Guest Post by Keith Jensen, Sales and Marketing Operations Intern

As I am dreading my impending graduation from CU Boulder this May, it was interesting to look back and see what I wish I would’ve learned while attending college.  I’ve only been at Trada for a little over two months, and I now know that there will always be more concepts, skills, or programs to learn before I can get to where I want to be in the real world.  Here are five main ones that hit me within seven days of my Marketing and Sales Operations Internship:

Salesforce.com
If you are involved with marketing or sales and you haven’t heard of SFDC, then I would recommend buying Salesforce.com for Dummies.  SFDC has received multiple awards over the past few years, including “Most Innovative Company” and “Best Sales Platform.” It serves as the basis for keeping all of a company’s leads, contacts, opportunities, accounts, campaigns, and everything else sales-related organized and easy to read.  A lot of companies pay above-average salaries for someone to be their SFDC Administrator, so learning everything about the site can prove to be a huge resume booster.  I had to spend hours exploring all the features and pages that exist in the back-end of the site, and knowing the basis of how it worked first would’ve made it a lot easier. [Read more...]

Today I am very pleased to announce that Trada will be opening CodeSpace, a free co-working space dedicated to startup developers and software engineers. CodeSpace will be located in Trada’s downtown Boulder office space, and we’ll have more than 3,000 sq ft of space dedicated to CodeSpace companies and friends. We plan to open CodeSpace to the public on July 18^th with an opening party the week before.

Since day one, we have wanted Trada to be a true downtown Boulder company. True to that commitment, our first location was in a cramped 1,700 sq ft office behind Lolita’s. Since then our company has grown and with it our ambition about what place startup companies can have in the Boulder community. We firmly believe Boulder is experiencing a renaissance of entrepreneurism, startups, and changing what the complexion of downtown Boulder looks like. Specifically, Walnut Street has emerged as a corridor for technology startups companies including Foundry Group, SendGrid, Lijit, OneRiot, StandingCloud, and the TechStars Bunker. Today, we’re thrilled today to add CodeSpace to that list.

While there are many places where non-technical entrepreneurs can meet up in Boulder to discuss their startups, there are few places where software developers can camp out for the day, week or month and work together on a project. We wanted to add this environment to the mix of coffee shops, traditional co-working spaces, and rented offices in Boulder. And we thought it would be cool if it was free.

CodeSpace has two components to it (a third will be announced a little later this summer). The first is an application-based component. We have three dedicated spaces for startup software development teams (read lockable offices). These spaces can be applied for and they will be dedicated to the accepted teams (they fit from 1-4 people depending on the space). We also have come as you like developer co-working space with all the whiteboards, wireless, soda, coffee and foosball that you can eat for free.

To start, CodeSpace will be open 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday. The program will run through the summer when we will understand how best to extend the program in the fall.

To apply for one of the 3 dedicated co-working spaces please visit trada.com/codespace.

To register for the CodeSpace opening party and hackathon please email codespace@trada.com.

Trada is located in the old Daily Camera building at 1023 Walnut. CodeSpace will be housed in our building but please route all inquiries to codespace@trada.com.

Trada’s CEO Niel Robertson (@nielr1) wrote two guest posts this week for AdExchanger and GigaOm. He was also selected for Boulder County Business Report’s Forty Under 40. Try not to congratulate him though because the Scottish have naturally larger heads as it is.

Niel’s article for AdExchanger focused on what he calls the Drive Time Web.

Driving between Boulder and Denver the other day, I did something completely old school – I turned on the radio. It was during rush hour, and I couldn’t help but notice the continued emphasis on the ad-free drive-time show (yes, the irony didn’t escape me they were advertising no ads). I started to think about the pros and cons of ad-free time segments on the radio, and it dawned on me this might apply to the web as well.

One of my predictions for this decade is that content monetization is going to go through a renaissance as content sites have an ever-increasing number of ways to monetize. To date it’s been display ads and a cost-per-impression (CPM) model. Now sites can monetize with affiliate links, real-time content ads, display ads, in-text ads, in-context stores (daily deals on your site), sponsorships and sponsored Twitter feeds. The number of ways content sites can generate money will only continue to expand as the amount of content on the web expands.

I’m going to take a guess that drive-time radio was designed to trade-off ad dollars at the highest trafficked time of the day with the cost of acquiring new listeners at those times. If you hear one hour of uninterrupted great music on your drive, you’ll likely tune into that radio station later and suffer through some ads in off-hours. Websites can (and perhaps should) work exactly the same way.

For GigaOm, Niel wrote on Jobs 2.0: Data Centric Jobs for Gen Y:

While some may say that Generation Y are slackers, I think they’re just waiting around for the next crop of interesting jobs. Well, good news, 20-somethings, the new fall line of jobs is here! You’ll note that most of these jobs center around one thing: data. Gen Y (which I prefer to call Gen A, for “Analysis”) will be the first generation entering the workforce that have the skills to apply measurement and analysis to everything. They’ve been counting calories on their iPhones, anxiously trying to raise their Klout scores and driving their follow counts on Twitter. Data is the new black.

Niel further details out some of those potential jobs including content monetization money manager, crowd manager, personal trainer 2.0 and Webmaster 2.0.

After our big move to the Daily Camera Trada building, we have room for some big hires. We’re really excited to announce we’ve brought on Tim Mayer and Ben Wright, bringing combined experience of 25 years of search experience. (Search is still a nascent industry, so this much experience is definitely a rarity.) Both are bringing their families from Palo Alto and Los Angeles to join us in Boulder, and we’re honored to have them join us.

Both Wright and Mayer are most recently from Yahoo. Prior to Yahoo, Mayer held management positions for several companies including Overture Services, Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), Inktomi and The Thomson Corporation. Prior to Yahoo, Wright held account management positions at GoTo.com, which later became Overture Services and was acquired by Yahoo in 2003.

You can check out the formal version of the news release. Plus, below is a post from Ben Wright with more perspective on his big move.

For my old friends at Yahoo! and across the broader industry, thought I might try this brand new blogging thing to let you know I’m now officially in role at Trada.  And, couldn’t be happier!  Why?

Firstly, (on a personal note) Boulder, CO!  My family and I get to live in a beautiful environment, and Daddy only has to drive 15 mins each way to get to an office filled with super smart people doing really innovative work – overall, tough combo to find, I feel extremely blessed.  Not missing the 90-min-each-way-in-L.A-traffic-commute just yet.

Secondly, I truly believe in the power of crowdsourcing and truly (truly truly!) believe in the potential of its application to the optimization component of performance based digital media.  Yep, I actually think I have been fortunate enough to join a company that can redefine how the industry thinks about optimizing digital media. Seriously.  From two perspectives in particular…

Firstly, from a pure performance perspective.  Regardless of how big or small your company or campaign is, having a group of Optimizers working on your campaign vs. just one or even two, will likely get you better overall performance.  This is a well understood core premise of crowdsourcing in general… that the crowd (leveraging it’s collective wisdom) will inevitably outperform the individual.  If we purpose this theory to performance based digital media (which we at Trada do every day!), it really comes down to this:  If I was given the choice between having the very best optimization specialist I know (and I am fortunate enough to know and have worked with some truly great ones!) work on my campaign, OR have that person PLUS another 7, 10, 15 etc really good optimizers also working on my campaign, all running hard at it, all getting paid directly based on how well they are meeting my campaign objectives, it is a no-brainer which will perform better and make me the happiest advertiser.

Secondly, I think our crowdsourcing approach may have cracked the conundrum that generally prevents smaller advertisers in particular from being successful in performance based digital media… the barrier to entry doubleheaded monster of upfront $$ investment and knowledge, or both!  If a business has a website and willingness to do paid search, they can launch their campaign into the Trada marketplace.  Because our optimizers only make money when they exceed an Advertiser’s objectives, incentives are aligned out of gate.  Small/Medium size business owners who want to play in search now have an option other than either 1) spending lots of money “learning” paid search themselves, 2) spending lots of money hiring in-house PPC expertise or 3) spending lots of money hiring an agency (please note, I love agencies, but fact is they are often not in the budget for a typical small business).  PPC experts on the other hand don’t have to spend a ton of time and money starting their own formal agency or consulting business.  Rather, they can pick and choose the campaigns they work on in the Trada marketplace based on their experience and interest – which really translates to where they believe they can be successful.  And again, because advertisers establish the campaign performance targets, and optimizers only make money when they beat those targets, a mutually beneficial, scalable alternative exists for SMBs in particular to have a good run at leveraging performance based digital advertising.  Exciting possibility.

Oh, one other thing… if you have been to http://www.trada.com;  you’ll see that today we do Paid Search optimization.  However, you may notice I keep referring to performance based digital media, not just paid search.

That’s the other reason I’m REALLY excited… stay tuned!

British citizen Sharron Lonsdale stumbled upon the Trada Marketplace this summer after reading about Google Ventures investment in one of her favorite search blogs. While Sharron has only joined about half-a-dozen campaigns, her work within the Trada Marketplace has been very high-quality. With a full-time day job and a family, she joins campaigns as her schedule allows.

Sharron has been working on paid search campaigns as part of her job since 2002, and the last three years have had her doing many paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn. One of the advantages for advertisers in the Trada Marketplace is getting to work with Optimizers such as Sharron who have a wide breadth of working within different search networks and how easy Trada makes it to advertise on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

What makes Sharron’s work on Trada paid search campaigns so exemplary is her focus on exact match keywords. She feels broad matching can bring in too many un-targeted keywords. She’s focused on finding precise keywords for her campaigns, which is why her click-through-rate (CTR) is so high. Her ads don’t show up for non-targeted search terms. She also employs a long-tail approach to coming up with keywords.

When looking for campaigns to optimize, she likes to look around the advertiser’s site. If the advertiser isn’t within her skill set, she won’t work on the campaign. Sharron also looks for the advertiser with a high-quality site. She realizes that if she drives traffic to a poor-quality website, it won’t convert.

For Sharron, she appreciates all the different types of campaigns she can work on within Trada and feels Trada is an excellent way to gain experience with different types of clients and campaigns. She also knows that by having more experience with varied paid search campaigns, it benefits all of the campaigns she works on.

If you are interested in becoming a Trada PPC expert, please visit the Trada application page.

At Defrag I experienced, more than once, that moment; the moment when suddenly a new idea (or one that’s been lurking in the back of your head) is actualized. The thought, or comment, of another person just pushes you to a new idea for your own position and for possible businesses.

I sometimes wonder exactly why it’s so sweet working at Trada, but Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) put a finger on it when he argued that friendly conversations and forming closer bonds (based on research coming from my alma mater Carnegie Mellon (@CarnegieMellon) – awesome!) help form social cognition. Basically, if we understand each other on a deeper social level, then we can better gauge and understand the mental states of the people around us. I think the biggest takeaway from him was “I am made greater by the sum of my connections”, just one example of the type of exploratory thoughts presented at Defrag.

The primary focus of Defrag Conference was to expose what data is and the usefulness of data in constructing the future internet company (call it Web3.0 or web 2.0 squared if you want). After hearing a few excellent speakers, including Dion Hinchcliffe (idea: Why, not what), Nathan Gilliatt (@gilliatt) (idea: Analytics + Intelligence = Strategic Value of Information) and Dave Angulo (@daveangulo) (idea: how tightly are you connected to someone?), it seemed that the single-word theme was context.

The real question becomes; are you connecting with your co-workers or a friend on Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks? The difference with the future is that right now the relationships we form in social networks lack that precise context that relationships in reality have. This is a trend that will be exploited in Web3 and entirely data-driven; that is, who are you interacting with and how should that interaction happen? Just think Facebook with friends who can only see your stuff M-F 9AM-5PM (or the content you would feel comfortable having shown during those hours). Fernando Mesa of MarkLogic really drove home this point by examining the statement that “context determines how I want to socialize” in his talk.

Trada CEO Niel Robertson (@nielr1) spoke on the efficacy of Expertsourcing and stressed that the expert crowd is formed by the ability than an expert, rather than a beginner, has to leverage data in making informed decisions. Similarly, Scott Davis of Lyza Software (@scottatlyzasoft) suggested that furthering our ability to analyze data relies on our ability to crowdsource the creation of metadata (a.k.a data about the data). He went so far as to suggest that enterprise search would be a new avenue, a view that was slightly controversial given a few speakers statements that the future of search was filtering due to large data, not search.

The day closed with an inspirational speech from Jeffry Ma (see our interview with Jeff Ma on our blog) who urged the audience to commit to data-driven decision making. Backed with unbelievable stories of playing poker with strategy and analytics, his talk illustrated a direct and successful application of data-driven decision making. Beyond emphasizing data-driven decision making, he warned the audience to be wary of any cognitive bias that occurs in making decisions by being rigorous (think: it’s been 6 reds at the roulette table, it’s gotta be black this time! Rather than computing probabilities).

Earlier in the day Vivek Wadhwa (@vwadhwa) noted, when talking about Indian entrepreneurs helping fund companies in Silicon Valley, to foster growth we must invest in each other. This sentiment persisted through many presentations and provided a more subtle aim for the conference. Defrag Conference 2010 was an unforgettable learning experience. I hope to bring the concepts and analytics back to Trada and implement ideas about culture whenever possible.