Factiva

Andy Beal, formerly the high-profile vice president of marketing at WebSourced, is running a new Internet marketing company that will compete with his old employer.

Beal left Morrisville-based WebSourced in July because of what he describes as philosophical differences. Beal expects his new venture's bread and butter also will be helping companies boost their rankings on Web searches.

But Fortune Interactive also will be a full-service interactive marketing agency offering services such as e-mail marketing and using blogs as a marketing tool. The new agency, which already has eight full-time employees, is housed in temporary offices in North Raleigh until it finds permanent space.

Beal, 31, co-founded the company with Michael Marshall, previously a Web-marketing consultant based in Virginia. The new agency, which already has eight full-time employees, is housed in temporary offices in North Raleigh until it finds permanent space.

Fortune Interactive will put a premium on customer service, but its "secret sauce" is technology developed by Marshall, who, besides being the company's full-time vice president of technology, is working on a doctorate in semantics at the University of Virginia.

"It is really going to give us an edge over all our competitors," said Beal, a native of England.

Fortune Interactive's technology, called SEMLogic -- SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing -- uses artificial intelligence to analyze industry Web sites and those of the competition. That information can be used to tweak the client's own Web offerings so that, when someone undertakes a search on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, the client's sites appear higher in the search results.

SEMLogic already has had a trial run with Cruise Network, an online travel agency based in Raleigh. As a result, the agency has been ranking No. 1 in Google searches for key phrases such as "online cruise bookings" and "group cruise bookings," said Erin Stroud, director of marketing at the travel business.

Fortune Interactive is working with a Raleigh personal injury lawyer, Beal said, but the attorney has asked not to be identified.

Cruise Network's parent company, Raleigh's George Enterprise International, was so impressed with the results that they invested in Fortune Interactive, Beal said. Executives at George Enterprise couldn't be reached for comment.

Beal declined to say how much George Enterprise has invested but said that "it has certainly put us in a position to grow."

Beal's former company, WebSourced, has expanded from 18 to 176 employees over the past five years. Beal became well-known in the industry while at Websourced. He acted as company spokesman and spoke at industry conferences, as well as writing and editing an industry blog. He sold that blog site to WebSourced last year but now is blogging at www.marketingpilgrim.com .

WebSourced is in an upheaval -- it reported a $1.4 million write- off for bad debt last month and recently fired two top executives.

Xavier Hermosillo, a WebSourced spokesman and a board member of its corporate parent, praised Beal as "one of the gurus of the search industry."