2012 Conference Schedule

Carlos Hidalgo is CEO of The Annuitas Group, the leading provider of sales and marketing process consulting services. In his role, Hidalgo has helped their clients identify over $700 million of potential revenue by developing and implementing lead management processes.

In addition to his role with The Annuitas Group, Hidalgo is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of The Marketing Automation Institute, the premier he community for marketing automation end-users that provides the highest level of vendor neutral curriculum, training and certification.

Prior to his role at BMC Software, Hidalgo held a similar role at McAfee, Inc.

Duane Forrester is a Sr. Product Manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program.

Previously, he was an inhouse SEM running the SEO program for MSN in the US & Americas. He's also the founding co-chair of SEMPO's In-House SEM Committee, was formerly on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is the author of two books: How To Make Money With Your Blog and Turn Clicks Into Customers.

Duane was a moderator at www.searchengineforums.com and maintains his own blog at www.theonlinemarketingguy.com. When writing for Search Engine Land, Duane's main focus was on in-house search marketing, both what it took to manage it, and who folks were in the industry.

John Gagnon is a Senior SEM Manager at Microsoft based in Seattle, Washington.

He consults for Microsoft’s paid search advertising campaigns running on Bing and Yahoo through Microsoft adCenter. He partners with teams ranging from Hotmail, Windows 7 and Internet Explorer to more B2B product groups like Office 365, Windows Azure and Dynamics CRM.

Previously at Microsoft, John worked as a Search Analyst specializing in improving ROI for premium accounts. He was also a Search Account Manager aligned to a range of strategic advertisers including Hotwire, Esurance, Nintendo and BlackRock, where he created and led a series on advanced adCenter optimization techniques.

Prior to working at Microsoft, John worked at Google for the AdWords Small Business segment becoming an expert in their toolset. Before entering the online advertising space

John spent time as a Research Analyst for a private equity fund based in Seattle.

John holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Finance from the University of Washington and is a huge Husky fan.

Gillian Muessig is the President and Co-Founder of SEOmoz, the web's most popular SEO software platform. Known as SEOmom throughout the industry, Gillian travels the world evangelizing for both the company and the search marketing industry. Gillian is known to have hand on the pulse of the profession and has provided keynotes and sessions for conferences and seminars around the world. SEOmoz, Gillian and her partner, Rand Fishkin (son and CEO of SEOmoz) have been featured in publications such as Newsweek, NPR, and the NYTimes. Gillian's Webmaster Radio show, CEO Coach airs Mondays at noon Eastern, 9AM Pacific time.

John Thyfault has more than 18 years of marketing, sales and product development experience, and he brings a proven track record of successful campaign, program and product development expertise to his clients. His knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC) marketing and social media marketing, combined with an in-depth understanding of customer identification, market analysis and segmentation, allows him to deliver high returns on our client's marketing investment for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets.

Prior to working with Beasley Direct, John was Senior Client Services Project Director at ThirdAge.com, a first wave baby boomer lifestyle and community website. At ThirdAge he successfully led major client sponsorships for Fortune 100 companies in healthcare (Tylenol), financial services (American Century), technology (Intel & IBM) and consumer products areas (Revlon & Viactive). He was responsible for strategic and tactical goal setting, project management, new product creation and web site production.

John previously worked in Channel Marketing and National Account Sales for IDG Books Worldwide, the publishers of the immensely popular "...For Dummies" book series. Additionally, he managed the wholesale distributor sales channel for Tor/Forge Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press.

John is active in local marketing associations, including the Direct Marketing Association, the Business Marketing Association of Northern California.

John has taught search engine marketing extensively in Northern California and across the country. He has led workshops for the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, the Direct Marketing Association in Northern and Southern California and the Business Marketing Association. He also teaches Search Engine Marketing at University of California, Santa Cruz, Extension in Silicon Valley.

Sarah loves the business she's in. As a passionate, high level thinking Internet Marketing Specialist, she has been a top performer for more than half a dozen corporations in her lifetime. Over the last decade, she has managed affiliate programs, lead sales teams, and written and implemented online marketing plans for several multimillion dollar corporations.

Throughout her sales and marketing career, she has been recognized for ten sales achievement awards, four customer service awards, been nominated for employee of the year twice, won Marketing MVP twice, and had her company nominated for two different awards in 2009: Best New Start Up of the Year in Vancouver, BC and Best New Outsourced Program Management Company of the Year by A Best Web.

Sarah now leads a team of highly skilled Affiliate Marketing Specialists in both her companies, All Inclusive Marketing, Canada's leading Full Service Affiliate Management Company, and Affiliate Management Trainers, which offers personalized affiliate management training to Internet Retailers.

Sarah believes in integrity, honesty, and that energy and persistence concur all things. She pushes her team for continued personal and professional development, as well as her own abilities as a team leader, industry expert, and teacher in the online marketing space.

Sundeep Kapur has been assisting organizations with their converged channel marketing strategies since 1990. From direct marketing to digital to converged, he is a passionate teacher who works with businesses across multiple industries, helping them to enable technology and services to brand, personalize and speak to consumers more effectively.

Sundeep is also an avid user of social media, having leveraged words, pictures, & video into a conversational blog. His daily dose of best practices can be found at EmailYogi.com, where he wrote his 1,000th article on February 17, 2011.

As President of Anvil Media, Inc., Kent Lewis is responsible for managing operations, marketing and business development to achieve the search engine marketing agency's mission: to build Anvil into the one of the most respected search engine marketing agencies in the world. Current Anvil clients include Extensis, gDiapers, Nautilus, Lucy Activewear, Oregon State University, PC World, Planar, Point6, Tea Collection and Yesmail.

He is also founder and acting President of Formic Media, a search engine marketing (SEM) agency focusing on the small business market. Lewis is also co-founder and former President of SEMpdx, a trade organization for SEM professionals based in Portland, Oregon.

With a background in integrated marketing, Lewis left a public relations agency in 1996 to start his Internet marketing career at a Web development firm, where he also created a free monthly lifestyle e-zine. Shortly thereafter, he built and managed his first search engine marketing team at local full-service marketing agency before co-founding Wave Rock Communications and later, eROI.

Lewis was also Director of Marketing and Business Development at goodguys.com, an online electronics retailer. In 2001, Lewis created pdxMindShare an online career community and Portland-area networking event. He is also an adjunct professor at Portland State University, where he teaches eMarketing and SEM workshops.

In 2003, he founded a charity fundraiser event, Anvil's Annual Get SMART Gala, to raise awareness for SMART (Start Making a Reader Today) for which he also sits on the board. Lewis is a member of EO, a global organization for entrepreneurs, and is a recipient of Portland Business Journal's Top 40 Under 40 Award. When he's not working or hanging out with his family, he likes to write about his travels and life experiences on his blog, The Kent Lewis Experience.

Matt is a founding partner of Clixo, a Denver based web architecture and Internet marketing agency. Prior to founding Clixo, Matthew spent three years as a strategic marketing manager building, from scratch, the marketing department at one of Denver's most successful web design and marketing agencies.

Matthew's eclectic background includes a law degree from New York Law School where he was a member and articles editor of the New York Law School law review, the creation and sale of two Denver based businesses, and working as sales executive for a technology company.

As an entrepreneur with three businesses under his belt and over seven years of marketing experience, Matt offers an approach that combines traditional marketing principals with Internet marketing techniques to help clients generate bottom line results.

Matt has optimized websites and Internet marketing programs for over fifty clients in a wide variety of industries. Many of the websites and search engine marketing programs Matt has managed have achieved conversion rates and sales well beyond industry standards. Some clients' sales have doubled and tripled as a direct result of Matt's consulting.

Lisa Raehsler is more than just passionate about search. Lisa has led strategy on more than 40 PPC accounts and puts her experience into practice every day as a thought leader in integrating search campaigns with ecommerce websites, behavioral targeting strategies, and web analytics.

In addition to agency work, she has led successful online marketing programs at Thomson Reuters in search marketing, merchandising, and ecommerce strategies at the enterprise level.

Lisa frequently lends her expertise to the search industry through organizational involvement, speaking, and blogging. She recently co-founded Minnesota Search Engine Marketing Association (MnSEM) and served on the programming committee for the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) . Lisa's recent speaking engagements on search include MIMA, SMX, SES conferences. She holds a BA in Economics from Valparaiso University and is a Certified Google Advertising Professional

Sundeep Kapur has been assisting organizations with their converged channel marketing strategies since 1990. From direct marketing to digital to converged, he is a passionate teacher who works with businesses across multiple industries, helping them to enable technology and services to brand, personalize and speak to consumers more effectively.

Sundeep is also an avid user of social media, having leveraged words, pictures, & video into a conversational blog. His daily dose of best practices can be found at EmailYogi.com, where he wrote his 1,000th article on February 17, 2011.

Over the course of his twenty-year career, Chris Baggott has redefined what it means to be a marketer. In 2001, he set up a desk in his friend’s garage and worked alongside Scott Dorsey and Peter McCormick to build ExactTarget, which has since grown to become a world-leading, multi-national email service provider. In 2007, Chris created Compendium, a business blogging platform with the software, tools, and services that empowers companies to create, capture, moderate, and broadcast their messages online. Two years ago, Invesp dubbed Chris one of the 25 most influential marketers in the world. In short, Mr. Baggott knows his stuff when it comes to business blogging, content marketing, and email marketing. In fact, he literally wrote the book on the latter when he penned Email Marketing by the Numbers in 2006.

Genoo Founder and CEO Kim Albee has over 23 years of experience designing software and running businesses. Her passion is in creating systems that are easy to use and helping companies attract more prospects and close more sales.

Kim Albee founded Einsof in 2000. Einsof is a sales & marketing performance software company that helps businesses achieve their strategic objectives by streamlining how information is accessed and used in sales and marketing processes.

In February of 2008, Kim founded Genoo LLC, a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering of Integrated Online Marketing Tools (http://www.genoo.com). Genoo provides a new level of innovation in online marketing tools. These tools enable marketers to generate messaging, drive traffic, create demand and pass intelligent lead information on to their sales departments to build relationships.

Prior to Einsof, Kim worked with organizations such as Minneapolis Star Tribune, Wells Fargo, and Verisign Global Registry Services to develop Internet strategies that delivered on strategic goals.

Kim holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Systems from Linfield College. In addition to her work with software, Kim has a lifelong interest in the technology of being and leads courses in ontology.

John Thyfault has more than 18 years of marketing, sales and product development experience, and he brings a proven track record of successful campaign, program and product development expertise to his clients. His knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC) marketing and social media marketing, combined with an in-depth understanding of customer identification, market analysis and segmentation, allows him to deliver high returns on our client's marketing investment for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets.

Prior to working with Beasley Direct, John was Senior Client Services Project Director at ThirdAge.com, a first wave baby boomer lifestyle and community website. At ThirdAge he successfully led major client sponsorships for Fortune 100 companies in healthcare (Tylenol), financial services (American Century), technology (Intel & IBM) and consumer products areas (Revlon & Viactive). He was responsible for strategic and tactical goal setting, project management, new product creation and web site production.

John previously worked in Channel Marketing and National Account Sales for IDG Books Worldwide, the publishers of the immensely popular "...For Dummies" book series. Additionally, he managed the wholesale distributor sales channel for Tor/Forge Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press.

John is active in local marketing associations, including the Direct Marketing Association, the Business Marketing Association of Northern California.

John has taught search engine marketing extensively in Northern California and across the country. He has led workshops for the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, the Direct Marketing Association in Northern and Southern California and the Business Marketing Association. He also teaches Search Engine Marketing at University of California, Santa Cruz, Extension in Silicon Valley.

Laurie is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc. www.BeasleyDirect.com, a Silicon Valley direct marketing agency that has managed online and direct marketing programs for hundreds of companies. Laurie serves as president of the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California www.DMAnc.org. She is also an instructor for the Online Marketing Institute www.OnlineMarketingInstitute.org and an instructor for the Online Marketing Certificate program at UC Berkeley Extension.

Nichole Goodyear is a seasoned and award-winning entrepreneur having helped build seven technology companies over the course of her career. Nichole has received numerous awards for her work in the social media space including being named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology for 2011, an IAB Leadership Award for her work on the nation’s first Social Media Buyers Guide and two Stevie Awards; one for Entrepreneur of the Year and the other for Technology Innovation in the social media space.

Prior to joining Extole, Nichole was the CEO & Co-founder of Brickfish.com, a Social Media Engagement Platform. In addition to working with Extole, Nichole is also the Co-Executive Director of the Social Media Advertising Consortium (SMAC) and an advisor to several other technology companies, advising on social media technology strategy.

As Strategic Advisor for Extole, Nichole works cross-functionally with the Executive, Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams to develop strategy for its Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) Social Marketing Platform.

Twitter @NGoodyear

Sundeep Kapur has been assisting organizations with their converged channel marketing strategies since 1990. From direct marketing to digital to converged, he is a passionate teacher who works with businesses across multiple industries, helping them to enable technology and services to brand, personalize and speak to consumers more effectively.

Sundeep is also an avid user of social media, having leveraged words, pictures, & video into a conversational blog. His daily dose of best practices can be found at EmailYogi.com, where he wrote his 1,000th article on February 17, 2011.

Dennis Yu is CEO of Blitzlocal, helping brands grow and measure their Facebook presence. He is an internationally recognized lecturer in Facebook marketing, having been featured on National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News, AllFacebook, CBS Evening News, and KTLA-TV. He has spoken at Search Marketing Expo, Search Engine Strategies, Web 2.0, The American Marketing Association, PubCon, Conversational Commerce Conference, Pacific Conferences, HostingCon, Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Convention, UltraLight Startups, MIVA Merchant, and other venues. Yu has also counselled the Federal Trade Commission on privacy issues for social networks.

Dennis has held leadership positions at Yahoo! and American Airlines. His educational background is Finance and Economics from Southern Methodist University and London School of Economics.

A mobile developer and strategist, Gene has experience translating a wide variety of challenging client technical needs into elegant and durable online systems. As Director of Mobile Solutions, Gene works with ISITE's clients to craft mobile strategies that align with their broader digital strategy and business goals, and leads a team of solution providers developing innovative native mobile apps and mobile web applications and sites. Prior to ISITE, Gene founded and ran Portland-based firm Anomaly Incorporated for fourteen years, specializing in web and mobile application development. An avid outdoorsman, Gene enjoys skiing the Oregon backcountry and playing the electric guitar (though rarely simultaneously).

Dave leads the digital business practice at ISITE Design. As customer experiences become increasingly digital, ISITE Design provides management consulting, development, design, and content planning to enable digital enterprises.

Dave is a faculty member in Northeastern University’s graduate program for Digital Media. His experience as a brand marketer includes building digital teams for Thomson Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, and Sokolove Law. He has keynoted and shared his vision of the future of digital marketing for eConsultancy, Marketing Sherpa, Marketing Profs, ExactTarget, Marketo, and e-Dialog.

Dave is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Boston University, and Shimer College. He lives in Boston, where blogs on UsefulArts.us, and guest writes for AdAge.

Chris Boggs of Rosetta is a specialist in search engine optimization and paid search advertising. He joined Brulant from Avenue A | Razorfish in 2007 as manager of the SEO team, and Rosetta acquired Brulant in 2008.

Chris has worked in search engine marketing since 2000, starting in-house and moving into a consulting role in 2002. He's worked with organizations ranging from small businesses to Fortune 100, within all major industries, including health care, financial services, and consumer products, and retail. He is experienced in performing and directing hands-on SEO, from keyword research to content and link development, as well as guiding technical implementations with e-commerce platforms.

Chris is actively involved in the SEM community. He is as a regular speaker at major search marketing conferences, a moderator and expert columnist for SearchEngineWatch.com, an associate editor for the Search Engine Roundtable blog, and a member of the board for SEMPO since 2006. Chris lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, with his wife, son, and daughter, and enjoys golfing, soccer, and fantasy sports.

Elyse Tager is West Coast Regional Development Director for Constant Contact. A long-time marketer and passionate entrepreneur, Elyse has helped hundreds of small businesses, associations, and nonprofits develop and implement effective social media and email marketing strategies to grow their business or organization. Elyse is a popular speaker, writer and educator known for providing marketers with the practical tools, techniques and strategies they need to grow their business using the combined firepower of email and social media marketing. Elyse has been a past speaker on social media topics for the Association of Professional Fundraisers, the American Marketing Association, Ad-TechSF, the Direct Marketing Association, Women in Consulting and Hubspot, among others. She is an active member of the Bay Area business community, including: Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, Northern California Business Marketing Association, Women Entrepreneurs of the Bay Area, Catalog and Ecommerce Club of Northern California, Women in Consulting and the Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, she has been a past columnist for ClickZ and contributor to Network World on various marketing topics.