Hometown: Colorado Springs, Colo.
Resides: Los Angeles
Education: B.A., English and communications, Adams
State College, Alamosa, Colo.
Defining moments: “One defining moment was the
IPO (initial public offering) of Digital Think. Working
with the guys who started that company and going
through the whole IPO development process — I call it
my ‘Pocket MBA.’ It taught me how to converge brand
marketing and direct response. It really developed
my skills online. I worked 60, 70, 80 hours a week
sometimes, but it was fantastic. Another had to be
when I bought my business, Licensed Learning, which
operates under a DBA as Open TrafficSchool.com. That
was my first foray into E-commerce as a business
owner. It changed how I looked at building a Web
business online. At Borba, I was able to take what
I did at Open TrafficSchool.com and leverage those
experiences to apply them to a much larger business
for E-commerce.”
Greatest career accomplishment: “My book, Not
Another Bald Man Book: How Women Can Win Online,
is 80-percent done. Publishers are talking to me about
it now. That’s been huge for me. It’s about building
your own Web business, whether it’s for a frame shop
down the street or building something from scratch.
Anybody can have a Web business, but making it
successful is a different story.”
keting message or on a Web page, I have
a mobile or Web application — a button
or something — that says, ‘Send to 5
friends.’ That’s collaboration. Or what if,
in that E-mail, there was a link to Kaboodle — one of the largest social networking, E-commerce product-oriented Web
sites out there. What would it look like if
I could add the offer to my Kaboodle site?
Or if I could access my Kaboodle site from
my mobile phone? E-mail and Web alerts
are great, but it’s just the first step. Marketers have to think, ‘How do I turn that
into collaboration and community?’”
Again, though, she cautions marketers
to think and look past those buzzwords.
And while she says Borba was exploring,
with varying success, the value of connecting with major social media sites like
MySpace, Facebook, You Tube, Kaboodle
and others during her stint, she contends
that marketers new to the social media
area should begin internally. “What they
need to be wary of is looking at social
media in too broad of a perspective,” she
says. “My advice would be to start little.
Social networking can be as small as adding a discussion board to your Web site.
That’s the beginning of community. It
can be as little as user-generated content
like product reviews.”
As she moves into her new role,
McKenna sees social media and mobile
as the next great steps in cementing the
Internet’s dominance as a direct response
marketing outlet. And, she says, they fit
her overall vision of the direct response
space, of which she is an unabashed
booster.
“The message I would give to any
small, medium or large company is that
DR marketing works,” she avers. “It’s
measurable, it leaves you accountable. It
gives you the information that you need
to build your business.” ■
