Welcome to my personal site. Everyone asks me; “Why cosguru?” The answer is simple. It is the way to pronounce my real name! People call me “Cos” and my last name was always a mystery. So I always would tell people “Ghiurau” sounds like “guru”. Its that simple. Of course I also love applying it to what I do as a career.

Since 1994 I am immersed in all things interactive online.

My journey began while attending College for Creative Studies (1994-1998). While there I wanted to share my portfolio work with everyone I could, so the idea of creating a “homepage” with all of my work was a no-brainer! After self teaching myself the basics of HTML and applying my personality in design. A homepage turned into helping family and friends to create their own websites.

After graduating CCS, I held a steady “job” while trying to work on developing my interactive skills. I began a local web design company called” vTroy Internet Solutions” that transitioned into a new venture to tackle an emerging technology called “WAP” back in 1999-2000. This new venture was called “JumpEye Creative Media“.

JumpEye transitioned in 2002 into a full service web development company when I partnered with a friend from my birth country, Romania. At the end of 2005 this led to a hard decision to leave the automotive industry (General Motors Styling Studios) to full self-employment. For the next couple of years working together with my partner we grew the company to a point where it was time to move on to a new venture.

In 2007 BOSSdev called me to help them as a Solutions Architect for a growing company in the web, casual gaming, application development, and a mix of interactive marketing services. It was a perfect opportunity to join a healthy startup that was already in the space for a couple of years but wanted to strategically bring on board industry experts to continue to grow!

This allowed me to connect and work with various account directors and interactive experts at major ad agencies in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and throughout the US, along with opportunities to work with Executives and Brand Directors for multiple Fortune 500 companies.

While at BOSSdev I became the Social Media Architect for the company providing strategy and solutions that resulted in measurable success for our client base. As the subject matter expert in Social Media I was given multiple opportunities to speak at conferences, workshops, and webinars.

• Dec 2008 – Social Media, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly – Webinar
• Dec 2008 – Social Media Marketing Results Workshop – Houston, TX
• Jan 2009 – Social Media and Measureable Results Workshop – NJ/NYC
• Feb 2009 – Social Media 202 – Chicago, IL
• March 2009 – Wrapping your head around the Social Media Phenomenon – Webinar over 2,000 registrants!

As an active professional in the interactive industry I have had the opportunity to partake in various industry conferences such as Ad:Tech San Francisco and New York, AdAge Digital, OMMA, and others. Locally I have been a active proponent of networking events ( #module09 ) and Tweetups ( #rotu09 ) and even organizing the first ever “Breakfast Tweetup” in the Metro-Detroit area.

My career blog “Social Media Core” is an area where I share a lot of my direct thoughts on Social Media strategy, measurement, and technology reviews. Social Media Core has been used as a resource for popular content such as:

• Top 3 Social Media Measurement Tools
• Top 25 Free eBooks on Social Media
• 5 Steps to Automatically Add Twitter Followers

My first major introduction to “online communities” was back in 2002 when I founded and grew the web community; “royouth“, the largest ethnic Romanian youth community. By early 2009 royouth has grown to over 30,000 members and close to 500,000 discussion posts and conversations. royouth is now a self moderated community and continues to be a destination for ethnic Romanian youth.

As an embracer of emerging technology I always set my sights to find out what the “next best online tool” will be and how this tool will impact my life, career, affect me as a consumer, and how companies are able to capitalize on this tool.

So enough of the self broadcasting. Feel free to continue to poke around my personal blog as I share the lighter side of my steps online. Will you follow me?

Contact Me

Phone: +1 (248) 686-1050 (Powered by Google Voice)

For more info, please feel free to contact me: cosmin [@] cosguru dot com or connect with me on:

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