Joel Gross is a Business Analyst for Visible Technologies, an innovative market leader in social media analytics and reputation management services. Joel creates innovative public relations strategies focussed on the internet and also works extensively with advertising.
EDUCATION
University of Washington – Seattle, WA
September 2002 – June 2006
B.A. in Business Administration
Finance Concentration
GPA: 3.5
PricewaterhouseCoopers xACT accounting case competition winner
Sigma Chi Fraternity member
Experience
Visible Technologies is an explosively growing provider of brand management solutions for companies and individuals. Joel Gross currently works as a Business Analyst focussed on search engine optimization and marketing. He provides support when needed for other areas including conventional marketing, management techniques and data analysis.
Merrill Lynch.Merrill Lynch is one of the world's leading financial management and advisory companies, providing financial advice and investment banking services. Joel Gross worked at the Bellevue, WA branch of Merrill Lynch in the Daver Tiryakioglu group as an intern learning the ins and outs of high net worth client management and marketing.
Business Analyst for Visible Technologies
Creatively solved problems in areas throughout Visible Technologies such as marketing, product development, production and finance.
Helped to work on reverse engineering the search engines in order to better optimize clients websites.
Invented new methodology, TruView Index (TVI), for quantitatively measuring the value of branding across the search engines and designed software based on this new technology and am leading the way to establish TVI as the industry standard
Developed content, images and design for a version of the main corporate flash-based website (www.VisibleTechnologies.com) and subdivision website (www.1stQuery.com)
Prepared management and board presentations for various proposals
Wrote and published press releases that were picked up by major news organizations.
Managed monthly link purchasing
Performed monthly as well as annual budget and audit activities on link expenditures, including ROI analyses
Entrepreneurship
Joel founded his first business while still a junior in high school (J&J Landscaping) and gained his first valuable experiences in marketing, client management and production, while turning a very healthy profit. Joel Gross is now working on some very interesting projects of his own, including honing his online reputation management techniques and building several community driven web properties.
Accomplishments:
Joel is the first member of his family to earn a college degree (and paid his own way), and has assisted two of his younger brothers to gain admission and success at the University of Washington, and the youngest brother is on his way to do even better. Joel Gross climbed Mount Adams and has been to Camp Muir and is planning on making a try at summiting Mt. Rainier this summer. He has other diverse areas of interest including web design, reading, skiing, dance and flag football.
Reputation Management
Reputation management is the process of tracking an individual or companies action and others' opinions of those actions, along with reporting and reacting to opinions and actions. Joel is primarily involved with online reputation management, including working on both paid and natural search engine results, social media, and other influential community websites. Search engine reputation management is an industry still in its infancy, with massive potential and the associated growing pains. Over six billion searches are performed every month by people looking for information on other individuals, businesses and a wide assortment of topics. Search engine reputation management's goal is to track and influence an entities reputation online. What do people see when they search for you?
Buzz Marketing
Traditional forms of marketing, advertising and public relations generally follow a "push" strategy of trying to put their product or ideas in your face. Buzz marketing tries to engage people and get them talking about your products and ideas naturally, creating a "pull" effect. One of the best examples of this would be the way that Steve Jobs has led Apple's marketing for the last couple of years. When he launched the iPhone, there was more buzz and excitement around it than for any other product launch in recent memory. Joel has been studying and performing buzz marketing at a high level for almost two years and has become one of the best in the business.
Going Viral
Viral advertising is using pre-existing social networks to produce brand awareness. The goal is to put a self-replicating message into a system, analogous to the way a computer virus moves through a network. The viral message could be delivered via word of mouth or enhanced through the massive network effects provided by the Internet. A good example of viral marketing would be a funny commercial posted on YouTube; people find it and laugh, then email it to friends, post it to social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon) or link to it from their websites. This process is extraordinarily rapid and sometimes a video can go from 10 views to 100,000 in a matter of hours.
Joel Gross actively works with many networks of people online through social bookmarking sites, forums and blogs, and has observed (and sometimes started) the viral marketing effect. He is currently working on an academic quality paper describing the passage of an idea through groups of people.
SEO PPC
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) are the industries in which Joel Gross was baptized and now is working to merge with traditional marketing and public relations to form new marketplaces. Search engine optimization is the process of controlling the natural search results brought back for a keyword query in a search engine. For Google, these would be the left hand results. PPC is the paid advertising displayed by search engines and regular websites. An advertiser pays for each click (hence the name Pay-Per-Click) or pays for a certain number of views (usually 1,000, known as CPM).