Geeks Are Sexy
Geeks Are Sexy, ([GAS]), is a technology, science, and geek subculture news site based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Originally a personal project of system administrator Yan Fortin, it was launched in October 2005 on a free Blogspot account, but around a year later, it moved onto a more serious blog solution.
Geeks Are Sexy provides up to the minute tech news, reviews, and tutorials to the readership, which is mainly composed of IT professionals and computer enthusiasts. Today, [GAS] has a team of seven professional writers.
Challenge:
[GAS] had two main challenges. The first was typical: In order to remain self-sustaining, [GAS] has an advertising-based revenue model which relies on keeping readership numbers high, and does so in the very crowded market of technology news sites.
The second was not so typical – though founder and editor Fortin is fluent in English, his native language is Québécois French. While Fortin can write well even in English, he sometimes had need of English-language copy editing, especially for the idiom heavy responsibilities of succinct headline writing.
Solution:
[GAS] formed a partnership with Blogphilo early on, starting in late 2006, where Blogphilo would review copy written by Fortin and other contributors and send back revised material.
Over time, Blogphilo also contributed a number of text articles for the [GAS] home page. In 2008, Blogphilo also provided [GAS] with a number of short documentaries covering inventors of unusual gadgetry for the GeeksAreSexyTechNews YouTube video channel.
Results:
The text articles brought in significant traffic and inbound links, boosting [GAS]’s pagerank, and therefore value to [GAS]’s advertisers. Most notably, an article on Fox News-based IP addresses changing Wikipedia to smear corporate rivals got 75,000 hits in the first two days.
And of the eleven videos produced for [GAS], seven received more than 10,000 views on YouTube and other services. Four of them received over 30,000 views. And two of them, “Arc Attack” and “Fish on a Volvo” have received over 134,000 and over 147,000 views respectively.
NetQoS (now CA|NetQoS)
NetQoS was founded in 1999, and specialized in making network monitoring software and solutions for enterprise networks. Specializing in passive monitoring tools, including applications for performance management and response time analysis that promised end-to-end performance monitoring, NetQoS consistently ranked as part of the Deloitte Texas Fast 50, and in 2005 and 2006, it was included in the Inc. 500 list of the country’s fastest growing private companies.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NetQoS’s customers included Chevron Corporation, Lockheed Martin, American Express, Siemens AG, Deutsche Telekom, NASA, and Barclays Global Investors.
Challenge:
In 2006, NetQoS was second in size and revenue to their largest competitor, NetScout, which was also a competitor for online presence and search results. The marketing department at NetQoS sought to build up the NetQoS brand online through blogging. They hoped that the company, then roughly valued at $50-75M, would appear more like a $200M company. This included setting aside resources for corporate blogging. Additionally, a successful blog would set them up as thought leaders in the marketplace, improve their SEO standings, and bring in traffic that lead to sales and revenue.
Solution:
NetQoS hired Brian Boyko, the founder of Blogphilo New Media, as a full-time new media specialist and copywriter in late 2006. Boyko quickly established a strategy of writing not only about the company’s products and events to encompass a more broader view that the NetQoS blog, “NetworkPerformanceDaily.com,” should write about issues and events which would be of interest to NetQoS’s customer base of CIOs and other purchasing decision makers, as well as the network engineers that used NetQoS’s products on a day-to-day basis.
Taking the mantra of writing about “anything and everything that affects network performance, from the mundane to the bizzare,” Network Performance Daily created daily updates on news and events, which included everything from light, humorous parody, general silliness, to hard-hitting investigative reporting. Always careful to disclose Network Performance Daily’s roots as a company blog, Boyko treated it with the same ethics that he brought with him from the journalism world.
Additionally, Boyko used humor and an informal, conversational style of writing to engage the reader, despite the very dry topic of network performance management in general. This tone of voice also helped separate it from the numerous other networking blogs out there.
As time went on, Boyko, who taught himself filmmaking, assumed responsibility for producing, directing, and editing corporate video for the growing company to be used in sales presentations, user help, marketing collateral, viral videos, and trade show presentations.
Results:
Eight months into the project, Network Performance Daily already had over 180k visitors, and several inbound links from high-pageranked sites. Network Performance Daily would continue to get high-pagerank inbound links throughout its lifetime. It would go on to receive praise from Michael Coté at Redmonk and Paul McNamara at Network World for it’s coverage.
The crowning achievement of Network Performance Daily was an investigative report produced on the legal case of a schoolteacher in Connecticut, Julie Amero, who was wrongfully convicted of child endangerment when the computer in her classroom was infected with spyware that showed lewd (but not pornographic) pop-up ads. She faced 40 years in prison at her sentencing.
Interviewing the defense expert witness, the prosecution expert witness, and the CEO of the company that made the forensic software used in the case and publishing their remarks verbatim, Network Performance Daily advanced the story further than anyone else had done so at the time. As a result, the story was picked up by the Washington Post, PBS, Huffington Post, USA Today, Slashdot, Fark, Digg, Reddit, etc. This nationwide coverage pressured the judge in the case to grant Ms. Amero a new trial.
Videos produced for NetQoS helped salespeople in the field explain the features of the suite more fully, and the less serious, more humorous videos produced for NetQoS were often big draws to the NetQoS booth in-between sessions at trade shows.
Both the blog and the videos produced led to increased revenue and sales for the company. By 2009, they had reached their target goal and were purchased by CA for $200M.