Steve Farnsworth
[dropcap style=”style1″]W[/dropcap]ell known for his B2B content marketing and inbound marketing work, Steve Farnsworth is a social media strategist working with tech companies and B2B. He offers advice and tips at The @Steveology Blog.
As a director with the Silicon Valley Brand Forum and an adviser to other professional organizations, Steve has moderated panels, spoken at or facilitated industry events at Intel, Yahoo!, HP, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Adobe, Electronic Arts, Hewlett-Packard, and Stanford. In 2012, he was appointed the Communications and Social Media Advisor to TEDxSanJoseCA.
He’s highly invested in the tech world, and offers keen insight into his industry at every turn.
Ted Rubin
[dropcap style=”style1″]S[/dropcap]ocial marketing strategist, keynote speaker, brand evangelist, and acting CMO of Brand Innovators, Ted Rubin penned the book, Return on Relationship, a movement he started nearly five years ago. He has been involved in digital marketing since 1997 and worked for some of the largest brands around, and is on the Advisory Boards of Crowdsourcing Week, EvenVoice, Expressible, OpenSky, SheSpeaks, and Zuberance. Rubin is influential, not just because of his expertise, but because of his unrestrained enthusiasm – he is fun to listen to and is a highly engaging speaker and social media user.
Tonia Ries
[dropcap style=”style1″]T[/dropcap]onia Ries is a branding genius, no lie. She is an experienced media professional with a background in marketing in sales, and you may already know her for her #RLTM Realtime Report which has been around since 2009, or her co-founding of The Realtime Conferences (formerly TWTRCON).
In 2002, she founded and remains the CEO of Modern Media which builds media brands, produces conferences, and designs web sites and marketing strategies.
Ries is influential not only for her branding expertise, but has been on the cutting edge of digital media since before it was ever even referred to as social media. She never rests on her laurels and always pushes to innovate.
Tinu Abayomi-Paul
[dropcap style=”style1″]T[/dropcap]his East Coast gal is stuck on West Coast time, and once dreamed of being called the Honorable Abayomi-Paul. Tinu Abayomi-Paul is the Owner of Leveraged Promotions, established in 1998.
She is influential because she has long helped brands of all size to become visible online, which sounds easy but is not. She is the editor of Women Grow Business, and serves on the Social Web Advisory Board at Web.com.
Abayomi-Paul is a Website Promotion Specialist, Author, and Entrepreneur. She teaches search-centric traffic generation to entrepreneurs and builds custom online marketing systems for larger companies.
She shows people how to generate more leads using the internet, and how to leverage web visibility to make those leads into lifelong connections. Repeat business is the cornerstone of an empire. Bottom line: she is too smart for her own good.
Tristan Walker
[dropcap style=”style1″]A[/dropcap]t age 29, Tristan Walker is an entrepreneur-in-residence for Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture-capital firms.
He was one of the first employees at Foursquare, the founder of CODE2040, which gets highly motivated young students of color into tech internships.
Walker is a serial entrepreneur, but not because he fails over and over, but because he is a born leader. He hasn’t even cracked his 30s yet, so watch out for his name – he’s an entrepreneur star in the making.
Linda Bernstein
January 2, 2014 at 2:22 pm
So many terrific people here! I love this list.
Christopher S. Penn
January 2, 2014 at 2:40 pm
Thanks for including me! Much appreciated.
Ted Rubin
January 2, 2014 at 3:50 pm
Honored to be included 🙂
Miriam Slozberg
January 2, 2014 at 4:05 pm
Very honored to be included! Thank you.
Amber Osborne
January 2, 2014 at 4:27 pm
Honored to be included among those who inspired me to get into this industry. Thank you!
annhandley
January 2, 2014 at 4:45 pm
This list is stuffed full of people I’m lucky enough to call friends, as well as many who have influenced *me*. Thanks for adding my name to the roundup.
Charles E Gaudet II
January 2, 2014 at 5:51 pm
Thank you for the honor! I’m both humbled and grateful to be included among this least of extraordinary people.
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
AmyVernon
January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!
Liz Strauss
January 2, 2014 at 7:31 pm
Thank you, AGBeat, for the thought and work that went into writing about all of us. You captured the people who have influence not just their resumes, making this fun to read. I’m honored that you included me.
Michelle Poccia
January 2, 2014 at 8:34 pm
This list is chock full of GENIUS! Congrats to all who are on it! And thanks AGBeat for my 2014 Stalker List!
Danny Brown
January 2, 2014 at 8:56 pm
Nice to see such a diverse group, and appreciate the fact you took the time to share reasons why people might want to connect, versus a generic “OMG, these guys are just awesome, y’all!!”
Cheers for the kind inclusion, and Happy New Year!
J Philip Faranda
January 2, 2014 at 9:33 pm
I hope to meet Michael McClure in person someday! He is remarkable.
Belinda Summers
January 2, 2014 at 11:00 pm
Gee! A bunch of people I look up to. 🙂 How I wish to be one of them someday.
Matt Hixson
January 2, 2014 at 11:38 pm
This was a great way to start the year. Thanks for including me.
Belinda Summers
January 3, 2014 at 1:00 am
Gee! A bunch of people I look up to. 🙂 How I wish to be one of them someday.
Lucretia M Pruitt
January 3, 2014 at 3:02 am
Some of my favorite people on here… Glad to see AGBeat and I agree on so many awesome people as influences!! Congrats for a solid list and kudos to some awesome folks.
Lucretia M Pruitt
January 3, 2014 at 3:02 am
Some of my favorite people on here… Glad to see AGBeat and I agree on so many awesome people as influences!! Congrats for a solid list and kudos to some awesome folks.
Michael Q Todd
January 3, 2014 at 6:37 am
Great list and especially great endorsements well done for taking the time and effort have subscribed to you
S. Anthony Iannarino
January 3, 2014 at 10:39 am
Thanks so much for including me on this all-star list! I am honored!
Heather MacLean
January 3, 2014 at 11:34 am
Great list. Nice to see some really familiar faces as well as some new ones.
agbenn
January 3, 2014 at 1:36 pm
As the Founder and Publisher of The American Genius, I certainly do not want to sound callous, and text can be so impersonal. We hear your feedback, and have noted it for future reference. When we see people, we see human beings, whatever their race or gender.
In saying that, our pick if we were considering race or gender ie. a particular Hispanic Influencer, it would have undoubtedly been His Holiness, Pope Francis. However, because we’ve covered His Holiness, several times in the past month, it gave way to another open spot out of hundreds of thousands of potential people we considered one by one. To be quite honest, I actually had to go back and look and read every entry to see if anyone was or wasn’t Hispanic.
For the record, I am Hispanic, and I am honored to have our team present this list as it is, and with innocent hearts. We do know several of the persons you’ve mentioned and do hold them in very high regard.
So thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback and encouragement, and we look forward to meeting and getting to know a few on your list. 🙂
Brian Hansford
January 3, 2014 at 1:47 pm
So nice to see some new faces in a list. It gets old seeing lists with the same names over and over just to get SEO juice.
agbenn
January 3, 2014 at 2:01 pm
Maya, bless your heart for sharing your kind thoughts and ideas with us. We agree with your sentiments profoundly, and thank you for recoginizing the complexity of what we’re presenting through our lists. We’ll take your idea and have the team bounce it around and see if we can’t do something as meaningful more often. As you know, things become passe when over done, even when done well. For the record, you influence me in thought provoking ways, and that’s not easy to do with a guy like me.
Happy New Year, and kick 2014’s ass!
tracysestili
January 3, 2014 at 5:19 pm
I love listening to Brian Carter speak. He’s not only funny, but real. Plus he presents data in a way that you didn’t think of. Glad to see he made the list and a few of my other faves. 🙂
Eve Mayer
January 4, 2014 at 5:47 pm
Whoa, I’m so lucky to be on this list! Thank you very much for thinking I’m somewhat as cool as all those respected peeps!
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