About Sozo Technical

Quick Facts

• Founded as Fine Brand Media, Inc. in 1997.
• Specializes in providing technical services for marketing teams.
• Principal Consultant: Rian Schmidt
  • MBA, Stanford University
  • Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, University of Minnesota
• Business Experience
  • Multi-million Dollar PPC Campaign Management
  • Vendor Assessment and Management
  • SEO-Aware Content Creation
  • Technology Project Management
  • Technology-related Marketing Strategy Development
• Technical Capabilities
  • Unix System Management (Configuration, Monitoring, Backup Plans)
  • Network Design and Management (Routers, Wireless, Firewalls)
  • Database Design and Management (SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL)
  • Application Development (Java, Ruby, C)
  • Server Configuration (Apache, Rails, Postfix, BIND)
• Service Available with 10 Hour/Month Minimum Retainer ($125/Hour)
• PPC Management at 10% of Spend ($2000/Month Minimum)

A Message from Principal Consultant, Rian Schmidt

I founded my first company, Fine Brand Media, Inc., shortly after earning my MBA from Stanford University in 1996. Having consulted on interactive marketing issues for companies including Silicon Graphics and Macromedia, I saw a need for on-tap Web site management services, and Fine Brand Media specialized in providing them to clients that included Hewlett-Packard, Lucent Technologies, First Republic Bank, and Fujitsu Consulting.

I came from an engineering and system administration background. Combined with my managerial experience and education, these technical skills provided a great basis to provide first-class consulting services to organizations struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change. Fine Brand Media earned and kept its clients because of our commitment to communicate clearly, improve constantly, and to represent our clients' interests to service providers as if they were our own.

As the dot-com implosion loomed, Fine Brand Media had developed three distinct specialties-- site management, search engine optimization, and technical development. It was at this time that I made the personal decisions to reduce the size of the business and relocate to Japan for a year. I spun off site management as the now independent Collaborint Web Management Services, and a small team and I continued to provide SEO and PPC services to The New York Times and others for the next several years.

During that time our technical work was focused on developing tools and reporting applications as well as the requisite systems work to maintain the databases and application servers that powered these multi-million dollar campaigns.

In fact, so much of what the company had really been providing to its clients for so many years was handy, trustworthy access to a source of broad technical skills and knowledge. Our Interact Web Work Request system is an easy-to-use Web-based Java application that continues to serve as the backbone of the Collaborint Web Management business. Our Ruby on Rails-based custom management and reporting suite, developed for The Times, hid the complex details of tens of thousands of keywords and hundreds of ads from the marketing staff and, instead, provided integrated, graphically rich reporting on data gathered from analytics and vendors.

From representing clients in the booth at a tradeshow to designing a more robust database configuration to provide for mirroring and fail-over, the underlying theme has been the creative, imaginative application of our technological skills and knowledge to management and marketing issues.

Sozo Technical is based on that idea. My team and I will act as our clients' technical team members. We'll be easy to talk to and unbiased about solutions. Our specialty is in applying these skills to the marketing function, but I believe that there are few businesses operating today that couldn't use a trustworthy technical adviser. Our perfect client would realize that need but want the flexibility that outsourcing to an external service provider can provide: no need to hire staff, the ability to retain less than full-time equivalent resources if appropriate, and an easy 30-day notification period to modify the contract.

Sozo Technical makes it easy for managers to leverage technology, remove pinch-points, and educate themselves and their staff so that they can better perform the jobs they were hired to do. Contact us today for more information on how we do the same for you.