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Heardable's appointment of Jon Samsel as their new CEO counts as today's "Deal of the Day". There are very few guys out there that know what Jon knows about digital marketing, and fewer still that understand the interface between brands, the web, and the value of the new media relative to traditional media.

Heardable, which measures online brand optimization, is, speaking from the unvarnished point of view of a co-founder and angel investor, the perfect home for the man.

You could see this coming a while ago. Back in the day (actually, twenty years ago), when the rest of us were hanging out in LA trying to get our hands on a cell phone that weighed less than three pounds, Samsel was busy authoring a book about multi-media and a little thing called the World Wide Web.

I believe this was 1993, or thereabouts. We watched on, hoping that whatever "the web" was, it wouldn't bring him down when it proved to be but a passing trend.

Happily, that didn't happen. And since those heady days in Los Angeles, Samsel has moved on to work with a large number of big brands, both as a web marketing consultant (first at Apple, where he helped develop their worldwide developer network, then later at Cognitative, based in San Francisco, where he worked for Oracle, Cisco, Sun, to name but a few of their clients).

Later still, he moved to the C-Level offices, becoming founder and entrepreneur of RoadLoans.com, a company that later became an integral part of Ford's online strategy. Then at Countrywide, Samsel went on to perfect his talent at growing online businesses, something he continued to do after the merger, at Bank of America.

Since his early days in LA, Jon has mentored students as an adjunct writing instructor at UCLA and UC Irvine where he has taught courses in multimedia, fiction and non-fiction writing. His book, ‘Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business,’ co-authored with Laurie Windham, predicted many of the changes the Internet has had on businesses and organizational processes.

I'm excited to be back working with Jon and I look forward to seeing what direction he decides to take Heardable in. We're already riding a wave of solid growth (from just 50 users in November, we're now up to over 25,000 unique visitors a month - a pretty amazing number, on par with the early days of Compete - and growing fast.)

For those of you that haven't taken Heardable for a test drive, please go and plug your brand/domain into the tool at Heardable.com and see where you rank. Want to know where you stand in a given NAICS category? We just launched that too - but you'll need to sign up to peek at that.

Congrats Jon and good luck - here's to your/our success.