An Interview with Tony Adam – Senior Manager of Online Marketing at myspace

Tony Adam is currently a Senior Manager of Online Marketing at myspace where he heads up all aspects of SEO and Viral Marketing. He is also the Founder and Principal of Visible Factors, an Online Marketing agency and Advisor for Ranker.

Tony Adam Interview

You have a history of working with some of the largest companies in the industry, which usually means you have to manage people across a variety of disciplines. What tips do you have for our readers on how to coordinate large teams?

It is a very tough task dealing with multiple teams and even multiple teams across the verticals. Much of it is developing the right relationships with the right people, and, even almost everyone. Also, constantly chipping away at projects, constant open communication, creating documentation or streamlining peoples work load is also a way at getting things done.

What project management tools do you use or recommend for people with large web teams?

I really don’t use many project management tools outside of Basecamp. I use that for everything related to project work and keeping things in a central location. But, overall, I am more into the relationships and not the tools. Tools are more effective for organization.

What are the biggest obstacles you’ve run into when trying to optimize a site as large as myspace?

Optimizing large sites is an issue on many levels. From the index standpoint, you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and with myspace, hundreds of millions of pages in the index. It’s very important to understand what is and what isn’t important and filter them out of the index, so your important content is being crawled frequently. Also, it’s crucial to understand how to build templates and modules that are re-usable and already SEO friendly from the beginning.

Aside from that, there is the off-page optimization like Social, PR, Link Building, etc. that go into getting links to a site like ours. That scale us very hard to understand, because, you can just go out and get a few links and be done with. It’s tough to move the needle, so finding strategies that do, matters.

On average, what percentage of time does your team spend on the following SEO efforts (would love it if you could give us a little insight as to why, too):

• Optimizing site structure: 20% – Site structure is about understanding the crawl rate, optimizing robots.txt, figuring out what pages need to be no-indexed, etc. After all that, I’ll look at Cross Linking between verticals and other internal linking initiatives.
• Optimizing on-page ranking factors (e.g. title tags): 20% – This is an ongoing process as projects come up for redesigns or engineering resources free up. I usually also try to create a set of guidelines that are easily implementable by front end engineering teams. This usually will take care of it and then it’s pretty much maintenance mode.
• Link building: 30-40% – I usually end up spending a lot of time here because it’s the fun part of my job and where I get to think outside the box. The other thing is that most times with bigger sites you can’t do ANY link building outreach or paid links for the fear of being called out or even worse, having parts of your site removed from the index. This is where you have to be strategic about things like Biz Dev partnerships, content creation, PR, and widget distribution. The other thing is that there is a very deep index of pages and URLs that need links and you have to think about that scale…it’s a VERY tough problem to solve.
• Content creation: 30% – Content is a very important part of SEO, bottom line. I spend a lot of time working with and educating editorial teams on how to weave keywords into content and creating the right headlines and titles. But, also, a big part is spent now working with these teams how creating the right content that spreads virally and targeting the right bloggers for outreach. At the end of the day, my goal is to make content visible and it’s important to realize not only what search engines want, but, more so, what people want to share, because that is what is going to get me links at scale.

It has to make life easier working with such a trusted domain on the web like myspace, right? What types of advantages do sites like myspace have over your traditional website?

Working with myspace has a lot of positives when it comes to SEO and being a trusted domain. Because of the scale and trust, our content gets indexed very quickly and is constantly being crawled. But, furthermore, new content can have a lot of trust applied to it right away. This allows us to rank, now, we won’t rank very highly right away, because that takes time and links, but, there is almost always and instant movement up in initial rankings.

Tony, you are one of the most prominent and well-respected speakers in the industry. Do you have any tips for new speakers in the industry?

First of all, I’m humbled to hear that and appreciate that…I really love to speak and love to share the knowledge that I gain daily. I think there are a few things that are important:

1. Don’t try to BS your way through things, it will become very obvious that you are
2. Let your personality come through in your speaking, if you try to conform to speaking standards or any of that, you’ll seem uncomfortable
3. Relax and remember that you were chosen to speak to a group of your peers, share the knowledge you have gained and again, don’t BS, just be real about it.

Between conferences and your responsibilities at myspace, where do you find the time to stay up-to-date on the latest marketing trends? Any favorite blogs you follow?

To be honest, sometimes I get too busy to keep up with my reading, and I get way behind and start to hate myself for it. But, when I’m not that busy (read as: almost never) I usually read SEOMoz, SEOBook, and Search Engine Land for the latest in the industry. Also, I try to monitor Twitter as well for conversations people are having or the stories people are tweeting that could be talking about new trends, issues, etc…

BlueGlass LA was one of the first major conferences you helped organize. What did you learn from your experience as a conference organizer?

I learned that organizing and running a conference is one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done in my career. From hand selecting speakers, to the programming of the agenda, it was all very challenging and nerve racking – all the way untill the last session. I have a great deal of respect for the people that do this daily, and I would never want that to be my full-time job. I’ll leave that to the pros!

Thanks for all of your great insight! How can our readers keep in touch with you?

Thank you for taking the time! Readers can follow me on twitter, friend me on myspace, and email me if they have any questions.