Influencer Profile: Scott Shockley
August 3rd, 2011 by
This week’s profiled Influencer is Assistant Production Manager Scott Shockley. Originally from the Greater New Orleans area, Scott graduated from LSU in 2008 with a degree in Marketing after four years in Baton Rouge. He’s worked for a tech startup and Capital One, as well as serving as Tulane University’s Marketing Manager.
Scott exemplifying the professional demeanor we strive for at SI.
He finds himself interested in the technical side of marketing and business and appreciates SEO’s demand for these skills on a daily basis. Scott’s also a longtime Influencer, tied with developers Luke Ledet and Doug Thomas for longest-tenured Production member — all three have been with us since the company was based out of Will and Angie’s living room!
What do you find yourself doing on a day-to-day basis? Any particular skills you’ve had to develop since joining SI?
One of my biggest responsibilities is making sure that approximately 600,000 words per month are in proper order, not misspelled and make sense, and that approximately 21,600 links per month are intact and functioning properly. I spend a lot of my time looking for issues, fixing some and having good training in place to minimize errors. We do a great job at getting a massive amount of work done and it’s mostly because the work we do as individuals comes together like a nice smooth roux at the end of every month.
At Search Influence I’ve learned a ton about management but also the technical skills required to work in this industry. I have also learned that you actually can go to Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge for several hours after work, with coworkers, and still have a job the next day.
You were recently promoted from an Internet Marketing Associate to Assistant Manager of the Bad Boyz of Production. Congrats! How’d the changeover go?
It wasn’t much of a change because it has been a constantly evolving progression for the last year. I’ve done almost everything in Production, from editing websites to being the subject of a horribly corny snakes in a can prank (Psych! I played along to be a good sport). I was here near the inception of the Production department and wanted to get my hands as dirty as possible from the beginning.
Is there anything you’d like to be doing more or less of around the office? In a perfect world, what would you be doing all day?
It would be pretty awesome if Will retired and made me CEO, but I don’t see that happening any time soon! It would be pretty cool to do some statistical research about correlations between all of the known SEO variables and rankings on search engines. I’ve also always fantasized about trading lives with Just Blaze or Diplo.
Does keeping track of the hundreds upon hundreds of content we process every month get overwhelming? How do you deal with it?
It’s usually not overwhelming because the training process is so thorough that we usually don’t make very many mistakes. On top of that, when I export task data from our project management system, I plug it in to one of the sickest spreadsheets known to man [=SUMPRODUCT(–(input!C2:C2000=””&A14&””),–(input!D2:D2000=”Deferred”))], and it warns me about many of the problems we might be having.
Scott Shockley's own smoked pork shoulder.
What do you find yourself doing outside of SI? Any cool projects?
I’m trying to redesign my currently ugly, but juiced up website to promote 24 hour restaurants in New Orleans, mainly because I love SEO but I also love to eat. I’m also into cooking, especially smoking food, and will be roasting my first whole pig this Labor Day! On top of that, I manage to find time to tell all the jokes that are too inappropriate to tell at work.
The editor would like it to go on the record that she appreciates both inappropriate jokes and copious amounts of pulled pork. Thanks for all the work you put in wrangling writers, content and SI employees, Scott! We’ll be back in two weeks with another exciting Influencer profile.
