Brian Provost: The E-Interview

Brian has always been one of my favorite bloggers. Whether writing about the ultimate golf outing or WWJLT (What Would Jesus Link To), I find Brian’s blogging style and creativity to be every bit as advanced as his ideas. Here are his answers to some questions that I asked him:

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?

Buckle up, I wear about 100 different hats every day. The “day job” for me, if you assume a 36 hour day, is running the Audience Development organization at Tippit. Tippit is a venture-backed, San Francisco-based B2B media & advertising startup I joined back in late 2005. Technically, it’s still in stealth mode, but it’s probably the worst stealth-moding of all time.

In my role as the head of Audience Development, I’m influencing SEO, SEM , social media, our editorial team, our publisher/affiliate network, and our M&A activity. One of my old consulting clients and good friend wrote the business plan as an EIR. Scoreboard was originally aimed at SEO and complex internet marketing engagements with Fortune 500 and big brand clients. After a few really big years in that business, I was getting burnt out making other rich guys a lot richer and I felt like I need to sow my wild entrepreneurial oats in the Big Leagues of online media. It was time for me to build something of legacy value and to become less of a one trick SEO monkey. Two and a half years, 3 rounds of fundraising, and 60 employees later, I am so glad I decided to do this. It’s given me an amazing amount of “seat time” and exposure to the venture capital world and operating experience in a fast growing business. Everyone should do at least one startup in their lives.

I still maintain Scoreboard Media Group, the consulting business, but I only take on 5-10 complex projects for big brands each year. I’m typically anti-consulting for anyone that’s got any sort of skill whatsoever, but for me, these limited engagements allow me looks at some really big problems. Acting like The Wolf from Pulp Fiction in these really big problems keeps my game sharp and everything else I do benefits from that exposure. I’m also terribly concerned that some 8 year old kid in China will smoke me one day if I don’t hustle every day. There are too many smart people in the game now.

When I’m not cranking at the day job or playing The Wolf, I also advise a handful of other companies, a few VC’s, and some hedge funds on their Internet investments. While it’s been fun grabbing equity all around the Valley, I think the more valuable result of these roles is the networking. I have some pretty big ideas about “the next one” and having these kinds of relationships with the guys who hold all the capital will be meaningful. It’s one thing to have a great idea for a business, but there are a million ways to get screwed on the process if you don’t understand the finance side of it. As much as I crack on Calacanis, he understood this and you see the evidence of it in how he raised money for Mahalo.

Lastly, I have a number of joint ventures with friends and the domaining subsidiary of Scoreboard. I’m marginally addicted to NameJet and Snapnames. It’s like my version of Scrabulous.

2) How do you explain and sell SEO to C-level executives?

Well, you usually aren’t selling to C-level execs unless a) you have already achieved buy-in from the direct managers or b) you have existing relationships with C-level execs and they are dumping you on said managers. If you’ve gotten to a C-level exec via the first route, it’s less about you being the right guy and it’s more about the value proposition. I lucked out and rarely had to go that route. That route had pricing pressure. For me, I had this amazing access to executives from previous businesses and from the motorsports world (see my Client Baiting blog post). That was always my advantage when I was building Scoreboard.

Assuming you don’t already know the C-level decision maker, my best advice when selling into large organizations is to just be honest. That’s it. The business unit managers are smart people but they are there to manage the change initially, not to become subject matter experts by osmosis. I would always go in there and start by demystifying search. There are so many hacks, snake oil peddlers, and bad sources of information out there that you really have to establish trust first.

After you’ve established yourself as an honest broker, you should be really clear about who owns what in the process. If you are in a Fortune 500 company, there are probably a handful of internal organizations that will be stakeholders in the workflow…and they will be fighting each other for control. Understand the Org Chart and then lead them. Befriend the staff that will be performing the work and challenge the leadership to champion the cause internally. If you do that backwards, you’ll get mired in a Mongolian Clusterf*ck.

Lastly, you cannot horde the relationship. Greed is not good in consulting arrangements. Fortune 500 companies generally do not feel good about relying on third parties after the initial engagement. I never structured my engagements as maintenance contracts. I was there to teach them how to fish. It was neither in their best interest to have to rely on me for too long nor did I want to be on-call ad infinitum. While this is counterintuitive to most consultants who think of maintenance contracts as perpetuities, it was always more valuable for me to have satisfied C-level execs from big companies as evangelists of my expertise instead of me cashing maintenance checks.

3) It’s your college graduation day and you’ve been presented with 2 possible paths: SEO and Domaining. Which would you take and why?

SEO. Would you rather own barren swampland in Central Florida or would you rather own Disney World? I love domaining and I started a domaining business…but, to me, domaining is simply one component of the larger audience equation. If you stop at the domain level, it’s like going to the bench after the first inning.

4) Is it “All About The Benjamins”? Is “money earned” the best way of keeping score in the business world?

Nope. I mean, if you are only knocking down $40GR a year as a full-time SEO, yes, it can be argued that you either a) suck b) have the worst luck in the world or c) you get high a lot. But at some point, there’s so much money to be made on Internet audiences that you look for the meaningful wins because your expenses were covered a long time ago. I’ve never heard anyone eulogized with their blog income stats. Do something big that you can be proud of and the money will follow.

5) Is there a unifying theme or themes that ties your blog posts together?

Apparently not if you’re asking this question! As I’m redesigning the blog, I have been thinking about the mission statement…or as Hagans calls it, “the dream”. I guess I just want to encourage people to think bigger. There’s not much difference between the guy making $30/day in Adsense on a site he works on at night and the skillset required to build a big media audience. Swing for the fences, people.

6) In reading your blog posts, I see your writing style as being both extremely creative and very funny, which is atypical for blogs in our industry. For example, we all criticized Jason Calacanis but your “5 Ways Jason Calacanis Will Revolutionize Your Life in 2008” brilliant parodied him and Mahalo. Is there a backstory to your unique ability to put forth your ideas?

I write how I talk. It probably should be a little more formal, but I’ve always looked at my blog as I think Charles Barkley looks at his role on “Inside the NBA”. I love what I do, I have respect for the game, I want to uphold the dignity of the game, I want to give back a little, and I want to crack jokes with my friends. Mostly the last part.

Just to clear something up…I do not hate Jason Calacanis. In fact, I’d have to be one hell of a myopic dick to not give Jason the credit he deserves. I’ve always said that it’s tough to make a living on the Internet and he’s been doing it pretty well for longer than most. I just think he says some really douchy stuff sometimes. I do, too.

7) What prevents more people from Mak(ing) F U Money Online ?

Two things: a) fear of failure and b) wives. Just kidding, ladies. But it is hard to swing for the fence all the time if you have a family to consider. It’s just me, some cars, and a German Shepherd. We can go all-in on everything when others might not have that latitude. I just wish more of the extremely-talented people I’ve met around the community would gamble on themselves a little bit more. I routinely run across more successful but less talented people who don’t have any game, but they had huge balls of steel.

8) How valuable is image in the SEO / Business community? What image do you try to put forth of yourself and how would you like others to view you?

Unfortunately, perception is the reality more often than not in this business. Some people take the “Fake it till you make it” route to managing that perception and I think far too many blogs have been created to that end. I’m happy to trade on the quality and scope of my work. I might be a complete jackass, but I don’t think anyone would consider me to be an untalented, unproven jackass.

9) Do you see social media in the “B to B” space as a hot trend?

If by “a hot trend” you mean “something you’ve already run into the ground”, then yes. Nobody in B2B embraces social media as much as we do and certainly not with our batting average. With that said, I’m sure that all of the multibillion dollar legacy B2B companies of yesteryear will be terribly excited about their first blog post and embedded social networking buttons when they roll them out in the year 2012.

10) If somebody asked you, “What is the best way to make money online?” what would you answer?

Depends on the investment horizon. Short term, paid search arbitrage. Long term, premium domain name development. Or porn.