Jay Baer
Jay Baer is a hype-free marketing strategist, speaker, and author and President of the social media and content marketing
consultancy Convince & Convert. A digital marketing pioneer, Jay has consulted with more than 700 companies since 1994, including Caterpillar, Nike, Visit California, Allstate, Petco, Columbia Sportswear, and 29 of the Fortune 500.
He’s the author ofthe forthcoming new book Youtility: Why Smart Companies are Helping Not Selling and is the co-author of The NOW Revolution a best-selling book about social media’s impact on businesses of all sizes and types.
Heidi Cohen
Heidi Cohen has created integrated, social media, content, digital and social media marketing programs across diverse product categories encompassing soft goods, regulated financial services, media, entertainment-related products, and craft-oriented offerings.
She simplifies the complex concepts behind today’s evolving integrated marketing challenges for clients such as the New York Times Digital, AccuWeather.com, CheapTickets, and the UJA. Additionally, Heidi has worked with numerous other media companies and retailers.
Ann Handley
Ann Handley speaks and writes about how you can rethink the way your business markets. Cited in Forbes as the most influential woman in Social Media and recognized by ForbesWoman as one of the top 20 women bloggers, Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, a training and education company with the largest community of marketers in its category. She is a monthly columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, a member of the LinkedIn Influencer program , and the co-author of the best-selling book on content marketing, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (Wiley, originally published 2011. Paperback 2012.) The book has been translated into nine languages, including Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese. She currently has more than 180,000 followers on Twitter.
Stephanie Leffler
Stephanie Leffler and business partner Ryan Noble started an online store during college. After using a startup e-commerce company, Leffler and Noble saw great potential in the software as a service model and started MonsterCommerce, an ecommerce platform that grew to serve over 8,000 small businesses.
MonsterCommerce’s annual sales exceeded $20 million, supported by a staff of more than 200. Leffler’s dedication to software innovation and superior customer service helped to fuel the company’s growth. MonsterCommerce was featured by a variety national media outlets including Entrepreneur.com, MSNBC, Practical Ecommerce, and Information Week.
Matt McGee
Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. He’s been writing for Search Engine Land since February 2007, first as a columnist and then joining the staff as Assignment Editor in September 2008. He was promoted to Executive News Editor in December 2010.
Matt has provided SEO consulting to some of the biggest companies on the web, and continues to consult/train a few small business clients on matters such as SEO, social media, and local search. He began doing SEO around 1999/2000 — back when Google was just a baby, and you were hot stuff if you could figure out how to get a site to rank well in both Lycos and Excite. Matt is a regular speaker at search marketing conferences across the country, and has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Inc. magazine, and several other media outlets
Matt Mullenweg
Matt is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California. He is the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress. After leaving CNET, he has devoted the majority of his time to developing a number of open source projects and is a frequent speaker at conferences, such as Canada’s Northern Voice and the WordCamp events organized around WordPress software.
In late 2005, he founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet. Mullenweg attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts where he studied jazz saxophone.
Joe Pulizzi
Joe Pulizzi is first and foremost a content marketing evangelist. He began using the term “content marketing” back in 2001. He’s the founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, recognized as the 468th fastest growing private company by Inc. magazine in 2013.
CMI is responsible for producing Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing event in the world, as well as the leading content marketing magazine, Chief Content Officer. CMI also offers strategic consulting for enterprise brands such as AT&T, Petco, LinkedIn, SAP and many others.
Scott Stratten
Scott Stratten is the President of Un-Marketing. He is an expert in Viral, Social, and Authentic Marketing which he calls Un-Marketing. It’s all about positioning yourself as a trusted expert in front of your target market, so when they have the need, they choose you.
Formerly a music industry marketer, national sales training manager and a Professor at the Sheridan College School of Business, he ran his “UnAgency” for a nearly a decade before solely focusing on speaking at events for companies like PepsiCo, Adobe, Red Cross, Cirque du Soleil, Saks Fifth Avenue and Fidelity Investments when they need help guiding their way through social media.
Dan Sullivan
Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade.
Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline.
Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines.
Tom Preston-Werner
Tom Preston-Werner is a software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded GitHub in 2008, along with Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett, to simplify sharing code and make it easy to collaborate on building software. Today, GitHub is the largest code host in the world, with a community of more than 2.7M people building software together.
Before founding GitHub, Tom worked as a Ruby developer for Powerset, a Wikipedia search engine that was acquired by Microsoft. Additionally, Tom invented Gravatar, a service for providing unique avatars that follow you from site to site, which he sold to Automattic in 2007.