Our topic for this month’s roundtable is ‘Social Media” and how companies are embracing it. The roundtable will cover what companies may or may not be doing in regards to social media and how they can leverage it to best benefit them. We will be touching on many issues from best practices, user engagement, relationship building, brand building, consumer communication, mobile, and customer acquisition.
We have a great group of companies and people for this event as they comprise successful startups, industry executives and investors. You can see a complete list with brief bios below.
Trendrr: Trendrr captures and illustrates accurate, real-time market intelligence in an easy-to-use, digestible format. Users can track pre-set data sources or review others’ graphs to discover trends as they happen.
Attending: Mark Ghuneim, Founder & CEO
Twitter: @trendrr
Foursquare: Foursquare is a location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. They are all about helping people find new ways to explore the city. It allows you to meet up with friends and allows you to earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people.
Attending: Dennis Crowley, Co-founder & CEO
Twitter: @foursquare / @dens
Appssavvy: Appssavvy connects web publishers and developers with the world’s largest and most visible brands, specifically around widgets and applications. It provides advertisers with contextually-relevant targeted media opportunities reaching an audience of more than 50 million unique online consumers enjoying social media application
Attending: Michael Burke, Co-founder & President
Twitter: @appssavvy
Affinitive: Affinitive is a Word of Mouth (WOM) and social media marketing and technology
company. It engages, empowers, and connects passionate consumers by giving them the tools to express their passion for the brands, products, services, and causes they love, thereby cultivating conversation, long-lasting loyalty, and sustained awareness.
Attending: Bob Troia
Twitter: @affinitive / @bobtroia
MTVN: Joshua Dern, Former SVP & GM Social Media
Joshua is a senior digital media exec, artist, and designer. He has spent over 15 years creating digital experiences for some of the best known media brands. Most recently he was SVP & GM of Social Media for MTV Networks.
Barnes & Noble: Kevin Ryan, VP Social Media
A social media strategist with deep roots in all facets of content and social commerce, Kevin Ryan leads customer engagement communities for Barnes & Noble, including the company’s online book clubs, the My B&N reviews and recommendations platform, its blogs, and its presence on Facebook and Twitter.
He started the First Look Book Club, a forum that generates early buzz for pre-release books, and established the search-and-share feature that commerce-enabled the company’s discussion boards. Before Barnes & Noble, Kevin built and managed content programs at a number of consumer websites.
Twitter: @KevinSRyan
Hachette Filipacchi Media: Todd Anderman, SVP, Digital Media
Todd Anderman, named Senior Vice President, Digital Media, for Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. in January 2008, is responsible for the company’s web sites, mobile business as well as other emerging platforms. Over the course of Anderman’s career, he has successfully built and expanded a number of brands in the digital space.
Hearst Magazines Digital Media: Matthew Milner, VP, Social Media
Matthew is the VP of Social Media for Hearst Digital Media. He received his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, and his BA in literature from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school, Matthew worked in marketing and business development in the music business. After completing his studies at Kellogg, he worked in Sales & Trading on Wall Street, most recently at Lehman Brothers. He left Wall Street to write a romantic comedy called Guy Critical, and soon launched a site to market his novel. That site, originally called GuyCritical.com, “Where Women Can Ask Guys Anything,” eventually grew to become a social media platform called Answerology. Answerology was acquired by Hearst Digital Media in 2008.
Outbrain: Yaron Galai, Angel Investor,Co-founder and CEO,
Yaron is the Co-Founder and CEO. Prior to founding Outbrain, Mr. Galai was Co-Founder, SVP of Quigo, Inc. (www.quigo.com), a provider of performance-based marketing solutions for advertisers and premium publishers. He previously served as the CEO of the company for three years. Quigo was acquired by AOL in December 2007. Previously, Mr. Galai was Co-Founder & VP Business Development at Ad4ever, a developer of rich-media advertising technologies for the web which was later acquired by Atlas (a division of aQuantive – www.aquantive.com). Earlier, he was the Founder of NetWorks Web Design – an SEO and web design firm. At NetWorks he oversaw the production and search engine optimization of over 30 websites.
Blog: www.webx0.com
Twitter: @YaronGalai
Bessemer Ventures: Sarah Tavel, Associate
Sarah Tavel is an Associate at Bessemer Venture Partners. She focuses on the software, eCommerce and Internet sectors and has been closely involved in the Diapers.com, Metalogix, Yodle, Cornerstone OnDemand, Onestop, and CPower investments. She also is involved with Bessemer’s investments in Intego, OLX and Parallels.
Sarah joined BVP in 2006. Earlier, she was a consultant for The Kerdan Group, a startup strategy consulting firm.
Twitter: @adventurista
Blog at www.adventurista.com
EDventure Holdings: Esther Dyson, Angel Investor
Esther is a long-time catalyst of start-ups in information technology in the US and other markets, including Russia. Since selling her company, EDventure Holdings, to CNET Networks in 2004, she have taken on newer challenges in private aviation and space as well as in health care (as a director of 23andMe, a consumer genetics company). Esther’s IT investments have included Flickr and del.icio.us (both sold to Yahoo!), and Medstory (sold to Microsoft), as well as Meetup, Eventful.com, Boxbe and Voxiva. Esther is also an active investor in air and space, with holdings in Space Adventures and Zero-G Corporation, as well as XCOR Aerospace, Constellation Services International, Coastal Technologies Group, Dopplr.com, Airship Ventures and Icon Aircraft.
Twitter: @edyson
