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North Potomac's 'Social Media Swami' Hired As Bozzuto's VP of Digital Marketing

Fourteen years after leaving India for America, North Potomac's Shashi Bellamkonda is selected as one of 25 Minority Business Leader Awards recipients from Washington Business Journal.

Update: April 1, 2013

After spending more than five years as senior director of marketing for Web.com/Network Solutions, the "Social Media Swami" is on to his next challenge.

The Bozzuto Group, a Greenbelt, MD–based real estate services company, recently named North Potomac's Shashi Bellamkonda vice president of digital marketing.

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Bellamkonda will be responsible for creating innovative and highly effective digital marketing strategies for the six divisions with The Bozzuto Group and its clients, according to a news release. He will also serve as the company's in-house expert and lead educator on new interactive developments, and will oversee all of the company and community websites.

Original Post: Feb. 29, 2012

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Before becoming the “Social Media Swami,” Shashi Bellamkonda had to take a giant leap of faith and seek a fresh start.

The North Potomac resident was living in his native India, overseeing a staff of 150 people at a logistics chain when he decided to bring his wife and child with him to the United States. Bellamkonda didn’t want to grow old and not feel like he had taken every opportunity to be successful, he said.

Fourteen years after coming to the U.S., Bellamkonda has found his success, selected as one of 25 recipients of the Washington Business Journal’s 2012 Minority Business Leader Awards.

“It was quite a pleasant surprise,” Bellamkonda, now 49, said. “I met current and past awardees and there is a lot of enthusiasm. I’m lucky to be associated with people like that.”

Bellamkonda is also a two-time selection of Washingtonian Magazine’s 100 Tech Titans for the D.C. area. The recognition provides a special validation for his work, he said.

After taking classes at Montgomery College and balancing a full-time restaurant job, Bellamkonda started with Network Solutions in its customer service department, he said. He would work his way up the ranks with a new job “every 2-3 years” before landing in his current role as Senior Director of Social Media where Bellamkonda works with customers to create content for small business, helping them with community outreach, he said.

“There comes this moment of discovery,” Bellamkonda said, “that if you can reach people and answer the questions they’re asking, you have maximum impact.”

And Bellamkonda finds ways to be impactful in both his professional and personal life by applying his knowledge of social media and using it to help his friends, he said.

He’s taken his trade to Bombay Bistro, helping its chef get his blog off the ground. Bellamkonda’s also befriended his optometrist, Dr. Alan Glazier, and inspired him to start using social media.

Around late 2005 to early 2006, Glazier said he noticed his practice was dying and with some guidance from his patient, boldly abandoned traditional marketing platforms for social media.

“[Shashi] is a visionary in a lot of ways,” Glazier said. “He has the ability to point out stuff to me that’s going to take off well in advance."

In this case, Bellamkonda suggested there might be an opportunity to drive attention to Glazier’s practice and save money, Glazier said. He proceeded to spend six months building his social media presence and search engine optimization and “saw a huge uptick in business for Q4,” Glazier said.

“[Shashi’s] mastered the social side of it,” Glazier said. “A lot of people claim to be ‘Swamis,’ but he really knows how to use the medium they way it’s meant to be used.”

Using the success of his own business model, Glazier wrote a book – Searchial Marketing: How Social Media Drives Optimization in Web 3.0 – and sought Bellamkonda’s input within his areas of expertise.

In addition to his role at Network Solutions, Bellamkonda also teaches new media platforms at Georgetown University where he tries to bestow the same knowledge he worked so hard to acquire since coming to the U.S.

"You really see the students grow," he said. "Teaching is a form of learning, and you learn every day in life."

He can be followed on Twitter at @ShashiB and on his food blog, Carry On Curry.


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