Profile
Pulse Digital Media
Matthew Melucci is an award winning digital media specialist and founder of Pulse Digital Media. He currently serves as director of content strategy at Stony Brook University where he oversees integrated marketing efforts and content creation and distribution across the university's media platforms. In addition to his award-winning work building digital strategies for businesses such as Beliefnet.com, CNN and Sonicnet/MTV, he led the social marketing company LoveCinema.com to be named a Top 100 up-and-coming technology business in North America.
In the past 14 years, Melucci has founded and helped develop several other innovative companies with business models built around social interactions, technology and digital promotions. His passion is in operating businesses online and developing innovative marketing, product and business strategies for smart companies.
In the past six years, Melucci helped build two of these pioneering Web sites focused on social media as a tool for marketing and community. The two companies are Houseparty.com (www.houseparty.com), started in 2005 and currently netting more than $18 million annually through partnerships with major companies such as NBC/Universal, Microsoft and TBS, and the recently launched film community at LoveCinema.com (www.lovecinema.com).
Melucci has also lead the build of social networking platforms for the award-winning spiritual site at Beliefnet.com, CNN.com's iReport and Doubledown Media's TraderDaily.com. Prior to this, he was one of the founders of Sonicnet.com, a premier music destination purchased by MTV for $152 million in 1999.
Melucci’s team of digital specialists introduced LoveCinema to the market via an application on Facebook called Celebrity Friends (http://apps.facebook.com/lovecinema/home) and quickly built a strong user-base there. They launched the community and released a wireless mobile application for iPhones in the span of one year. As a Red Herring Top 100 award winner, Melucci’s team beat out hundreds of other smart technology companies for LoveCinema’s innovative approach to social marketing and community building.
Melucci’s entrepreneurial philosophy is built on the notion that by identifying and aggregating highly influential audiences through smart technology and design and then creating a community of fans around great content, business can open powerful channels for distributors and marketers to target these fans. What’s more it’s cost effective and scalable for industries used to spending tens of millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns.
Melucci has worked as an executive for large and medium-size corporations as well as start-ups and enthusiastically continues the course he set out on at Sonicnet.com back in 1996, striving to build new media businesses that challenge the conventions of industry by introducing tools that redefine the business-to-consumer and business-to-business experience.
In turn, these technologies boldly disrupt the foundations of media in the 21st century.
He is a writer and former journalist for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner, Maxim magazine, Writer magazine, SF Magazine and numerous publications nationwide.
Since 2001, Melucci has served as an assistant professor of graduate level Media Studies and undergraduate Writing/Journalism at The New School in Manhattan.
Degrees Held
Master's Degree in Creative Writing, Wesleyan University
Bachelor's of Arts in Magazine Journalism, Syracuse University
Bacherlor's of Science in Pyschology, Syracuse University
Awards And Honors
- Red Herring Top 100 Winner, LoveCinema, best tech companies in N. America (2010)
- Communications Director, Exec Committee, PA, Whitby School, Greenwich, CT (2010)
- Winner of Hired Guns Top Consultancy Award for innovative social platforms (2008)
- National Magazine Award for Online Publications, Beliefnet (2007)
- Scripps-Howard National Journalism Award, Investigative Reporting, Sonicnet (2000)
- ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, Excellence in Journalism, Sonicnet (2000)
- Webby Award, Best Music Site , SonicNet.com, (1997, 1999)
- Yahoo! Internet Life Award, Best Teen Portal, Katrillion, (2001)
- Yahoo! Internet Life Award, Best Music Portal. Sonicnet, (1998, 1999, 2000)
- Wammy Award, Best Music Portal, Sonicnet, (2000)
- Volunteer Web Marketing, Raised $240,000 at online auction, Whitby School, (2010)
- Best Headline Award, first place, Hearst Publications Inc., (1996)
- Panelist speaker , First International Media Online Conference, Brazil (2007)
- Panelist speaker, Interactive Media Conference, Miami, Fla. (2007)
- Breaking News Award, first place, Conn. Society of Prof. Journalists, (1992-1993)
- Literary Award, finalist, William Faulkner Short Story Competition, (1994)
- iBreakfast Web 2.0 member of organization of new media professionals (2007)
- ASCAP member, (since 1987)
- SCBWI member, (since 2000)
Portfolio
My Pulse Media