Advisory Board
Social Media Week San Francisco is currently forming its Advisory Board. Follow @SMWSF on Twitter to receive real-time updates and alerts.
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Syed Kashif Ali
Social Media Monster, Monster Inc.
Syed has been involved in both the social media marketing and journalism industry for the past five years. In his current position as Social Media Monster, he is in charge of overseeing and implementing the tactical execution as well as high-level initiatives across all of the company’s social media channels, product launches, tradeshows and events. Furthermore, he is tasked with exploring other avenues to increase Monster’s digital presence via new partnerships, tools and methods, while also evangelizing the importance of social internally with the company and integrating it into its blueprint for success across all facets of business operations.
Syed receive his Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from San Francisco State University and can be found on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
Raanan Bar-Cohen
VP, Media Services, Automattic
Raanan Bart-Cohen has over 15 years experience as an entrepreneur and innovator in the digital media space. Raanan currently serves as Vice President of Media Services at Automattic, which contributes heavily to the WordPress Open Source project and runs a number of online services including WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, IntenseDebate, VaultPress, and PollDaddy. Raanan blogs often at http://raanan.com and can be followed @raanan.
Michael Celiceo
Sr. Director, Bite Communications
Michael brings 15 years of PR experience to the table, having worked with a variety of technology companies, including Microsoft, as well as with organizations dedicated to issues advocacy like NetHope. Before joining Bite, he worked at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide and before that he worked at Schwartz Communications and at TailorMade Software. On a daily basis he is in touch with influentials up and down the media food chain — from traditional media outlets from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NPR, AFP and BBC to new media influencers at Mashable, TechCrunch and The Huffington Post.
Michael earned his bachelor of arts degree in International Relations from California State University at Chico and studied business at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He can be followed at @mceliceo.
Melissa Chanslor
Account Director and Digital Strategist, Text 100
Melissa Chanslor is an account director and digital strategist at Text 100 North America, focused on integration of social media with traditional communications and marketing efforts to meet business objectives. She consults clients across Text 100’s U.S. client base about social media strategy and program development, and supports the agency’s digital innovation and business development efforts.
Additionally, Melissa is currently the account lead for Adobe, American Express and NXP. Recognized for her ability to achieve maximum value and results, Melissa’s experience spans B-to-C and B-to-B communications. She has a track record of leading successful communications, and has worked with premier brands such as Cisco, eBay, PayPal and Synopsys.
Jason Clarke
Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, Text 100
Jason Clarke, Vice President, heads up marketing and business development at Text 100.
Jason has over 15 years of experience as a business development and marketing professional servicing the technology market. Jason joined Text 100 from Bite Communications, where he’s held the role of role VP of business development and marketing for over seven years; two years in London focused on the EMEA market and three years in San Francisco servicing the North American market. Jason was responsible for raising Bite’s profile with senior marketing communications executives through a variety of integrated programs to drive growth in the North American market. Over the last five years, these programs helped generate targeted leads to build out Bite’s impressive portfolio of enterprise business-to-business and business-to consumer clients in the technology sector. Previously, Jason led business development at Lewis PR and marketing at Boston-based IT consultancy, Synetics, where he led nationwide strategic partner marketing programs.
Jason has a Bachelor of Arts degree in both English Textual Studies and Geography from Syracuse University, New York.
Todd Defren
Principal, SHIFT Communications
Chris Di Cesare
Head of Creative Programming, Creative Lab, Google
Chris Di Cesare joined YouTube as the Head of Marketing in October 2007 to oversee all marketing efforts for the top video sharing site. Since joining Chris has played a role in many of the major marketing programs completed by YouTube, including the Webby award winning event YouTube Live and the highly successful YouTube Symphony Orchestra. In March 2010, Chris became the Head of Creative Programming at Google’s Creative Lab where he oversees major programs for the company, including YouTube. He served as executive producer for the highly regarded program, YouTube Play, in partnership with the Guggenheim Museum to surface the world’s best in video creativity. This online program closed with a globally streamed event reaching an audience of over 10 million users and generated international press coverage.
Prior to YouTube, Chris spent 12 years at Microsoft in product management and marketing leadership roles. He served as the creative marketing lead for the launch of Halo 3 and has been actively involved in many notable product launches all while spearheading marketing efforts involving the fusion of entertainment, technology and content.
John Earnhardt
Director, Corporate Communications, Cisco
Earnhardt started the first blog at Cisco in 2005. He is now Director of Social Media within Corporate Communications. He manages the social media team responsible for the “The Network: Cisco’s Technology News Site” and other corporate communications channels such as the corporate blog and Facebook page, Twitter @CiscoSystems (2010 B2B Twitterer of the Year), LinkedIn, Ustream and Flickr site. He also manages the PR team’s media strategy, corporate op-ed program, broadcast media strategy and executive media training. Follow Earnhardt on Twitter @urnhart.
Gordon Evans
Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Radian 6, Salesforce.com
Gordon Evans leads product marketing for Salesforce Radian6 at salesforce.com. He is responsible for the messaging, positioning and go to market strategy for Radian6, the world’s leading social media monitoring platform. In the past six years at salesforce.com, Gordon helped build salesforce.com’s award-winning public relations and social media teams, and launched some of the company’s most exciting initiatives, including the AppExchange and Force.com. Gordon lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.
Mark Evans
Founder and Managing Director, Converge Labs, LLC
Mark launched the highly successful Geo-Loco and Social-Loco (SoLoMo) conferences in 2010 and 2011; events that focus on the business perspectives between the convergence of the social web, mobile tech and location based services, i.e., monetization, challenges, and opportunities, and bringing buyers and sellers together across multiple industries and verticals.
Converge Labs specializes in bringing together big brands, SMBs, agencies, investors and entrepreneurs around new technologies in an environment focused on learning, collaboration, experimentation and deal making.
Eric Forst
VP, Strategy Agency Partnerships, Visible Technologies
Jeanette Gibson
Senior Director, Global Social Media and Digital Marketing
Jeanette leads the Global Social Media Marketing team at Cisco. Her team provides social strategy, services and consulting across Cisco to expand our brand presence and increase customer connections through the power of social media. Her team is responsible for setting social marketing strategy and success metrics and driving alignment, governance and best practice sharing across the company. This includes overseeing the creation of Cisco branded social sites, our corporate blogging platform, communities, YouTube and whatever else new pops up!
Jeanette also co-leads the Social Media Advisory Council at Cisco to help guide and direct Cisco’s company-wide social media strategy.
Previously, Jeanette led the New Media group in Corporate Communications which included Cisco’s online communications strategy and created new media programs to infuse innovation in our communications approach.
Jeanette has worked at Cisco for 12 years and previously worked for startup, PointCast leading public and analyst relations. Prior to that, Jeanette worked for PR agencies specializing in high tech PR.
Victoria Graham
Director, Digital Services, Bite Communications
Victoria specializes in driving business results with measurable digital programs. She has over 10 years marketing experience – most recently leading digital marketing for Gap International at AKQA and Nokia US at TribalDDB. Her expertise lies in helping enterprise level clients enter and own the digital and social space. Examples of this include growing Gap’s Facebook following from a few thousand to over a million in less than a year; building award-winning, first-of-their-kind iPhone and iPad applications; and collaborating with clients to introduce an internal social media process.
Measurement and analytics are also a strong suit of Victoria’s. For more than a dozen clients she has introduced measurement programs that hold the agency accountable and give client executives the hard proof they need to show a return on their investment.
Justin Gonzalez
Social Specialist, BARS+TONE
Justin has been involved in Marketing and Social Media for 2 years. In his current position as Social Specialist at BARS+TONE, he is responsible for developing strategies for brands and organizations to effectively communicate with their audience through social networks. Justin has been featured in Mashable as a YouTube expert, offering advice and how-to’s on getting started with YouTube marketing. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Drama with a Minor in Marketing from San Francisco State University.
Steve Jang
Founder, CEO, Schematic Labs
Gabe Joynt
Digital Marketing Strategist, Razorfish
Gareth Kay
Chief Strategy Officer, Goodby, Silverstein and Partners
Gareth is the Chief Strategy Officer at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, an agency he joined in 2009 as the Director of Digital Strategy. He is charged with evolving the strategy discipline and is responsible for the output and day-to-day running of the department.
Prior to joining GSP, Gareth was the Head of Planning at Modernista! and has been recognized by his peers as the most respected planning director in the US.
Gareth serves on the board of the VCU Brandcenter, and is a co-founder of the non-profit “Planning For Good”, a virtual entity that harnesses the collective intelligence and amazing minds of planners around the world to help address the business and communication challenges of non-profits. He sits on the Google Creative Leadership Council where he is the only ‘non-creative’. Gareth writes the blog on brands and communication, “Brand New“, and passionately believes that there has never been a more exciting time to work in advertising.
Kerry Lange
Director, Social Marketing, Yahoo!
Kerry currently leads a team that executes Social Media and Influencer marketing programs that amplify marketing content and consumer-facing campaigns at Yahoo! Prior to that, Kerry was executing social media, word of mouth, and experiential marketing programs for clients as varied as Mentos, Microsoft, Virgin America, Jean Paul Gaultier, Hornitos Tequila and Reebok. She began her career doing sponsorship marketing for the first US Adventure Racing Series, and managed event logistics and conference programming for Streaming Media Inc.
Kerry’s passion for travel, good wine, dinner parties and live music lead to interesting stories around the water cooler. She stays engaged with the community by supporting local politics, managing operations and donations procurement for Beats for Boobs (a breast cancer fundraiser), and as a Board Member and mentor with WISE SF (Women in Sports and Events).
Aaron Mann
CEO, Socialarc
Aaron is the founder of leading social marketing firm Socialarc and leads the company’s strategy practice. Aaron loves the challenge of bringing the rapidly evolving social world to life within an overall brand marketing strategy.
Socialarc has executed highly successful social marketing campaigns for a wide range of leading brands including Visa, Lenovo, THQ, Philips, Fair Trade USA, Verizon and many more. In 2006 Aaron founded RelevantMind, one of the first social media monitoring platforms. Follow Socialarc on Twitter @socialarc.
Shabnum Mehra
Group Strategy Director, Social Media, AKQA
Shabnum Mehra currently holds the position of Group Media /Strategy Director at AKQA focusing on social efforts in the US and heading up the Social committee in the US. Prior to AKQA Shabnum has over 15 years of digital, mobile and social experience holding management positions at Universal McCann, PHD, Razorfish , Black Bag Advertising, CMP Media , IPSH and Beyond Interactive. Most relevant to the Social Media group Shabnum held the VP, Custom Soluitions Director positoiun at Federated Media where she and her teams built out social solutions for companies such as AMEX , Honda and AT&T.
Shabnum’s worked on clients ranging from Banana Republic, eBay, Visa to Microsoft, HP., Intel.
Shabnum has a B.A. from Michigan, hobbies include extreme sports such as Heli boarding and skydiving
James Musick
Director, Social Media and Web Communications, Genentech
Maria Poveromo
Director, Social Media, Adobe Systems, Inc.
As Director, Social Media for Adobe Systems, Inc., Maria Poveromo is responsible for driving social media strategy at Adobe. Her team established the organizational framework and strategic direction for social media activities across the company. Maria’s main areas of focus include corporate strategy, governance, measurement, brand channel engagement and the development of best social media practices company-wide. Prior to this role, Maria lead the Global Public Relations team at Adobe for nine years. Before Joining Adobe, Maria held numerous marketing and communications positions at high technology companies located in Silicon Valley and in Europe.
Kelli Robertson
Director, Strategy, AKQA
Kelli Robertson worked in the account planning departments of agencies including Carmichael Lynch, Fallon and Mullen and has been at AKQA for 5 years, where she leads a team of 20 strategists as Director of Strategy. Her team helps brands create digital and social experiences that mutually benefit brands and people. Kelli loves the complexity and messiness of strategy at a digital agency, developing new tools and frameworks for understanding people’s motivations for sharing and participating, conversation and channel strategy, and brand positioning. She values action over talk, and being interesting over being right.
Aimee Rosewall-Godley
Regional Vice President, AOL
Aimee Rosewall-Godley has over 18 years in interactive and digital advertising sales, management and marketing, including roles at Pacific Telesis, @Plan and US West. She currently leads west coast category sales for AOL and also serves as 3rd VP and Board Member for sfBIG.
Erin Santy
Vice President, SHIFT Communications
Erin Santy runs SHIFT Communications’ West Coast Consumer Lifestyle Practice, setting traditional and social media strategies for a wide variety of consumer and consumer tech clients. She has worked closely with companies at all stages of grow – from startups such as CardStar, Powerset, UGOBE and Zite to major brands including AOL, Logitech, Quiznos and TASER. Prior to joining SHIFT, Erin worked at Edelman and A&R Partners with tech companies including AirMagnet, Avocent, Citrix, Check Point Software and TV Guide. She holds bachelor’s degrees in mass communications and political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Rick Silvestrini
Product Marketing Manager, Monetization, YouTube
Rick Silvestrini leads YouTube’s global monetization strategy for Brand Engagement Products; including the homepage, brand channels, and engagement platforms. He recently launched YouTube First Watch, a unique sponsorship opportunity for advertisers to own the first ad impression users see as they begin watching video on YouTube. Rick frequently advises marketers on video strategies that succeed in the world of social media. He has also been featured on the YouTube homepage 4 times.
Prior to joining YouTube, Rick spent several years in the agency world with stops at McCann Erickson and Grey Worldwide before serving as Executive Producer for the New York based interactive production start-up, Modern Publicity.
Rick has BA from Notre Dame and is currently an MBA candidate at the Haas School of Business.
Natascha Thomson
Social Media Marketing Executive, SAP
Natascha Thomson is a marketing executive with 15+ years experience in the enterprise software market and holds two master’s degrees. In her current position as Sr. Director, Social Media Audience Marketing at SAP, Natascha develops social media marketing best practices by running social media pilot programs and providing SAP internal consulting services.
Previously, Natascha was responsible for marketing SAP Community Network, designing programs to increase community awareness, member engagement and demand for SAP solutions. During her career, she has held positions in competitive intelligence, partner marketing, product marketing and product management at start ups and large corporations, including HP, Bay Networks, and Documentum/EMC. In her free time, Natascha teaches yoga, volunteers, networks, and reads the NYT.
She is the author of the blog Social Media for B2B Marketing and can be found on LinkedIn. Follow her on Twitter @nathomson.
Gigi Wang
Board Member & Chair Emeritus, MIT/Stanford Venture Lab
A veteran conference strategist and party giver, Gigi Wang now sits on the boards of the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab and the Wireless Communications Alliance which are leading high tech forums in Silicon Valley promoting entrepreneurship and technology innovation. She is also the Managing Partner at MG-Team, an international strategic marketing and business development firm for mobile, web services and telecom companies with clients in the US, Europe and Asia.
Before starting MG-Team, Gigi was the SVP of Marketing and Alliances for July Systems, a mobile start-up providing mobile retailing and marketing solutions to customers including AT&T, EA, and MTV. Prior to July, she was CEO & Co-founder of AsiaQuest, a company providing market entry services for companies entering Asia. Her team developed relationships with major Asian players for its clients. She also started up the International Carrier Marketing group and lead VOIP Product Marketing for Ascend Communications (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent). As an Internet pioneer in the 90’s, she launched the TRUSTe Internet privacy program in 1996 and also started up Pacific Internet in Singapore (IPO on NASDAQ in 1999), along with holding sales and business development positions at Pacific Bell (acquired by SBC/AT&T).
Gigi holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University where she was President of the Engineering Honor Society, and a Masters in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. While in Singapore, she taught at the National University of Singapore as an Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Entrepreneurship. She is a frequent speaker at entrepreneur and innovation conferences around the world.
