Speakers

Conversations with

Joe Fernandez | Klout

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.

 

Greg Hounslow | WestJet

Greg Hounslow is the Emerging Media Advisor for WestJet. In addition to managing the company’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube communities he is involved with developing the short- and long-term strategies for social media at WestJet.

An avid follower of new technology and emerging media trends, Greg is also passionate about travel and tourism, photography, hockey and the great outdoors. He holds a degree in Tourism Management and has travelled to five continents. His work has taken him across Canada and the United States, and has landed him in several locations off the beaten track, such as Cuba, Alaska, Churchill and Mexico.

 

Steve Rubel | Edelman

Steve Rubel is EVP/Global Strategy and Insights for Edelman – the world’s largest independent public relations firm. In this role, Rubel studies the future of media and works across the firm’s practices and geographies to help clients unify their communications strategies across traditional, emerging, owned and social channels.

In addition, Rubel also acts as a highly visible Edelman thought leader and writer on media, technology and digital culture. He speaks dozens of times each year around the world and appears frequently in the press. In addition he actively shares his observations and insights through his blog, his monthly Advertising Age column, on Twitter where he is followed by more than 55,000 and Google+ where he is followed by more than 16,000.

 

Joanna Track | Dealuxe

Joanna is the co-founder and CEO of Dealuxe. She has over 15 years experience in marketing, business strategy, branding and advertising.

After earning a BA in Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and an MBA in Finance at Schulich School of Business, she worked in the marketing departments of a variety of companies including The Loyalty Group (AIR MILES) and Club Monaco, before landing at Ogilvy & Mather. Joanna built a career at Ogilvy over six years, working on key global accounts, including Amex, FedEx and SAP, doing everything from Brand Advertising to Direct Marketing to Web. Her stint at Ogilvy took her to New York City, where she worked for a year as an Account Director and honed her skills as a marketer, before returning to the Toronto office in the same role. Joanna’s entrepreneurial spirit grew strong and in 2004, Sweetspot was born. Seven years, three websites (Sweetspot, Sweetmama, Sweethome) six newsletters, and over 100,000 subscribers later, Sweetspot.ca is the ultimate destination for Canadian women to stay in the know about what’s new and fabulous in their city. In July 2006, Rogers Publishing recognized this success and purchased a stake in the company, and then acquired the remainder of the company in early 2011.

 

Andrew Osis | Poynt

As the CEO and co-founder of Poynt, Andrew is one of the early movers in the location-based search space. Before iPhones made apps ubiquitous, Poynt envisioned an app for mobile phones that could help consumers locate local businesses, retailers, movie listings and restaurants in their local area. They then took this idea one step further through the integration of actionable utility with the ability to call businesses, add listings and events to calendars, map directions and book movie tickets and dinner reservations. Andrew’s focus on “revenue, cash flow, earnings” has led him to explore and implement successful monetization strategies for Poynt’s mobile local search application, and the company has continued to innovate in the location-based advertising space.

 

Marcus Wilson | IdeaPaint

Marcus is the chief marketing officer for IdeaPaint, the producer of the innovative, dry-erase paint product by the same name that can transform any “paintable” surface into a platform for creativity and collaboration. In this role, Marcus oversees all aspects of IdeaPaint’s marketing plans, including public relations, advertising and digital strategy. He brings over 10 years of consumer experience and business development expertise to his position at IdeaPaint. Previously, Marcus served as a managing director for the venture capital firm Breakaway Ventures. Prior to joining Breakaway, Marcus was the head of brand strategy for Reebok, where he was responsible for strategic planning and consumer insights globally. While at Reebok, Marcus also played critical roles in product marketing and process development.

 

Benjie Levy | Score Media

As Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Benjie Levy oversees the development and execution of Score Media’s business strategy. Benjie has been instrumental in shaping Score Media’s digital media strategy, including the creation of Score Media Ventures, Score Media’s digital division, and the launch of ScoreMobile, Score Media’s industry leading mobile platform which has now become an international success story. From spearheading the acquisition of SportsTap, a rival mobile sports app, to overseeing the company’s foray into international languages through the launch of the Spanish version of ScoreMobile FC, Benjie’s leadership skills and keen business sense are a constant driving force at the company.

 

Dave Kerpen | Likeable Media

Dave Kerpen is the co-founder and CEO of Likeable Media, an award-winning social media and word-of-mouth marketing firm. Dave’s book, a New York Times Best Seller, is “Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook and other social networks.” Dave is proud of his Likeable business accomplishments but prouder of his wife and business partner Carrie and two daughters at home in New York.

 

Felicia Yukich | Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts

Felicia Yukich is the Manager of Social Media Marketing at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, leading the brand’s global social media strategy. This role is an all-new global role for the company, recognizing Four Seasons’ commitment to leadership and innovation in the space.  In her previous role as Manager, Interactive Marketing, Felicia spearheaded digital content, social media and search-engine-optimization.

A previous member of the Four Seasons Corporate Public Relations team, Felicia managed the PR and social media launch for new hotel openings and campaigns, including media events in the US and Brazil as well as launching and overseeing corporate PR efforts in Latin America.

Prior to joining Four Seasons, Felicia worked at GCI Group Canada – a WPP agency in Toronto – in the Consumer Lifestyle PR Practice. She specialized in media relations and social media marketing for international brands including Mattel, Dell and AIR MILES.  Her previous hotel experience includes hands-on hospitality PR experience at Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto.

 

Gail Gabrielle Ordogh | Real Sports at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment

Gail is the voice of Real Sports Bar in Toronto! As a Digital Host and Vlogger at Real Sports, she is works in various media platforms including Broadcast and Social Media for Real Sports Bar & Grill and Real Sports Apparel. You may have seen Gail in front of 20,000 crazy sports fans as a former In-Game host for St.Michael’s Majors, Mississauga IceDogs, Toronto Rock, Toronto Marlies & Toronto Maple Leafs! Fans have seen interviewing athletes and artists, tweeting to her close to 5,000 followers or talking to James, the cutest Raptors fan on one of her latest YouTube.

Gail is also an Ambassador for the David Suzuki Foundation and a Certified teacher in BC and Ontario.

 

Jason Lonsdale | TAXI

Jason Lonsdale is the newly arrived Head of Planning at TAXI. He joins us from Saatchi & Saatchi London, where, in his capacity as international planning director, he was the strategic lead on the internationally acclaimed T-Mobile business.

Jason started his career many years ago at Colenso BBDO in Auckland, New Zealand, cutting his teeth on many famous local and international brands, including Air New Zealand, MARS, Uncle Ben’s, TV3, Pepsi, MINI, Tip Top Ice Cream, Coruba Rum, Corona, and Stella Artois. In 2007, Jason moved to the UK to join Leo Burnett and then RKCR/Y&R, leading accounts such as LG, Land Rover, Palm, and McDonald’s.

In his spare time, Jason collects rare funk and soul records and continues his quest for the perfect espresso.

 

Krista LaRiviere | gShift Labs

Krista LaRiviere is the Cofounder and CEO at gShift Labs, an SEO software and technology company. gShift is Krista’s third software company having successfully exited from the previous two in 2006. gShift’s game changing, patent pending SEO software, Web Presence Optimer(TM) is changing the way people think about and perform organic search optimization. The gShift team believes that marketers should have control over their SEO campaigns just like they have control over email marketing and paid search. Web Presence Optimizer(TM) makes this possible. Founded in 2009, gShift has over 200 clients, was named YTA StartUp of the Year in 2010, named CIX Digital Media winner and a Branham300 Up and Comer in 2011. gShift is funded by MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund and Growthworks.

 

Kunal Das | Microsoft (Bing)

Kunal Das is a Search Evangelist at Microsoft (Bing). He is responsible for evangelizing Microsoft’s vision and strategy for search and inspiring top marketers, key agencies, and the wider search marketing industry.
He serves as a thought leader and strategic partner to Microsoft’s most valued customers through the evangelism of Bing & adCenter. He is a search expert, shares product roadmaps, introduces new initiatives, showcases innovations, and helps key partners to connect the dots across Microsoft’s search business. He enjoys listening to the needs of customers and the market, and ensuring the feedback influences the direction of search at Microsoft.

Previously at Microsoft, Kunal was a Search Account Manager responsible for growing revenue for a portfolio of clients through deepening client relationships, partnering with account teams, and executing in-depth optimizations using deep analytics. Kunal specialized in the retail, travel, and consumer electronics sectors.

Kunal also worked as a Search Media Strategist responsible for helping to grow and scale Microsoft’s search sales & client service practices – with a focus on strategic SEM agencies. Kunal has spoken at several industry events including ad:tech New York. Prior to Microsoft, Kunal spent two years on entrepreneurial ventures; including co-founding and growing a college bookstore in Austin, TX.

 

Marcus Sheridan | The Sales Lion

The story of Marcus Sheridan is a unique one. In 2001, he stumbled across his first business with two friends and began installing swimming pools out of the back of a beat-up pickup truck. 9 years later, and with the help of incredible innovations through inbound and content marketing, Sheridan’s company became one of the largest pool installers in the country and currently has the most visited swimming pool web site in the world.

With such success, in late 2009, Sheridan started his sales/marketing/and personal development blog—The Sales Lion, and has since grown it to one of the strongest blog communities on the web. With so much success teaching others about content and inbound marketing, Sheridan has now moved on to become a very popular keynote and business speaker, known for his boundless energy and contagious enthusiasm when on stage.

 

Patrick Gladney | Social Media Group

Patrick leads the Research & Insights practice at Social Media Group, leading all strategy-based research and monitoring programs. Prior to joining SMG, Patrick started Social Currency™, a social media measurement practice for  Northstar Research Partners . Patrick has worked in marketing strategy and communications for almost 20 years.  A reformed ad man, he worked for  Doner Advertising, Ogilvy & Mather and Taxi Advertising and Design before turning is full attention to the social web based on the belief that its transformative effects are just starting to be felt and understood.

 

Nina Sohi | Blu Trumpet

Nina is a seasoned startup exec and has a strong history of building and scaling early-stage companies. Most recently, Nina was the COO at BumpTop where she helped shape the company and execute its sale to Google, Inc. Nina’s start-up experience also includes: Avogadro (acquired by OpenWave), OnDevice (acquired by KeyNote Systems), Cordant Systems, and Gamook. Nina began her career at Microsoft as a Program Manager in the Windows CE group, where she started to build her expertise in the mobile space. In addition to her experiences at tech companies, Nina was a VP at Merrill Lynch in their technology investment banking group for 3 years where she worked on a number of tech IPOs and M&A transactions.

Nina holds a B.A.Sc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

 

Rod Smith | IBM

Rod Smith is an IBM fellow and Vice President of the IBM Emerging Internet Technologies organization, where he leads a group of highly technical innovators who are developing solutions to help organizations realize the value of big data. His early advocacy in the industry has played an important role in the adoption of technologies such as J2EE, Linux, Web services, XML, rich Internet applications, and various wireless standards.

As an IBM Fellow, Rod is helping lead IBM’s efforts around big data analytics and the application of IBM Watson like technologies to business solutions, helping companies make better decisions more quickly for improved business outcomes. His early identification of emerging technologies has led to a sustained record of achievement in the global software community. Rod has authored numerous invention patents and disclosures, and is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the TJ Watson Design Excellence Award. He is also a long time member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

Rod is a Computer Science graduate of Western Michigan University, and holds a M.A. and B.A. in Economics with a concentration in Math from Western Michigan University.

 

Scott Lake | Swix

Scott has been leading software companies for the past decade. He was a founder and the CEO of Shopify.com, one of the largest hosted e-commerce apps on the Web. He also founded one of the first social media marketing firms, ThinkSM. Scott was also VP of Technical Services at Tomoye Corporation, where he helped implement online communities at some of the largest organizations in the world, including Lockheed Martin, John Deere, the G8 and the US Army. In past lives, he’s worked as a bike messenger, a university lecturer, and a driver at NATO. Scott also has a PhD.

 

Sheldon Levine | Sysomos

Sheldon Levine is the community manager for Sysomos, acting as his company’s public face to connect with its many audiences around the globe. Having emerged as a thought leader in the digital world, Sheldon’s engaging communication style has helped countless numbers of organizations understand how they can leverage social media to boost their business success. Through community outreach, new media marketing and public relations, Sheldon illustrates how social media monitoring and analytics lead to improved customer relationships and measurable ROI.

Sheldon is co-founder of a weekly Twitter chat, #SMmeasure, that focuses on the use of social media and how to measure its results. With a Masters in Professional Communication, Sheldon has taken his traditional PR training to a new level, transferring it into the realm of social media and adding his own personal twist to wake people up to all that social media can be.

Dorothy Steel | Invest Ontario

Fifteen years ago, Dorothy began teaching SEO back when O’Reilly actually published an annual book of all the websites on the internet and Lycos and Excite were forces to be reckoned with. Now she is using social media to teach people that it’s actually cool to work for the government. In her role as the Interactive Marketing Consultant and Social Media Lead for the Invest Ontario program of the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation she runs the @InvestOntario Twitter channel with a side of mobile and search engine marketing. In her spare time you can find her @dorothysteel on Twitter and Linkedin and collecting old cell phones for Hope Phones.

 

Your Session Moderators & Hosts:

Michael O’Connor Clarke | Media Profile & Guest Moderator

Recognized as a pioneer in social media, Michael has more than twenty years’ experience in integrated communications and marketing in Europe and North America.

A serial early-adopter, Michael has been online since the 80’s, joined his first online social network in 1997, was in the first wave of Twitter fans, signed up for Flickr when it was still mostly an online chat system, and was in the first 500 public users of LinkedIn. In other words, he’s been involved in this stuff longer than many self-styled “social media experts” have been online.
He has translated this experience into the design of numerous successful social media initiatives for clients of all kinds; blending digital creativity and expertise with hard-earned mainstream experience into hybrid programs that deliver tangible results.

Before agency life, Michael developed thick layers of corporate scar tissue as head of worldwide marketing for one of Canada’s largest publicly-traded software firms. Prior to that, he was part of a starving team of hubris-fuelled geeks that took a software startup from zero to a $36-million IPO in eight months (back when $36-million was more than chump change).

Michael is also part of the team behind HoHoTO, an extraordinary annual fund-raising initiative, built and promoted entirely through social media, that has raised over $145,000 to help hungry people in the past three years.

 

Stuart MacDonald | FreshBooks & mesh co-founder

Stuart is a digital business guy who loves making customers happy and building great teams. A mentor, investor, consultant and frequent speaker on things digital and entrepreneurial, Stuart is the veteran of several start-ups including starting Expedia.ca in his spare room in Toronto. He moved to Seattle as senior vice-president/chief marketing officer for Expedia.com, as well as running the U.S. packages business. Stuart co-founded mesh and meshmarketing, has traveled extensively, worked abroad on several occasions.

 

Mathew Ingram | GigaOm & mesh co-founder

Mathew Ingram is an award-winning journalist, who has spent the past 15 years writing about business, technology and new media as a reporter, columnist and blogger. Mathew’s expertise is how the media landscape is being dramatically disrupted by the emergence of the Web. Before becoming a senior writer with GigaOm, Mathew was a blogger and technology writer for the Globe & Mail. He was also the G&M’s first online Communities Editor, where he helped the paper learn about and appreciate the benefits of social-media tools.

 

Mark Evans | ME Consulting & mesh co-founder

Mark is a digital marketing, content and social media strategist who works with startups, entrepreneurs and fast-growing companies looking to jump-start how they are using the Web to meet their business goals. At the core of what Mark does is create compelling stories that tell the world what you do and why they should be interested. These stories are delivered in places that resonate and engage – a Web site, social media services, corporate videos, marketing collateral, or pitches to media/bloggers. Before starting his own business, Mark was an award-winning technology reporter with the National Post, Globe & Mail and Bloomberg News. He has also worked with four startups – Blanketware, b5media, PlanetEye and Sysomos. Mark writes several blogs, including Mark Evans Tech and the Sysomos corporate blog, as well as a regular column for the Globe & Mail on startups and entrepreneurs.

 

Rob Hyndman | Hyndman Law & mesh co-founder

Rob is a Toronto technology business lawyer – his clients are technology companies and their customers. His firm is Hyndman | Law, a boutique law practice that provides legal counsel to technology businesses on a wide variety of business law needs. He’s an unabashed life-long geek who got his start more than 30 years ago as the vice-president of a two-member computer club in high school. He’s passionate about helping grow the Toronto Web community and evangelizing the opportunities for connection, sharing and inspiration that the Web has given us.

 

Mike McDerment | FreshBooks & mesh co-founder

Mike is the co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks, the leading online invoicing and bookkeeping service for small businesses. In 2003, Mike started FreshBooks to meet the needs of his design firm. Since launching in May 2004 (from his parents’ basement!), FreshBooks has more 2.5 million users, and it now moves billions of dollars on behalf of hard working entrepreneurs in more than 100 countries. Mike and his team pride themselves on delivering extraordinary customer experiences for people who love their work, and want to focus on it – instead of focusing on their paperwork.