Vendor Council
VENDOR COUNCIL COMPANY MEMBERS:
Biz360 provides market intelligence to Global 2000 decision makers so they can take action to shape their market and improve their competitive position. Our flagship offering, Market360®, continuously analyzes global news and information together with social media to deliver timely intelligence on perception, influence and marketing impact. Visit Biz360’s MarketIQ blog for sample reports.
With more than 9000 customers, iContact allows organizations of all sizes to easily create, send, and track email newsletters, RSS feeds, and blogs through its leading email marketing software iContact. Market leaders like Vonage, International Paper, ReMax, Century 21, Nissan, Ford Motors, Centex Homes, and United Colors of Benetton use IntelliContact to build stronger relationships with their customers and prospects at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods. IntelliContact 4.0, designed for the SMB market and IntelliContact Enterprise, designed for mid-sized to large organizations, are both available at www.icontact.com
Business Wire, a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, is the global market leader in commercial news distribution. Thousands of member companies and organizations depend on Business Wire to transmit their full-text news releases, regulatory filings, photos and other multimedia content to journalists, financial professionals, investor services, regulatory authorities and the general public worldwide. In fact, Business Wire has the most comprehensive news and disclosure network in the world. We originate hundreds of thousands of news announcements each year, with a dramatic impact on capital and commercial markets around the globe and in virtually every industry sector.
Influence moves markets. It’s a basic tenet of marketing. But until now, it’s been impossible to understand influence — and who wields it — within specific conversations taking place in social media. BuzzLogic changes this dynamic by uniquely defining and measuring influence in social media, and by surfacing the key influencers who are shaping and defining markets, issues and reputations. Through the lens of influence, BuzzLogic provides a means for marketing and communications practitioners to engage with social media in order to manage their brands, reputations, products and customer relationships. As a result, the confusion that has characterized social media is replaced by clarity – marketers can make sense of the conversations they care about. And they can do something about them. At BuzzLogic, our mission is to apply the science of influence to the world of social media. This requires keen insight into dynamic conversational networks, a methodology premised on the idea that influence is in and of itself dynamic, and an ability to identify which participants in conversations are gaining or losing influence over time. This is very different than “blogger A-lists†or other imprecise measures that can identify only who is popular, but not who is influential. And it is very different from the brand monitoring and analysis services that can describe what a small sample of bloggers was thinking a few weeks ago, not what is happening right now. Only BuzzLogic brings both clarity and confidence to action in social media. BuzzLogic’s service enables brand and product marketing managers, corporate communications professionals, market researchers and customer service managers to actively monitor conversations that are taking place around their company, brand, products or competitors. They can quickly identify who the most influential participants of a conversation are. And they can engage with them to offer an alternative point of view, amplify key points or set the record straight. Once they are participants themselves in a conversation, they can then follow, track and understand the impact of their actions.
Cymfony, a market influence analytics company, scans and interprets the millions of voices at the intersection of consumer-generated and traditional media. Our award winning platform, Orchestra, integrates innovative technology with expert analysis to identify the people, issues and trends impacting your businessâ€â€at the speed of the market. Combining powerful automated analysis with expert human interpretation, Cymfony provides products and services that deliver intelligence on consumer preferences, competitor strengths and weaknesses, and other information critical to a company’s reputation, brands, products and employees. Cymfony works with marketing, research and PR professionals worldwide, offering a range of packaged services that address areas such as consumer-generated media strategy, consumer opinions and trends, customer satisfaction, PR measurement, and reputation management.
Since July 1999, NextPage has been dedicated to building profitable document applications for our clients. The company is currently focusing on an innovative approach to desktop document management. NextPage enables enterprises to manage and control the risk of Microsoft Office documents on the desktop with powerful document tracking services. With our patent pending document tracking technology, enterprises can securely track over 7.5 billion Office documents that are sent as e-mail attachments, stored on users’ desktops and removable media or saved to centralized servers.
nooked is the leading provider of web-based RSS marketing solutions for businesses and organizations. With our easy-to-use wizard, unlimited feed creation capability, search engine optimization integration, RSS tracking and reporting and high deliverability, nooked makes it easy for you to communicate with your customers and visitors - and keep them coming back!
Not another blog search engine, right? Well, if you’ve used Opinmind already, you’ve seen that we’re not your everyday blog search engine. Type any subject into our search box and you’ll find people with opinions (good and bad) on your topic of interest. We hope that you’ll use Opinmind to discover and connect with people with similar hobbies and interests. We also hope that you’ll use Opinmind to learn about people with opinions that differ from your own. Most of all, we hope that you’ll have fun using Opinmind to discover bloggers all over the world. Right now, we’re a small team that is working everyday to improve Opinmind for you. We’d love to hear what you think. Give us your feedback by sending us an email.
Performancing.com’s mission is to create a home for professional bloggers, a place where those that want to make money from their blogs can learn, and perfect the art of making a living from weblogging.
The Personal Bee is a brand-new, new-media company with one foot planted firmly in Silicon Valley and the other on the other side of San Francisco Bay in the Berkeley Arts and Commerce District (yes, there really is such a place). In a nutshell, we’re dedicated to helping information producers and consumers capture the essential buzz from the roar of information washing over us all everyday. We believe that smart analysis of the information torrent coursing through blogs and mainstream news sites, coupled with the abilities of smart, aggressive and ambitious human editors, will help accelerate the evolution of our news media. The first expression of our thinking is The Personal Bee as you see it today: a collection of news editions personalized to your way of thinking, drawing from a panoply or sources, both novel and traditional, on a wide range of topics. It’s our startâ€â€and we’re glad you wandered by to see it.
PR Newswire is the global leader in news and information distribution services for professional communicators. Now in its 52nd year, PR Newswire Association LLC provides electronic distribution, targeting, measurement, translation and broadcast services on behalf of tens of thousands of corporate, government, association, labor, non-profit, and other customers worldwide. Using PR Newswire, these organizations reach a variety of critical audiences including the news media, the investment community, government decision-makers, and the general public with their up-to-the-minute, full-text news developments. Established in 1954, PR Newswire has offices in 11 countries and routinely sends its customers’ news to outlets in 135 countries and in 40 languages. Utilizing the latest in communications technology, PR Newswire content is considered a mainstay among news reporters, investors and individuals who seek breaking news from the source. PR Newswire’s leading brands and services include ProfNet, eWatch, MEDIAtlas, MediaRoom, Search Engine Optimization, MediaSense and MultiVu. PR Newswire is a subsidiary of United Business Media plc of London.
Six Apart has offices on three continents working to help people everywhere communicate using the Web. We hope we’re making it easier for you.
Social Platform LLC was founded by Eric Schlissel in 2005 to address the growing need for social applications. Schlissel quickly brought Joe Stump onboard to architect a system for increasing business impact through social applications unlike any other in the marketplace. Social Platform brings a unique, hands-on business model to this market segment, enabling its customers to get all of the upside of extending their business through social applications, with none of the headache. By creating a scalable, extensible, enterprise-grade solution, Social Platform can address the broad range of features that businesses want to deploy today, with the ability to easily roll in new features continually and address emerging technologies. Its flagship product, Social Platform Enterprise is a complete hosted offering for delivering branded, high-end social applications. Its enterprise-grade, white label solution integrates with a customer’s existing online offerings and scales to meet future growth.
Socialtext Incorporated makes enterprise social software for collaboration. Socialtext captures the best features of web-native tools called “wikis” and “weblogs” and brings them inside your enterprise to create a collaboration and knowledge tool that works the way people do. Traditional groupware and knowledge management tools use top-down constraints: pre-defined roles, workflows, and categories. Socialtext takes a bottom-up approach to collaborating and empowers people to develop their own solutions. With Socialtext, people form groups flexibly, and build lightweight structure on the fly, as part of getting their job done — without needing design or coding skills. As Socialtext CEO, Ross Mayfield, says, “Simple tools with simple rules yield the best results.” Socialtext is social software that groups can actually use to make themselves and their organizations more productive, while building trust between participants. When people collaborate, good things happen. Since 2002, over 2000 organizations — from business, non-profit and academic sectors have become part of the Socialtext network.
Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.†But it all started with blogs. A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it. On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster. The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second. Technorati. Who’s saying what. Right now.
PRWeb™ was founded in 1997 by David McInnis to solve a big, gnarly media problem: “Where did my press release go?†This question plagues startups and Fortune 500 firms worldwide. PRWeb solves that problem by ensuring clients the most internet and search engine optimized press release distribution platform in the world. Then we add additional performance assets that further increase visibility, syndication and compatibility. We can confidently say that we deliver more media exposure and direct-to-consumer results than anyone in the industry for a fraction of the cost. Not convinced? Simply do a web search for us. The results tell our story. And you’ll see the majority of the results are all about you, our clients. Everything we do and every technology we develop accelerates your media message into the places your customers look to find your products, services and solutions. Bringing media to the masses. Complex internet solutions made simple. Your message, freed from the restrictions of corporate firewalls and pushed into the web through RSS, email, photo, podcast and video. That’s the power PRWeb International has brought to more than 60,000 journalists and media outlets, 170,000 clients and 50,000,000 visitors. In English, French, Spanish and Chinese. Our mantra is simple: PRWeb is The Online Visibility Company©. Our stable of degreed editors helps maintain journalistic integrity of your message. Every press release, podcast, image and video message is run through a rigorous editorial process. As a result, our viewership seeking quality, timely information continues to increase at an unprecedented rate.
With 2.2 million registered users, WebEx is the global leader in on-demand applications for collaborative business on the web. These
applications enhance high-touch business processes, such as sales and
training, with efficient web-touch interactions. As an on-demand
provider, WebEx is able to facilitate both internal and external
collaboration. WebEx delivers its range of applications over the
WebEx MediaTone Network, a global network specifically designed for
the secure delivery of on-demand applications. WebEx applications
support multipoint videoconferencing, web conferencing and
application remote control. WebEx is based in Santa Clara, California
and has regional headquarters in Europe, Asia and Australia. Please
call toll free 877-509-3239 or visit www.webex.com for more information.
VENDOR COUNCIL MEMBER REPRESENTATIVES
Christopher Alden, Executive Vice President, GM, Professional Division, Six Apart, Ltd.
Christopher J. Alden oversees the Movable Type and TypePad product lines of professional blogging software and services. Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company, acquired Rojo Networks, Inc., creator of an innovative RSS feed reading service, where Mr. Alden was co-founder and CEO. Before Rojo, he was CEO of Red Herring Communications, Inc., publisher of Red Herring magazine – described by the Wall Street Journal as the “bible of Silicon Valley†– which he helped launch out of his house in 1993. Prior to that he founded Computer Guides, a consultancy, and taught computer studies at Crystal Springs Uplands school. Mr. Alden also has a background in real estate development and hotel management, having worked for Western Land Corporation and Woodside Hotels & Resorts. In the non-profit realm, Mr. Alden is board chair for Peninsula Bridge, which offers academic enrichment programs for low-income middle school students to motivate and prepare them for success in the next steps of their education. He is also a founding board member of SV2, the largest venture philanthropy partnership in the Bay Area, and is a founding board member of Lead21, an influential political organization formed by entrepreneurial business leaders, for entrepreneurial business leaders. A former board member of the SF Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Alden currently sits on the advisory boards of the Pacific Research Institute’s Center for Technology Studies and the Tuck Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship. He was awarded the Business Leadership Award from the Anderson School of Business at UCLA in 2000 and graduated with a degree in history from Dartmouth College in 1992.
Brian Glover, Senior Manager, Market Strategy, Biz360
As senior manager of market strategy for Biz360, Brian Glover is responsible for activities that support the company’s product direction and market adoption efforts. He has seven years of experience in marketing and public relations. Prior to Biz360, Brian was public relations manager for Documentum, acquired by EMC in 2003. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley .
Chuck Hester, Director of Corporate Communications, Broadwick
Chuck Hester is the Director of Corporate Communications for iContact, the developers of the web-based email marketing software. With more that 27 years experience in marketing, public relations and branding, Chuck has worked with technology communications with a wide spectrum of concerns, from TEAC to the Department of Defense Technology Transfer Program. He has worked in both agency and corporate settings, as well as running his own marketing communications consultancy for seven years. An instructor at the college level in marketing, business writing and Branding, he currently teaches at Duke University . A convert to the Social Media way of life, Chuck blogs at Forward Moving – a blog for young PR professionals www.forward-moving.com .
Ross Mayfield, CEO & Founder, Socialtext
Ross Mayfield is a serial entrepreneur with over 10 years of startup executive management experience and a focus on helping people and companies communicate effectively. Most recently, Mayfield served as VP of Marketing for a Fujitsu spinout developing enterprise software for the telecommunications industry and as Interim VP of Marketing for an Immersive Group Simulation provider to military and homeland defense markets. Previously he was CEO of an enterprise risk management software company. Mayfield co-founded and served as President of RateXchange (AMEX:RTX), the leading B2B commodity exchange for telecom. RateXchange reached $1 billion market capitalization, raised over $45 million in equity and debt and generated a thousand-fold return on investment for initial shareholders. His management of marketing led to majority market share, perceived leadership in its market category and recognition by Forbes as “The Best of the Web.” Mayfield served as the Marketing Director of the largest privately held telecommunications group in Eastern Europe and was the internal lead manager of their Initial Public Offering. He also founded an ISP, a web-design company and has served on a number of Advisory Boards of high tech startups. Mayfield is a former advisor to the Office of the President of Estonia and began his career in the non-profit sector. He holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program of the Anderson School of Business. He resides in his hometown of Palo Alto with his wife and two children.
Eric Schlissel, President & CEO, Social Platform
Eric Schlissel is president and chief executive officer of Social Platform. Prior to Social Platform, Schlissel formed Be Computing, Inc., in 1998. The company specialized in software and hardware integration for government agencies and Fortune 1000 clients. Be Computing was an early champion of the open source movement, delivering workstations with open source operating systems to the scientific community. In 2000, Be Computing was re-launched as Geek Teknologies, Inc., a web consultancy to small and medium-sized businesses focused on web hosting and development. Schlissel began his consulting career in 1996 by starting his own company, Ornaco Technologies, which specialized in small office networks. Schlissel grew up on Long Island, where his love of computers grew throughout elementary and secondary school. In the early 90s, Schlissel spent time on BBS systems and became fascinated with the possibilities and impact of the Internet.
Ted Shelton, Founder & CEO, Personal Bee
Ted has a long history as an entrepreneurâ€â€Prior to founding The Personal Bee he spent time as COO of Orb Networks, Inc; as CEO and co-founder of The Dr. Spock Company; CEO of Israeli-based Neta4 Technologies; and was the first outside executive recruited to WhoWhere? Inc., the eighth-largest Web property in audience reach at the time it was acquired by Lycos in 1998. From 2000 through 2003 Ted served as the chief strategy officer for Borland Software Corporation, helping to reposition Borland as a strategic vendor of life-cycle development infrastructure from its prior history as a tactical vendor of development tools. In prior lives, Ted also led a development team for CMP Media, a high-tech media company, Swiss Bank Corporation (now part of UBS), and was a founder of IT Solutions, Inc., a software development company focused on the NeXT computer.
Laura Sturaitis, Vice President of New Media Development, Business Wire
Laura Sturaitis heads up Business Wire’s Media Relations, Content Licensing and ExpertSource teams in the U.S. and Europe. She is responsible for the comprehensive and timely delivery of Business Wire client news to print, broadcast and online media organizations worldwide using Business Wire multi-platform delivery methods; and for developing new tools for the delivery and use of the Business Wire file. Laura is based in South Florida and was Business Wire’s Florida Regional Manager for eight years where she directed the marketing and editorial functions for Business Wire’s clients in the State of Florida, The Caribbean and Latin America. In 1999 Laura was on the team which developed the sales and marketing initiatives for Business Wire’s Smart News Release powered by Newstream a joint venture of Business Wire and Medialink, the global leader in the production and distribution of broadcast video services. Newstream was the first web site to provide services to online journalists, by giving them access to free multimedia news content such as photos, logos, graphics, animation, video and audio from corporations and organizations worldwide. Laura has been a featured speaker at several national conferences on topics such as multimedia, new media technologies, media relations and online communication strategies. Prior to joining Business Wire in 1992, Laura was founder, VP and general manager for International Business Chronicle, a biweekly newspaper covering international trade issues in the Southeastern United States, The Caribbean and Latin America. She was responsible for the marketing, sales, circulation and business operations of the company. She began her career at the Miami Herald and later joined The South Florida Business Journal as circulation and marketing director. Laura has served on the Board of NIRI, The National Investor Relations Institute’s South Florida Chapter and was Past President of the American Marketing Association’s Miami Chapter. She holds an MBA from Florida Atlantic University and a BA in English and Communication from St. Thomas University in Miami, FL. Laura enjoys travel, music, films, crafts, reading and taking courses on diverse subjects at the local community college. She has the distinction of being a former Jeopardy! Champion.
Cydni Tetro, VP of Product & Corporate Marketing, NextPage
With more than 13 years of high-tech product management and marketing experience, Cydni Tetro directs the strategy and execution of NextPage’s global marketing initiatives including product marketing and strategy, brand management, market research, marketing communications. Cydni was named as a 2005 vSpring Capital Top 100 Venture Entrepreneurs (v|100), and is the co-founder of the Marketing Executive Forum. Prior to joining NextPage, Cydni oversaw the Novell Directory Services (NDS) product management group at Novell and managed Novell’s NDS technical support and escalation team. She has also served as an IT manager for Nu Skin and as a tester and beta manager for WordPerfect Corporation. Cydni holds a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brigham Young University.
George A. Vazquez, Jr., Director, Targeted Distribution and Trade Media Relations, PR Newswire
In his current role, George manages national trade media relations and an array of targeted distribution services. George also serves as a resource and provides insight to PR Newswire clients on the evolving role of Social Media and PR Newswire’s role in helping expand the reach of the traditional press release. Prior to assuming this role, George most recently served as our Manager of Content Syndication where he played a proactive role in expanding the breadth of our online news distribution. George started his PR Newswire career as the U.S. Hispanic Media Specialist and General Market Media Relations Manager for the Southeastern United States. In this role, he established and maintained relationships with the General Market media in 10 states from Florida to Arkansas and with the Hispanic Media throughout the U.S. In addition, he also worked closely with PR Newswire’s Multicultural Markets department to develop national strategies for reaching and maintaining relationships with the growing Spanish-language media. With more than 10 years experience in television and radio throughout Florida including WFOR-CBS-TV, WSVN-FOX-TV, WHQT-FM and WTKS-FM, he has been a news promotions writer, producer and editor, in addition to serving as on-air talent for radio stations in Orlando and Miami. Prior to joining PR Newswire, George was as an account executive for a Miami area PR firm where he specialized in travel and tourism accounts, among others. George holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Broadcasting and Political Science with a minor in History from the University of Miami. George is a member of the Vendor Council of the Society for New Communications Research.
Jiyan Wei, Product Manager, Vocus
Jiyan Wei is product manager with Vocus, where he assists with the development of new media strategies and provides oversight for PRWeb. Jiyan obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 2000 from Georgetown University, where his areas of focus were English culture and performance, and classical music. He completed a Masters of Science in media and communications at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2006, where his dissertation studied power dynamics in online communities. He is an active member of the Social Media Club, Advertising, Marketing, and PR Society of the LSE (AMP), Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) and currently maintains a blog, Ether Breather (www.etherbreather.com), focused on culture, media, and technology.
Jeff Weinberger, Product Marketing, WebEx
Jeff Weinberger has spent more than 20 years helping companies
create, adapt to and capitalize on disruptive change in their
markets, technologies and businesses. His unique ability to incite innovation and his acute sense of the obvious have helped industry-leading companies such as SAP, Sun Microsystems, Ernst & Young and BellSouth (now AT&T) Wireless, along with smaller companies of which you’ve likely never heard separate from the competition, re-define their businesses, and create breakthrough leadership. Jeff is applying his disruptive energy to the field of marketing, working to invent new ways to use collaboration and communications to
develop communities and create compelling thought-leadership, genuine
engagement and stronger business relationships. Currently, Jeff is responsible for WebEx’s solutions for sales; he is working to help WebEx’s customers reap the benefits of new communication and collaboration technologies. Jeff is the author of the Disruptive Marketing blog, as well as a co-founder and board member of the
ChicagoGSB Technology/Venture Capital Network and a member of the
steering committee of MENG (Northern California). Jeff has been a
featured speaker on high-tech marketing and start-up issues at
various industry symposia, conferences and webinars. Jeff received his MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and his BA in Computer Science and Economics from Columbia University.
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