With a growing number of marketing activities taking place online today, the search is on to find the best way to market to online consumers. In this panel, we’ll discuss how influencer marketing may just be the ticket everyone has been waiting for and how best to use it. Influences are at the top of the knowledge dissemination pyramid. Look at “RT @guykawasaki” and you immediately get a sense of the power influencers have to spread information. They have a unique ability to surface interesting information and package it in a way that makes people want to click-through and act, whether through purchasing or retweeting. The idea behind influencer marketing is that it centers around identifying influencers, marketing to them and then marketing through them to reach the consumers whose attention they hold captive. With this tactic comes issues, like how do you identify top influencers in things like traveling, fashion or even cupcakes? It’s no easy task. Computational algorithms and semantic analysis however have progressed to the point where technology can now allow us to locate influencers in any topic in the world. In this panel, you’ll hear from the experts dissecting online influence and the marketers employing such maneuvers to intelligently reach their audience on their own turf.
Anthony is a senior editor at VentureBeat, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining the site in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com.
Joe Fernandez is the Founder and CEO of Klout. Physically constrained while his jaw was wired shut for nearly three months, Joe began to develop a deep fascination with the evolution of influence within the social web. The way individuals could instantly broadcast questions, opinions, and ideas to their trusted network sparked his curiosity. In 2008, Joe started Klout in an effort to help businesses understand this individual user impact by providing context around who a person influences and what topics they are particularly influential in. Klout is currently the standard for influence on the social web.
Previously Joe provided data solutions to experts within the Real Estate industry as Director of Innovation and Research at OnBoard Informatics. In 2003, Joe cofounded Evalulogix, actively helping over 5000 school districts meet their special education reporting mandates for compliance with NCLB and IDEA.
Joe grew up in Las Vegas and attended University of Miami and Oxford University.
Sloane Berrent is the founder of Answer With Action, a digital communications and marketing strategy consultancy specializing in cause-based campaigns. A former Kiva Fellow, she is the co-creator of “Cause It’s My Birthday,” a nationwide malaria prevention campaign. In January 2010, Sloane attended the World Economic Forum as the citizen journalist for MySpace and The Wall Street Journal. She is a nationally recognized speaker on community building and “cause-filled living” and writes on her blog, The Causemopolitan. Currently co-residing in New York City and New Orleans, she co-founded NOLAlicious, a weekly e-newsletter about New Orleans and organized the first CrisisCampNOLA and Gulf Coast Benefit series and the newly released Help A Woman Out. You can also find her on Twitter (@sloane). Sloane has been featured in articles in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, CNN, Psychology Today, LA Times, LAWeekly, TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Mashable, Triple Pundit, among others and has been published in GOOD, PopTech, WhatGives?! and on the official blog for the United Nations. She was named a top Twitter influencer at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative by Waggener Edstrom and named a “top woman to follow” on Twitter by Forbes.
