“Remarkable digital marketing agency” BlueGlass has proven to be anything but recently, with a messy public dispute among managing executives in the failing U.S. office. BlueGlass is one of the most well known SEO companies (currently) in existence, having been formed by top SEO companies and leaders in the industry. The merging of these major names in the industry formed the ultimate SEO company.
Founded in 2010, BlueGlass quickly created a considerably reputable name for itself for providing expert SEO, social media marketing and paid search services as well as hosting a very popular, well-attended conference, BlueGlassX. Their seeming success makes the news that the company is shutting down and cannot meet their financial obligations that much more shocking.
Over the past several weeks, a private Facebook group was formed entitled What Happened to BlueGlass. Within the past few days, the group was set to “open” (meaning public) by former BlueGlass President, Greg Boser. On April 12th, Boser publicly posted about the latest news:
I mentioned earlier that my requests for someone at BG to initiate the legal proceedings (that a majority of voting shareholders had agreed needed to be done) were met with a response of “we’re working on a plan.”
Tonight I received Kevin Gibbons plan. Or, I should say I received his demands. The short version is Kevin has demanded that we turn over control of BG to him for a period of 3 months so he can do due diligence and try to save the company from bankruptcy. And if we don’t comply, he is going to sue us.
He also demanded that I make him admin of this group so he could moderate (i.e. prevent anyone from posting anything negative) the comments.
I am not going to comply with any of his demands. Instead, I am going to focus on initiating legal action to force the proper closure of the company.
My final advice to all of you is to call your credit card companies and initiate charge backs on the tickets you purchased. The chances of any conference happening in 3 weeks given the can of legal #$$ Kevin has just opened is as about as close to zero as you can get.
Though Boser has been the most vocal of the former BlueGlass executives, Chris Winfield, founding member and CMO, shared some of his thoughts on the situation, and Patrick C. Price, Managing Director of BlueGlass EU, posted a YouTube video with more details.
President Greg Boser has an extensive background in SEO, having developed and executed winning online marketing strategies in some of the world’s most competitive spaces. Boser has worked with small businesses, VC-funded startups, interactive agencies, Fortune 500 companies and search engines.
CMO Chris Winfield began his career in Internet marketing as Vice President of SpiderFuel, a web development company in 1999 before moving onto his role as Director of Business Development with Spike Recording, creating a website and a highly effective SEO strategy for the recording studio. From there, Winfield became the President of 10e20, LLC, a premier social media marketing company before merging the business into BlueGlass Interactive.
Patrick C. Price held several noteworthy positions with well-known online marketing companies in Switzerland, including Head of Business Development, CMO and finally Chief Commercial Officer for Scout24 Schweiz AG, an online marketing company headquartered in Flamatt.
While there hasn’t been an official word on whether or not the BlueGlassX conference is still happening (schedules for May 21st and 22nd in Los Angeles), the list of speakers is impressive. Some noteworthy featured speakers include:
- Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager for Google
- Brian Piepgrass, Internet Marketing Manager for Facebook
- Cameron Olthuis, VP of Search & Social Strategies for CBS Interactive
- Joanna Lord, VP of Growth Marketing for SEOmoz
- Lauren Vaccarello, Senior Director of Digital for Salesforce.com
- William Sears, Senior Manager, Search Marketing for Disney Interactive Media Group
..and many more. This “two-day digital marketing conference that transforms lives” features not only hand-picked, world-class speakers, it also offers ten advanced sessions:
- Mastering the Evolving Search Landscape
- You Need More Than Just ‘Great Content’ to Build Killer Links
- What Everyone Should Know About Growth Marketing
- The Session You Don’t Want Your Competitors to See
- Agile Marketing – How to Test, Learn & Build Your Way to Search Success
- Local & Mobile Search Mastery: Advanced Techniques and Strategies
- The Secrets to Mobile App Success
- How to Get More from Organic by Leveraging Paid
- The Social Media Metrics that Matter & How to Measure Them
10. Digital Marketing in 2014 and Beyond
Currently, it remains undetermined what will happen with BlueGlass. Many employees have been laid off, BlueGlass clients have lost money on SEO services that have been paid for and the conference that is just a few weeks away has paid attendees and will likely not be held. We’re following the latest news and you can too by viewing the Facebook discussion.