About

Hi. I’m Nathan Burke. This is my blog.

I’m a Boston-area startup marketing guy and can often be founding posting here, on marketingstartups.com, on twitter, and on Google+.

A Little Background:

I grew up in upstate New York in a small town called Hudson Falls, and moved to the Boston-area to go to Northeastern University. After one year as a marketing major, I decided that I wasn’t really learning anything in my marketing classes. I don’t want to sound snobby here, I’m just saying that spending a semester to memorize the 4 “p’s” of the marketing mix wasn’t really earth-shattering. But I was learning a lot in my electives and started to love Sociology.

In my second year, I switched majors and was hooked. I loved learning about how humans behave, organize, and create groups and societies.

As Northeastern is (was?) a co-op school, I alternated between being in classes and working. My first job was at a software company called Dimensional Insight. I was their Web Marketing Specialist, and this was the first time I concentrated on the promotional aspects of online marketing. This was back before we had something called Google, and I spent a lot of time submitting their site to directories. I then became their webmaster, and quickly learned html.

After DI, I briefly worked at BuyerZone.com as their affiliate marketing manager. Their affiliate marketing program was a mess, mostly consisting of scammers sending fake traffic to their site, and after a few months they decided to shut down the affiliate program. It was a really good decision.

My last co-op job was with GesmerUpdegrove LLP, a high tech law firm in Boston where I was their Webmaster for 7 years. It was a great learning experience, as I split my time between building sites, promoting them, and calculating metrics. The end of my time there coincided with the emergence of blogging and social media, and I was much more interested in writing and promoting than programming and coding.

While at Gesmer, I built, designed and launched:

• Gesmer.com- I designed and built the site and the CMS behind it in PHP/MySQL. I also designed the company logo still used today.
• ConsortiumInfo.org- I built this from the ground up in PHP/MySQL and the CMS behind it. The design is completely different now. At its height, the site was receiving hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month.
• MassLawBlog.com- Lee Gesmer’s excellent blog.
• OpenSourceLegal.org- Peter Moldave’s blog on open source software issues and law.

And LawFirmBlogging.com, which was my own personal blog about marketing law firms online. This was my first blog, and it was what really got me interested in social media. The blog was very popular, and gave me opportunities to speak at and attend events.

In 2007, I decided to leave the law firm racket, and joined a startup called matchmine. I joined as their Web Community Evangelist, and worked with the company from proof-of-concept to launch at DEMOfall 2007, to its demise in October of 2008.

After consulting for a few months, I joined SaaS Data Management startup Aprigo in March of 2009 as their Marketing Manager. We changed the name to something much more descriptive: CloudLock, and I’m now the Director of Marketing.

If you’d like to contact me, feel free to email me at nathan dot burke at gmail dot com, or you can find me on linked in at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanwburke