Unmasked | Mike Levin Unmasked

SPECIALITY:

My specialty is search engine optimization. Back around 1997, I became a student of Peter Drucker's book, Managing in a Time of Great Change. He made the point that the mission of EVERY company was to get and keep customers. That message resonated so deeply that when I re-focused my career onto the Web, I was immediately struck by the role Search Engines played in doing exactly that. Since then, my specialty has been to synthesize these concepts with closely held "better-than-best-practices" search engine optimization. These practices are now the "secret sauce" in Connors' Search Engine Optimization products.

FAVORITE PASTIMES:

Poetry, reading, learning and applying new technology. I am a "new discipline" addict. I love watching the computer section of bookstores to see what topics have recently warranted new books. This lets me pick up on trends that are important, which I might like to learn. My latest is the universal modeling language (UML). Updating my Mike Levin site.

FAVORITE THINGS:

Learning from very sharp, very motivated people.
Applying technology in new and creative ways.
Mentoring.

PERSONAL STRENGTHS:

Quick at picking up and applying new ideas. Spotting trends & automating labor-intensive tasks. Simplifying complex ideas through illustration.

ASPIRATIONS:

Build the best Search Engine Optimization team in the world; in the process, catching the advertising & marketing world by surprise and changing the very rules of the game.

FAVORITE BOOKS:

The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
Selling The Dream, by Guy Kawasaki
Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions, by Peter DeGrace & Leslie Hulet Stahl
Managing in a Time of Great Change, by Peter F. Drucker

COOLEST THINGS:

Internet & The Web
Search Engines
Databases
Object Oriented Programming
XML
Java
.NET
Web Services
Adobe Creative Suite

PHILOSOPHY:

Use strong visual metaphors to guide you, such as the "weakest link in the chain," "spinning plates", and the 80/20 rule. In fact, I wrote a poem on that one, which I'll share...

The 80/20 friggn' rule --
Gotta' use it. It's a tool
Reducing clutter that we pack
Into our lives to hold us back.

When goals elude and time flies past
And with each step, you're still in last
Consider how you lost your aim
You'll find recursive tasks to blame.

With each thing you set to do,
A hundred more come fly at you.
Until at last, you quite forget
The goal for which you had first set.

The 80/20 Rule just asks
That you should start to plan your tasks
So when you're only one-fifth done
You could have stopped and still have won.