlie Conn from our Boston office simply saying, “today, we are all Yankee fans.” For some reason, it has stuck with me all these years. I think I had been in crisis management mode immediately following the catastrophe, and only after reading Charlie’s note did things start sinking in and I got to appreciate what we had just been through (for a diehard Red Sox fan to rout for the NYY, clearly something of unparalleled gravity had just happened). 

Today, I remember our project team (Adam, Aiko, Annmari, Brandon, Calvin, Caterina, Chip, Chris, Dan, Dave, Henri, John, Leslie, Melody, Sunghee, Yvonne, and many others) and I’m so thankful we all made it alive; I remember those we passed every day in the elevators and corridors of the World Trade who were not as lucky as we were; I remember those who walked into the fire to save lives and gave theirs when the buildings crumbled; and I remember the months that followed 9/11/01 when New Yorkers showed their true colors and with resilience, courage and solidarity overcame the adversity that had just hit us.

Ten years later today, let’s once again all be Yankees fans.

The question is, can we?  Tom Rue, aka. True, is starting at Traackr and we’re very excited about it.

He drinks about 5 red bulls a day, so we know he won’t fall asleep on us, and he has two kids at home to keep him sane in the midst of Traackr work. Ok, maybe a 9 – and 8-year-old won’t keep him sane, but he loves them, so we had to mention them in here.

A few more things about Tom we thought you might find pretty cool:

• Tom is a completely self-taught technologist. As a child, he had dyslexia and once he figured out he could read and write much better on a computer, he used technology for the rest of his formal education.
• He’s really looking forward to overcoming the technology challenges of storing tons (literally) of influencer data.
• He’s bungee jumped before!
• You can find him on LinkedIn.

Tom and I worked together some years back – for that matter, we went to hell and back together – so we anticipate his integration in the Traackr team to be a walk in the park…

Welcome to the team, Tom! We expect great things from you!

On a side note, it’s been a busy few months at Traackr with a lot of new hires, and we don’t anticipate slowing down anytime soon! Actually, we are still looking to hire a front-end developer. If you’re interested, or know anyone else that may be, be sure to get in contact with us.

Once again, we’re looking to expand the Traackr team.  We’ve recently added a couple of key players to our back-end team who are already making some amazing things happen for what we call the Traackr “core.”  Now we’re looking to add to our front end team a strong lead developer who can manage the development of our existing (and ever expanding) business interface.

This is a very, very important hire for us — not only because our business is expanding quickly and we simply need “more hands” to help us keep the application on pace with our growth, but also because we are still in the infancy of what Traackr can and will become and we want to bring someone on now who will help us define the future of the Traackr offering(s).  In short, we are looking to bring someone on now who will be with us for a long time to come…

What we’re looking for

At the very basic level, we’re looking for someone with groundbreaking technical chops.  Specifically, we are looking for someone with the following technical skills:

• BSCS, MSCS or equivalent
• Experience in Web application architecturing & development
• Experience in building advanced Web-based UI
• Expert in PHP5, Javascript, HTML and CSS
• Experience with MVC frameworks like CakePHP or similar
• Strong database knowledge (MySQL or similar)
• Experience with Ajax and Object Oriented Javascript programming

Why you will want to work with Traackr

Traackr is a great place to be for anyone interested in working in a very flexible, but demanding, start-up environment.  Some of the reasons you will love working at Traackr (if you are the right person) include:

• We are a small, scrappy start-up which has completely funded itself through revenue so far
• But we’re not going to be small forever…we have big goals for Traackr and are on our way to achieve them
• We are working on something big here at Traackr (some of which we can’t talk about here) but in short, it’s our aim to be the ultimate source for Online Influencer Analysis — something that will become even more important and valuable as the social media landscape develops.
• We have a clear vision and great management.  Unlike many start-ups, at Traackr you have both a clear vision for your role and where we are heading as well as the flexibility to shape and define your work.
• We have an awesome office in Cambridge
• We drink beer on friday afternoons…as a rule.

Inquire about this job

If you are interested in working with Traackr, you can let us know by sending a link to your LinkedIn profile (don’t bother cleaning up a resume, just update your LinkedIn profile) and a note to MGRAVE @ TRAACKR DOT COM with “Sr. Front End” in the subject line.

Thanks — looking forward to meeting you!

You already knew about the video -and here too- (you knew about that, right?), now discover the music.

All the spirit of Traackr.com in a song. Check it out on lastfm.com.

Thank you Laurent.

Enjoy!

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