Gregory Malenko

Gregory Serhiiovych Malenko
© Photo MyUkraineis.org

Kostiantyn Golubtsov

Updated: February 05 2024 at 08:01 pm
Source: myukraineis.org

Gregory (Grygorii, Hryhorii) Malenko (born June 17, 1986, in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR) is a Ukrainian entrepreneur, an expert in online reputation management and SERM specialist, founder of MediaMonitoringBot. Since 2017, he has been known as a philanthropist and volunteer, and since 2020 as a Kyiv City Council deputy from the Voice party.

Early Years and Education

After completing high school, he enrolled at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, specializing in "Software for Automated Systems," which he graduated from in 2009.

Career and Entrepreneurship

In 2007, before completing his university studies, Gregory Malenko started working at the Kyiv office of "Innovative Marketing Ukraine" (IMU) as a project manager developing and promoting software for the North American market.

Starting in 2009, he worked as a development director and from 2011 as a marketing and media development director for the media holding company OBOZ.ua, working on the development of the "Observer" portal. In 2010, Gregory Malenko led the rebranding and redesign of the "Observer" portal. His main task was to unite the media resources of the holding under a single brand - "Observer".

SERM

At the end of 2011, Gregory Malenko founded the agency "SERM" (Search Engine Reputation Management), which became the first Ukrainian agency specializing in online reputation management.

In 2014, SERM evolved into a comprehensive online reputation management agency. Since then, the agency has consistently held top positions in the rankings in the online reputation management market.

Gregory Serhiiovych Malenko (Grygorii, Hryhorii)

MediaMonitoringBot

In 2019, Gregory Malenko launched MediaMonitoringBot - a Telegram bot that performs rapid monitoring of Ukrainian media. The service was developed by the "SERM" agency team, but the project was presented as an autonomous business unit, which it eventually became.

In December 2019, Gregory Malenko received a certificate of appreciation from the Joint Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, signed by Valerii Zaluzhnyi, "for a significant contribution to the information struggle and counteracting Russian propaganda, high patriotism, and joint struggle for the Independence of Ukraine."

According to surveys among PR specialists in Ukraine, more than half of the professional PR consultants and representatives of profile agencies use MediaMonitoringBot as their primary tool for rapid media monitoring in Ukraine.

Educational and Public Activity

Since 2016, Gregory Malenko, as an invited expert, has collaborated with the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School. In particular, he lectures on "SERM & SMRM - Reputation Management in Search Engines and Social Media." Gregory Malenko is also a columnist for specialized publications AIN, MMR.

In 2017, Malenko founded the "Darnytsi" fund to assist the elderly, people with disabilities, and orphans. In May 2022, the fund launched the project "Ukraine is a big family," aimed at helping large families affected by the Russo-Ukrainian war.

In 2021, he created the NGO "Silver Kil Park" and initiated the creation of a park of 7.54 hectares around the Silver Kil lake in the Darnytskyi district of Kyiv. The design of the park around the lake began in 2021 under the leadership of Gregory Malenko, head of the NGO "Silver Kil Park" and a deputy of the Kyiv City Council.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Malenko began volunteering, helping battalions of Territorial Defense from various districts of the capital with necessary supplies.

In June 2022, he was one of the initiators to strip Minsk of its status as a sister city of Kyiv, and in September 2022, he called on the international IT community to introduce a mandatory adequacy test for IT specialists with Russian citizenship.

Since 2023, due to the large number of requests from the military, his fund began to assist in equipping the Defense Forces and transferred several dozen vehicles to various units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, a lot of ammunition, protective gear, and everything that was urgently needed.

In December 2023, the command of the support forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine awarded Gregory Malenko with the first-degree "Support Cross" military decoration.

Political Career

In 2015, Gregory Malenko began his political career. He joined the "Self-Help" association. He was a member of the public council at the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. From 2015, he headed the Darnytsia district organization. In 2017, he became part of the executive committee of "Self-Help" in Kyiv.

In 2018, he led the Kyiv city election headquarters of Andriy Sadovyi in the Ukrainian presidential elections. Gregory Malenko was announced under No. 35 in the list of candidates in the early parliamentary elections from the party in the summer of 2019.

In 2020, he led the Kyiv election headquarters of the political party "Voice" and was included in the party's electoral list for the Kyiv City Council under No. 5.

On December 1, 2020, during the first plenary session of the Kyiv City Council of the IX convocation, he took an oath and received a deputy's certificate. Earlier, Gregory Malenko was elected as the head of the "Voice" party faction in the Kyiv City Council.

Since 2020, he has served as the first deputy chairman of the permanent commission on architecture, urban planning, and land relations of the Kyiv City Council. In October 2021, he was the author of the project decision to appeal to the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine regarding the transfer of the building of St. Nicholas Church in Kyiv to the Roman Catholic community.

In July 2021, Malenko became a member of the political council of the "Voice" political party.

In December 2022, Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, Gregory Malenko, head of the "Darnytsi" Charitable Foundation, and Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko signed a memorandum on Taiwan's financing of the purchase of generators for Kyiv. At the beginning of January 2023, the first batch of generators arrived in Kyiv.

Scandals

In February 2021, Malenko supported the expulsion of deputy Kostyantyn Bohatov from the faction, who hit comedian Vlad Kapitsa during his performance.

On December 9, 2022, at a session of the Kyiv City Council, Malenko proposed to introduce an amendment to the 2022 Kyiv city budget to increase rental rates on land plots for residential development to 12% to increase revenue to the city budget and improve land use efficiency in the capital. Initially, the amendment was supported, but after an extraordinary break, the deputies rejected it, citing the budgetary regulation. Instead, Vitali Klitschko supported

the proposal and instructed his deputy to revise it and submit it for the next meeting in accordance with the procedure. At the session on December 16, Malenko again raised the issue of introducing the amendment to the budget. The Secretary of the Kyiv City Council assured that the relevant departments were working on the issue.

Hobbies

Gregory Malenko promotes amateur sports. He participated in international marathons and successfully completed marathons in Berlin, London, New York, and Paris. In July 2018, as part of the Ukrainian team Live.Love, he swam across the Bosphorus and earned the status of an intercontinental swimmer.