Joe Stradinger began his career as a CPA with Arthur Andersen. His first assignment was in Budapest, Hungary, where he performed business valuations to support the privatization effort of former Iron Curtain countries.

Joe eventually transferred to Arthur Andersen Business Consulting where he supported major telecommunications clients such as GTE and MCIWorldCom. In October of 1998, he co-founded Musicforce.com, the Internet's largest retailer focused exclusively on one of the fastest growing genres of music - contemporary Christian music. At Musicforce.com, he oversaw finance and operations as CFO and COO as well as a member of the board of directors. In July 1999, Gaylord Entertainment (NYSE GET) purchased a controlling interest in Musicforce.com at a valuation of $30 Million. The site and its management team formed the cornerstone of Gaylord Entertainment's new internet division, Gaylord Digital. As Gaylord Digitals VP of Strategic Development, Joe was responsible for all business opportunity development for the company including investments, acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and new-market development.

In 2012, Joe launched EdgeTheory, a conversation media company. EdgeTheory's platform creates, publishes and analyzes content at scale through proprietary conversation mapping & creation technology. The result for our customers is a greater share of the conversation that grows their market share.  

“We don't live in a search age anymore, we live in a find age. We have to go find people that aren’t looking for us.” - Joe Stradinger

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

• Content as a service: why you can’t have a conversation without content
• How EdgeTheory uses development engineers and conversation engineers to develop content
• EdgeTheory’s conversational maps that they use with clients to direct the kinds of conversations they need to have on social
• Why CMOs need to think of themselves as a publisher that builds a media company
• Why every company in every industry needs to own their conversation
• What people often misunderstand about social media
• The divide between the people who know what to say (those with experience) and those who know how to really use social media (younger employees)
• Why content creation is the new SEO

Ways to contact Joe:

• Website: edgetheory.com
• Twitter: @joeoptions
• Ted Talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5xHI4C2HwA