tony spencer

After several years of being in the same business in the same city with Andy Beal we finally got together for lunch. Walking through the open office space at Fortune Interactive was a much different experience than some of the other local sourced web (ahem) shops. Instead of a huge bullpen of sales people chattering away on the phones I see employees that appear to be writing content, sending emails, and sending reports (i.e. taking care of the customer). Instead of CTO’s that don’t know a user-agent from a response status code I see Mike Marshall, the brains behind FI’s SEMLogic and whiteboards with scribbling about Latent Semantic Indexing. Good sign for the clients.

While we didn’t have time for a demo (Mike was preparing for a client demo) Andy gave me run down of the technology. SEMLogic does exactly what my private set of tools has done for my business with great success. It captures masses of data from the current successful sites in the major search engines. It then aggregates that data into meaningful reports which enables Andy and crew to spot deficiencies and set targets for their own clients. Feed SEMLogic a keyword and it’ll give you timely, related keywords including LSI keywords ranked by a scoring system. It even goes a step further and groups clusters of exact match and LSA keywords and produces a 3D visualization of these clouds of nodes.

As many of you know I’ve found great success in analyzing and replicating the distribution of varied anchor texts in my competitor’s backlinks. You guessed it. SEMLogic is calculating off page factors as well. I asked Andy if FI will be offering clients link building services and he says yes so they pass that important test Jim. I have to say that is one of the most difficult services to provide but is also absolutely necessary if you actually expect to achieve greater targeted traffic for the client and its one service that the big local sourced web companies fails to provide.

Perhaps the most promising hint of the success of this young company is the attention to customer service. Beal tells me that Fortune Interactive has written its own policies such as minimum number of client phone calls per month, weekly reporting, much small customer to representative ratios than those found in other large SEM consulting firms. And the big customers won’t be left with one representative. The bigger the customer, the bigger the team allocated to them to ensure their success.

If Andy can keep Fortune Interactive’s focus on technology and the customer, I’d say the future looks pretty bright for this company.