Brian Stacey

Born and raised in Coppell, Texas, but now I call Austin home. I spend a lot of time outside doing various sports/activities like Triathlons, Tough Mudders, kayaking, hiking and so on. In my quest to keep Austin weird, I’m often sporting my Vibram Five Fingers.  I recently found out that the purebred beagle I bought off craigslist is mainly a dachshund, so I’m now a proud owner of a wiener dog. He’s named Marley, after Bob, not the book/movie. I’m also a big brother with Big Brothers Big Sisters. My little bro is thebomb.com and we’ve been hanging out for over 3 years now and have finished 4 adventure races together. I run another blog entirely focused on tennis called Roddickulous. I’ll try to keep my tennis posts all over there. Check it out!

I’ve been working in SEO and Social Media for a few years now and really find my specialty to be in content strategy. As you’ll see in Purifying Digital Content, I really see the future moving in the direction of quality content winning out over other SEO practices. I think in a lot of ways that’s why I’m such a fan of synergizing search and social strategies, ensuring that all online marketing revolves around high-quality, customer-relevant content.

 

Meredith Owen

Like Brian, I’m proud to call Austin home, and will have no problem telling you I think it’s better than Dallas (even though I’m from there).  It would be hard for me to tell you what I’m not interested in- but running, good music, and having time to work on my painting definitely make me happy.

I began my career in social media and research with interactive agency imc2, at a time when words like “user-generated content” and “virtual worlds” we’re first catching the interest of forward-thinking CMOs.  After moving to Austin, I spent two years at global public relations agency Porter Novelli, where I worked with clients like Hewlett-Packard as they learned how Twitter would have a profound impact on key business units (ie. customer service).  I became intensely interested in measuring this impact, which led to my current position as an analytics associate at WCG.  I joined Brian on this blog after realizing that our mutual interest in search and social- and individual experience working in these industries- had the potential to make for some really interesting conversations.