Sebastien Provencher, Co-Founder and Vice-President Product Management, Needium.

Sebastien is Co-Founder and Vice-President Product Management at
Needium. He has more than 12 years experience in local search. From
1999 to 2007, Sebastien played an instrumental role in formulating
Yellow Pages Group’s online strategy in Canada. He developed their
most successful online advertising product ever (DirectoryPlus),
struck a strategic partnership with Google, and created a vision
around local search.

Sebastien co-founded his company in 2007 to help SMBs and local media
companies tap into the growing potential of online word-of-mouth and
social media, and recently launched Needium (www.needium.com), a
revolutionary social media lead generation service for SMBs. He writes
about traditional media, local search and social media on his blog at
sebprovencher.com and tweets at @sebprovencher.

We are very pleased to have Akesios back in 2010 as one of our main event sponsors. Akesios also sponsored the 1st Local Social Summit in 2009. This is testament to the forward thinking and innovative nature of this company. Akesios are the breakfast sponsors at LSS 2010.

Here is some background on the company:

Akesios has developed a platform, Ad-Direction, to enable Yellow Pages publishers to sell a leads-based product to its customers.

Ad-Direction has the following features:

• Manages the fulfillment of leads in any form e.g. clicks, calls, emails, driving direction prints, coupons, RFQ’s etc. for a customer
• Aggregates leads from all sources at a customer level
• Manages all 3rd party distribution networks to increase the reach, and prioritise the media buy based on yield and/or quality
• Centralised budget management, bidding and pacing engine
• Consolidated reporting dashboard for internal e.g. management, and external use e.g. customer centre, partner centre etc
• Fully customized and modular SaaS solution

Customers are increasingly confused with the plethora of digital products being offered to them. Publishers are increasingly required to increase their reach via distribution and through the addition of 3rd party products. Publishers are also under increasing pressure to offer greater transparency on the performance of their advertising products.

Ad-Direction from Akesios is the holistic solution to all these challenges.

To find out more please visit the Akesios website and be sure to read about how Akesios Brings Sophisticated Lead Management to Local Channels …

Carolyn Watt is the Managing Director of Profero’s Social Media and Digital PR business unit.

She is responsible for heading up Profero’s social marketing offering adding core competency around digital PR consultancy, social marketing strategy and implementation, blogger relations and community management, advocacy programs, content creation and brand reputation management, online buzz tracking and analytics.

She was formerly Mindshare’s Head of SEO, Digital PR and Social Media, leaving the WPP agency in October 2009 to launch this new Profero digital PR and conversational marketing division as a key part of its digital solutions offering.

Carolyn set up Mindshare’s search engine optimisation (SEO), digital PR and social marketing division in April 2008 incorporating online brand positioning, SMO, SEM, analytics and tracking technologies as well as the design and creation of digital content. She has worked with some of the biggest clients in the business including LG, Volvo, HSBC, 3, Talk Talk, IBM, ITV, Unilever, Nestle, Ford, Jaguar and Land Rover.

She has nine years experience in strategic and tactical marketing, PR and communications (both digital and offline) including the previous Client Services Director at Netrank Ltd both pre and post Netrank’s January 2008 acquisition by LBi. She was also the Strategic Marketing Manager for Intel’s first foray into services, and has managed the PR
and marketing for a range of American and British IT and comms companies. She also worked part-time as a party agent for one of the UK’s main political parties, conducting research, editing reports,canvassing and writing speeches for MPs.

This combines with five years experience as a print, digital and broadcast journalist writing, editing and presenting news and features for a range of TV, radio and print media including the Guardian, The Sunday Times, Voice of America, GMTV, BBC Radio Five Live, CNN, Sky and Channel 4.

She has a BA Hons in Politics, NCTJ accredited (National Council for the Training of Journalists) and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).

Specialties:

• Digital marketing strategy across global markets
• Natural search strategy and Project Management
• Digital PR Consultancy and Project Management
• Social media campaigns – definition and implementation.
  Blogger relations and community management
• Content creation
• Brand reputation management
• Technical SEO Consultancy
• Competitive benchmarking
• Training & Workshops Reporting, tracking and analytics consultancy

Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.

Ben Barney is a founding member and Director of Akesios. He specialises in productising new media products for traditional businesses with large sales forces, and creating monetisation opportunities from the developing players in the Local Search space. With over 10 years experience with Directory and Yellow Page companies throughout Europe, he is also a specialist in Google AdWords; from a reseller, agency and advertiser’s perspective.

Ben’s areas of expertise include:

• Strategic advisory services for digitising traditional media businesses
• Project coordination and implementation
• Google AdWords Reseller programs
• Marketing, sales and product strategy within Local Search
• Business turnaround
• Operational Due Diligence

Ben was a founder member of Thomson Directories’ Internet department and a key member of the team that developed WebFinder.com, Thomson’s PPC engine. He set up and managed WebFinder’s dedicated sales, account management, customer service, partner management and business development teams. He was also responsible for the commercial and operational management of their Google Reseller programme. He can manage or assist with all aspects of establishing and running a service with products that are highly usable by the sales force and customer base alike.

Ben is a full member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. You can also find Ben posting on the Akesios blog.