Each and every day I aspire to be a better; writer, blogger, digital marketer, social media extraordinaire, iOS visionary and serial outsourcer.
Year by Year
2011: Traveled to South by South West Interactive in Austin, Texas with 3 days notice to appear at a World Record Appreciation event. Proceeded to set (and lose) the fastest time to eat 3 ‘tim tams’ while crowd surfing. Went on to meet hundreds of people and gain outrageous inspiration.
2010: Graduated university, left the daily grind for greener pastures. Purchased first Apple computer, a Macbook Pro. Developed code to create custom corporate Facebook pages.
2008: Lined up for 6 hours for the first internationally released iPhone (3G).
2006: Commenced studying a Bachelor of Business – Management and Marketing.
2005: Graduated high school with no idea of what to do next.
2002: Discovered Adobe Premiere, spent hundreds of hours tweaking video.
1996: Enjoyed the revolution that was Windows 95.
1992: Finished Commander Keen 4 dozens of times on the family’s DOS configured computer.
Detailed History
Matt Kelly is a 20 something, based out of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. He typically doesn’t talk in the 3rd person, but for the purpose of this page, he has decided that he will.
Matt started out with a love for console gaming when he won an original Nintendo Game Boy/Tetris bundle pack from an ice cream stick promotion. This coupled with a DOS configured computer featuring Commander Keen 4, kicked off an interest in all things technology.
Through his school years Matt developed an interest in image and video manipulation, and quickly grasped a range of content creation tools. Utilising programs came relatively seamlessly, however any attempts at coding were found with more difficulty. It was at this point, in mid high school, when Matt developed an interest in marketing. He found that this was an opportunity to think about businesses adoption of new platforms rather than creating the platforms himself. He found himself doing work experience at a local radio station and helped out friends by volunteering his time when he could.
When Matt graduated high school and moved into university, the online social movement became evident. Myspace was soaring and there was an abundance of new and innovative platforms to communicate with.
Matt’s interest in social media and digital marketing was born.
Tracking companies promotional activities online and brainstorming innovative marketing strategies with friends using new media became a hobby.
While digital marketing became Matt’s passion he decided to stick it out and finish his Bachelor of Business at Griffith University. His studies focused on Management and Marketing, however he always found his assignments sneak in a digital approach here or there.
Throughout his university days, he worked on both a part time and full time basis for a large financial services organisation based on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. This work provided not only an income but an opportunity to travel and learn more about the corporate world we live in. Matt worked a number of roles ranging from international development for companies based on Singapore, Malaysia, China and Hong Kong through to software sales and marketing management. While his time in the financial services industry did not immediately build on Matt’s knowledge of the digital world, he constantly found ways of bringing forth his interest and knowledge of online marketing to promote and manage the PR of a number of software suites. Matt eventually parted ways with the organisation in December, 2010 and decided that it might be time to give the opportunities that continued to present themselves through consultancy a chance to grow.
One day in the final semester of his studies, after talking to a friend at university about the difficulty in customising corporate Facebook pages, Matt went to work. 3 days later, he had functioning code that could be implemented on any corporate Facebook page which facilitated custom landing pages, contact forms and could drive various other promotional activities. Matt’s code features today on a number of corporate pages to encourage users to support the business, ‘like’ the page, and interact with the brand. It was at this point that Matt realised he had to build out the aspects of his service offering that makes his approach truly unique.
After reading Tim Ferriss’s book, the 4 Hour Work Week, Matt began to test the opportunities available through outsourcing. Not necessarily for getting work done at little expense, but rather to find the best, most qualified, most reasonable partners to work with him on a range of projects. After coordinating a number of jobs, Matt realised that the key in managing international commerce is being able to identify and articulate exactly what you’re looking for. Developing this skill has enabled him to manage a wide range of web and app development projects with people from all over the globe.
Throughout 2010 Matt began to experiment with a number of social ideas in order to first hand experience the viral nature of social networks and their communication flow. The first experiment took place on April 28th 2010. Matt and a couple of friends created a Facebook group titled ‘If 1000 people join this group, Matt Kelly will eat…’ and in the description of the event, it read ‘4 medium cheeseburger meals, 4 large Coca Colas, 2 large chocolate sundaes’. Needless to say, at this point in time, he did not have more than 290 friends on Facebook, consisting of 30% friends from work, 40% high school friends, 30% university/friends from other places. Regardless of Matt’s personal networks, interest in the group spread like wild-fire. Within just a few days the group had over 1200 fans, hundreds of whom Matt had never met or even heard of, in fact after 3 days, Matt was unable to even track back through mutual friendships where many of these people had come from. This truly illustrated the power of viral networks and the ‘Rule of 3’, a rule Matt developed which demonstrates that the average Facebook user has 130 friends, if 3 of those 130 pick up and share a compelling message, the communication chain continues and develops rapidly, in fact based on those metrics, Matt identified that after 5 levels of communication a message will have had over 15,000 impressions.
In February, 2011, Matt and close friend, Dave Thompson broke a URDB world record for the longest distance ran into a high five, beating the existing record of 3.30km by setting a new world record of 4.20km. As a result of breaking one of the URDB’s most popular records, Matt and Dave immediately found a surprising amount of interest in them from the media. They were interviewed by a number of publications including Bloomberg’s Business Week Magazine. Long story short, Matt found himself in contact with Dan Rollman, the CEO of the Universal Record Database. Matt and Dave ended up traveling to Austin, Texas for South by South West Interactive. Matt proceeded to find himself in stage in front of thousands of people discussing the longest high five and then crowd surfed his way into the history books as the first ever world record holder for the ‘Fastest time to eat 3 tim tams while crowd surfing’.
It’s been an interesting ride for Matt Kelly to date, but one thing is for sure, as long as he continues to allow it, outrageousness will continue to occur!
