CHAD E. ELKINS

BACKGROUND

I began my career in the financial services industry immediately after finishing up an undergraduate degree at Georgia Southern University where I double majored in Economics and Political Science.  At the time of my hiring, I was the youngest broker at Morgan Stanley and focused my efforts in the bond markets.  I decided to leave Morgan Stanley and move over into the online financial world in order to help establish a new Capital Markets Trading division at E*Trade.  While at E*Trade during the rise of the Internet stock bubble, I found that I had caught the online bug and decided to work on a MBA in E-Commerce at Georgia State University at night.  Upon completion of this degree I moved away from the financial services industry and took a new role at Earthlink as the Manager of Network Infrastructure Planning.  

At that time, Earthlink and Mindspring had just merged and then subsequently purchased One Main Internet which created an extremely large and inefficient physically owned network.  I spent the next three years leading the charge to consolidate approximately 700 physical network locations around the country and helped migrate all of Earthlink’s traffic over to more robust third party provided platforms that were both cheaper and gained a much better economy of scale.  Based on the cleanup performance of the network architecture, I moved over into the front end web content interface side of the house at Earthlink in order to help that business increase profitability by creating a new web analytics group.  As the Manager of Web Analytics and Product Management, I deployed a variety of both internal and external online traffic metric monitoring systems and established a line of KPIs in order to utilize this new data to enhance the content product offerings and tailor the user experience on the sites.  Over the next several years I was given increased ownership responsibilities with regard to not only the content side of the business, but also the commerce storefront as well.  As the Senior Manager of Internet Product Strategy & Analytics I led the charge to help push Earthlink deeper into the world of search engine optimization and online marketing, defensive and offensive domain asset management strategies, and sponsored an initiative that created a means for Earthlink to serve up highly targeted advertisements to customers across their online properties.  

Shortly after surpassing my 7 year tenure mark at Earthlink, I left the private sector for one within a government agency by accepting a role with NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).  There I currently work as an IT Architect in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer by assisting mission program and project managers with their data modeling.  While at NASA I have also helped to increase collaboration among departments by leveraging technological advances in internal portal sharing methods and assisting users with adapting to these digital mediums of information exchange.

I feel that I have a unique online skill set that is rooted with experience across a wide range of areas that would be highly beneficial to companies needing someone who not only understands the details, but can understand the broader impact as well.  Because of this wide exposure and ownership of multiple areas at Earthlink, I am afforded a much better insight of the end to end overall user experience online from not only a product management perspective, but an analytical, marketing, and commerce thought process as well.  Having served in other capacities with financial institutions and a government agency shows that I have been exposed to and able to adapt accordingly to a multitude of both work and process environments.

In my spare time I enjoy spending time with my two huskies, taking in an Atlanta Thrashers or Braves game, or fueling my passion for movie watching and video games.  Even in my spare time I can't seem to pull myself away from the Internet and spend a lot of it updating blogs and keeping up with friends thru various digital social mediums.  I also enjoy donating my time to various animal charities and organizations as well as volunteer work for Historic Oakland Cemetery.  There I spend time not only at the park giving tours, but handle all of their online media efforts as well.  I have built Oakland's social media presence from the ground up and over the past year have cultivated the largest and most active digital presence of any cemetery in the world.  

Recently, I created a new local effort called Foursquare Atlanta that was originally used to create and help promote Foursquare Day events and deals around Atlanta.  The concept has now evolved into a resource point for all Atlanta Foursquare players looking for assistance with problems, sharing Foursquare product news, and to help communicate events/deals around the metro area.  This concept (the first of its kind) has since been emulated by cities, countries, & regions all over the world that have used 4SqATL as their example.  Foursquare Atlanta is still the largest and most active of all the Foursquare user communities in the world and continues to grow daily.