Eight Years of Influencing: The Amy Arnold Story
May 14th, 2015 by
Amy Arnold, director of research & development at Search Influence, recently celebrated her eight-year anniversary with the company April 30. Amy, one of Search Influence’s original employees, is known for her extensive knowledge of the online marketing industry, and her contributions to our company’s progression are something to pay tribute to (and also because she has some wicked dance moves).
Amy’s Journey
Amy’s journey before Search Influence began in advertising. She started her career working for the original Internet—you know, the Yellow Pages—where she sold ads in a phone book, which was a great advertising tool that has lost its value today. Next, Amy moved onto online advertising for phonebooks and was introduced to a load of technical elements. Picking up bits and pieces about HTML and coding along the way, she was able to develop basic Internet knowledge, which brought her here, to Search Influence.
In the beginning, Amy recalls late nights and weekends (say what?), and she describes the first two years as “weird and wild.” The work in the beginning had to be accomplished extremely quickly, and it was both difficult and time consuming; Amy says she truly had so much fun during these years. One of her most memorable experiences during her early years here was when she would sit around her kitchen table with other employees and develop training and processes that our team still uses today.
During her time here, there have been crucial changes to Google that affected our business in totality. In 2013, there were a combination of Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird updates that Amy remembers as a defining moment in our culture: “That was the time to take a critical look at things we were doing.” The company changed many processes that year because of these updates. In that time, Amy was reassured that although much was changing, many of the tactics and processes in place were tried and true and weren’t going anywhere. Growth like this is something that propelled our company to what it is now.
The Future of Online Marketing
The future of our business and the Internet as a whole is unpredictable, but Amy has her guesses: “Apps are going to become more important.” They are quite influential now, of course, and apps have a specific purpose because they serve a specific need. “Google wants us to provide a need to customers,” Amy believes, and apps are designed specifically to do that. Also, data security is a hot topic right now for Internet users, and this is a tangible thing Google can track. Amy predicts this affecting Google trust for businesses in the future (you heard it here first, from Amy Arnold).
When I asked her about some of her more memorable moments here, she mentioned how Will and his wife, COO and Co-Founder Angie Scott, decided to grow a local team here in New Orleans. She described it as an early stepping stone for the company’s maturity into what it is now. Even though Amy is utterly irreplaceable here at Search Influence, she had this to say about her time here: “Will and Angie had the vision and courage to make a pretty bold decision, and I’m happy to be a part of it.”
I used to live by this saying: “I’ve always dreamed of growing up to be Amy Poehler.” – Amy Poehler. Now I’ll be amending that to my new favorite Amy, Amy Arnold.
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