Sarah Beeny

Sarah Beeny is a Channel 4 television presenter on the popular Property Snakes and Ladders prime time show. As well as being a well established property mogul Sarah also owns mysinglefriend.com, a social dating website, has written numerous books, and has recently launched Tepilo.com, her new free to use property website, which offers practical advice and the ability to sell your property through design, negotiation and marketing.

---

Robin Wight

As President of both Engine and WCRS, Robin was part of the management team that led the management buyout from Havas in 2004. Robin began his career by setting up a student advertising agency while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. After working as a copywriter in a number of agencies including Collett Dickinson Pearce and Partners, he co–founded Wight Collins Rutherford Scott with Peter Scott in 1979.

Though Robin Wight has spent his whole career in advertising, he has always had a number of outside interests. From 1982 to 1984, Robin served as the marketing adviser to the Right Hon Peter Walker when he was Minister for Agriculture before serving as a Council Member for Food from Britain between 1984 and 1988.

In 1989, he became Chairman of the NABS (National Advertising Benevolent Society) appeal raising nearly £4million for the industry.

---

Mat Morrison

Mat Morrison is a senior digital comms planner and (these days) socialmedia expert with leadership experience at a regional and global level. He has held board director roles, or been a director of his own companies, since 1999. You’d think that he’d have picked something up by now. He began his career almost 15 years ago at AKQA, going on to help set up Tribal DDB London as Commercial Manager then Head of Strategy. Before joining Porter Novelli as Global Digital Planning Director, he helped set up the digital comms planning agency RMM where (among other clients) he worked for Buckingham Palace. Mat is particularly interested in how networks of people make decisions, how we can model and measure “influence” and whether (in the final analysis) this is actually such a good idea.

---

Giles Rhys Jones
Director, Interactive – Ogilvy Group

Giles works across the whole of Ogilvy Group clients helping to deliver on their promise of digital heart/discipline head. He helped set up the Ogilvy Innovation Lab and their branded content division; Ogilvy Entertainment. Previously he worked at Saatchi & Saatchi, Agency.com, co-founded Agency Republic & helped set up The Brand Company in Hong Kong. His blog, interactive marketingtrends.blogspot.com, is in the UK top 5 advertising blogs and in the top 20 Global advertising planning blogs. He is passionate about how advertising needs to change its process not just its product.

---

Katy Lindemann

Katy Lindemann is a senior strategist at Naked Communications, a creative communications agency, where she develops social ideas and communications strategies for clients such as Vodafone, Nokia and the COI.  She is also part of the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Social group, across-industry team working to define best practice and guidance for social communication.  She was one of the first ever UK bloggers, having started blogging in 2000 when it was still called weblogging and people thought it would never take off.

---

Amanda Brown

Amanda is head of PR at first direct, the UK’s best online bank and has been responsible for spearheading a series of its innovative campaigns for nearly ten years. Amanda was responsible for the 24 hour society report which is still used as the first look into the changing society as it moved to become open all hours and was instrumental in developing the anorak amnesty one of the first online auctions which was created to publicise the bank’s move into internet banking. More recently she has developed and launched the bank’s groundbreaking social media newsroom giving its PR a whole new dynamic.

Amanda began her PR career at Burston Marsteller, London working on accounts such as Apple and Philips Electronics, before working in house at the Design Council and at financial services organisations such as the Halifax and Scarborough Building Society.

---

Deborah Copeland

Deborah Copeland is Head of Digital PR, Brahm, one of the UK’s leading independent agencies. Deborah’s career in digital PR started over 12 years ago working with the likes of BT and Global Platform before moving in-house to launch the world’s first virtual newscaster, Ananova, the figure-head for a real-time, personalised online news service that pioneered thinking around virtual communities and social ‘swarms’. Following Ananova, Deborah was PR Manager for Orange Multimedia Operations, where she led campaigns to promote the mobile operator’s WAP services and downloads, before moving to Brahm in 2002. At Brahm, Deborah has developed digital PR campaigns for the likes of First Direct, Department for Education & Skills, UK Trade & Investment, Action Aid, Cherry Valley and Schwarzkopf.

---

Giles Palmer

Giles is the founder and CEO of Brandwatch. He has taken the company from an initial project to build a local search engine for the UK government to a social media analysis system that has customers all across the globe. Work started on Brandwatch in November 2004, and really accelerated when the Company raised external capital to develop the system in May 2006.

---

Andrew Gerrard

Andrew Gerrard is a social and digital media strategy consultant, helping organisations to understand and engage in the conversations that their users and customers are having, and how to convert them into mutually profitable long-term relationships.
With a proven track record of delivering results, Andrew builds relevant strategies and tactics that create user engagement and customer loyalty, opportunity and profit.  His combination of social media and online experience, coupled with a sales and marketing background in technology, gives Andrew a strong commercial insight and vision for social and digital media integration into an organisation’s culture and infrastructure. Andrew has a creative strategic approach, developing a clear understanding of how a client operates and what their business objectives are, and then translating these into cost-effective, relevant and profitable activities.  With clients ranging from major global B2B and consumer brands to pure-play social media and online networks and services; technology start-ups, IT suppliers and vendors, Andrew provides social and digital media consultancy that enables organisations to grow and succeed.

---

Andrew Grill

Based in London, Andrew is an internationally renowned thought leader and keynote presenter in the field of digital and social media networks.A former resident of Sydney, for the last 4 years he has been active in the European market, and such he has a deep understanding of the digital, mobile and advertising space and is well connected to leading advertising agencies in London. He also sits on the UK Committee of the Mobile Marketing Association.

---

Dan Klein
Media Accounts Director, Detica

Dan’s role is to shape and manage work for Detica’s media clients and take to market propositions around Copyright Infringement. He is the lead authority in Detica on how ISP’s, Studios and Labels can come together to make money from music and videos on the internet. Dan is an engineer by profession, who has previously been a management consultant. Dan is fascinated by how new technologies can disrupt existing business models and revels in being able to find novel applications for seemingly unrelated technologies in order to make money. As a relative new comer to the media industries he is enjoying bucking the trend by trying to find ways to legitimise and monetise existing peer to peer file-sharing behaviours.

---

Toby Gunton
Managing Director, Altogether Digital

Toby started his digital career at Haymarket publishing in 1997 where he set up a digital team and launched Autosport.com. He founded Backend London in 1999, sister agency to Deepend and Glue.

He was a Director of digital agency Perception from 2001 before it’s acquisition by DC Interact in 2003 where he went on to hold the role of Managing Partner. After the merger of DC Interact, Meme and Eyefall to form Altogether Digital, Toby took on the role of Managing Director. Altogether work with brands including Abbey, Andrex, Sony, Kleenex, Vertu and Glenfiddich.

---

Penelope Lipsham
Social Media Planner

Penelope joined Altogether Digital as a Social Media Planner in August 2009 with the remit to strategically plan Social Media campaigns based on consumer insight and behaviour for Altogether’s clients, which include Abbey, Sony Audio and Kleenex.

Prior to this Penelope worked for 2 Years as a Social Media Specialist for Greenroom Digital / Momentum Worldwide, where she worked on a number of research, strategy and implementation campaigns for Entertainment brands.

---

Mark Pack

In June 2009 I joined Mandate Communications as an Associate Director, Digital, having previously been Head of Innovations at the Liberal Democrats.I am a Fellow of the RSA and have a history PhD from the University of York, looking at nineteenth century elections. I’ve appeared on many media outlets, including BBC News 24, Newsnight, The Westminster Hour and LBC, and spoken at many events and conferences on politics, electoral law and internet matters. I was a member of the Electoral Commission’s Political Parties Panel 2000-2009.

---

Marshall Manson
Director of Digital Strategy, Edelman

Marshall Manson is Director of Digital Strategy for Edelman in EMEA, and a leader in the field of online strategy, communications and reputation management. Marshall is based in London, and previously, was Vice-President of Online Advocacy in Washington, DC.

Marshall advises a host of clients that span industries on digital strategy, online reputation management, crisis management, advocacy, engagement and viral marketing. Some of his current and former clients include Shell, HP, Anglo-American Minerals, Krispy Kreme and English Heritage.

---

Chris Thorpe

Since he gave up playing with really big computers as a research scientist Chris has been trying to find more and more excuses to play with really big computers powering web applications. He’s been involved in projects as diverse as bringing Which? to an online audience, social worlds for 7-11 year olds, video archives of Nobel Prize winners telling their life stories, a James Bond premiere webcast and putting contemporary sculpture on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth.

He is a co-founder of Jaggeree which is a consultancy which works in the spaces and intersections around content, play, people and data.

---

Jonathan Akwue

Jonathan is a Director at Digital Public and leads its Engagement practice. He has delivered a number of innovative projects using new and emerging technologies. Over the last 15 years, Jonathan has worked for a wide range of public sector clients, and recently led the team that was commissioned by COI Interactive to map the social media landscape for Government Departments. This involved reviewing over two thousand social media sites and developing a methodology to rank them according to their influence. At the DCSF, Jonathan played a key role in helping to design a range of new information support services available for parents using social media, provided as part of the Parent Know How programme.

---

Paul Borge

I help clients understand and engage with the online space around their organizations and brands. I specialise in creating and implementing clear and objective strategies that encompass the myriad digital and social media channels, along with traditional PR, experiential and ATL activities. I’m a firm believer in integration – breaking marketing and communications campaigns into discipline or channel-specific silos doesn’t deliver impact. I’ve been in the PR industry for over ten years, with over five years of digital and social media experience. This includes search engine optimization and marketing; website development and management; video / audio content production; online PR; social media outreach and online reputation management. Wider experience includes consumer, corporate and B2B PR and I am also conversant with other martketing disciplines.Current clients include MTV UK and MTV Europe, learndirect, the Scottish Government, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and Mishcon de Reya.Previous client experience includes award-winning campaigns for clients such as AT&T, Harry Potter, the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG) International Air Transport association (IATA), P&G, BT, the World Hepatitis Alliance, McCain Foods, Egg, Yucatan Holidays, Borough Market and Dr Martens.In my spare time I provide pro bono strategic digital counsel for start-ups and third sector organisations.

---

Emma Cowan

Emma has worked on a wide range of pioneering and innovative campaigns including Royal Air Force recruitment, Sexual Health and the Schools Food Trust.

Emma strives to deploy the full potential of the digital landscape to help her clients achieve their communications objectives. She managed the ground breaking mobile drama ‘thmbnls’ and developed the social media strategy for the RAF.

Emma previously worked in financial marketing, and joined COI Interactive Services from Barclays in 2006.

---

Heather Hampson

Since joining COI Interactive Services in May 2009, Heather has been inovled with through the line campaigns for the Department for Health (swine flu), RAF recruitment and a national consultation on Autism.

With a background in journalism, she has previously worked at the Department of Children, Schools and Families on the Diplomas campaign.

Prior to that at FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) she managed the digital presence of FCO travel advice and the Know Before You Go Campaign, and was also part of the web team involved in rebuilding and re-launching over 140 FCO websites globally.

In her spare time she’s designed web 2.0 solutions for a bi-lateral trade union programme and developed a web strategy for an NGO in the Middle East.

---

Janet Parkinson

Janet is Head of Operations for Quirk in the UK. Quirk is the largest eMarketing agency in Africa and a leading company in innovation globally having created the renowned Online Reputation Management Tool ‘BrandsEye’, the crowdsourcing platform for creative ideas ‘IdeaBounty’, and producing creative campaigns using the latest technologies for clients around the world. Quirk also won the ‘08 Econsultancy Award for Innovation in Search.

Janet has been at the forefront of Social Media since ‘05 when she began podcasting and was MD for Talking Voices, a podcast production company. As Operations Director for many years in the language services and communications industries, Janet has worked with FTSE 100 UK companies and global brand leaders.