The speakers are responsible for creating discussions and keeping the event social and collaborative. Here are the individuals that will be leading the discussions at Event Camp Twin Cities 2011.
David Adler
Founder and CEO of BizBash Media
From 1994 until 2000, Adler was vice president of corporate communications for PRIMEDIA; previously, he held the same post at Macmillan Inc. from 1988 to 1990. In those positions, Adler was responsible for events, public relations, charitable giving, branding, and special chairman and C.E.O. projects including the Notre Dame University Conference on the Holocaust in 1998. Events projects included the 50th anniversary of Seventeen magazine, the 25th anniversary of New York magazine, the annual New York magazine awards, the 100th anniversary of the Daily Racing Form, and the annual Soap Opera Digest award celebration.
From 1990 until 1993, Adler was vice president of media relations and cause-related marketing, where he was responsible for development and execution programs such as the initial Avon Breast Cancer Initiative, the Reebok Human Rights awards, the Polaroid Missing Children Program, and the John F. Kennedy Library Profiles in Courage awards.
Casey Collins
Founder & CEO of Scrimmage, LLC
Casey Collins has spent the last 12 years in the training and development business focusing on learning software development, custom sales training, and sales force productivity and effectiveness across multiple vertical markets. In 2007, Casey founded Scrimmage to continue connecting people to strategy through training and development and help his clients ignite their competitive advantage through better learning solutions. His cross functional team of ten in-house consulting and software development resources has helped make him a sought after resource in the specialty training industry. With several years of successful sales, leadership, implementation, operations, and marketing experience, Casey offers his clients a blend of practical as well as proven methods to achieve their training and development objectives. A partial list of Casey’s past and current clients includes: American Express, Bausch & Lomb, BMS, Canon USA, Genzyme, Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline, Moody’s, Novo Nordisk, Perkin Elmer, Roche, Sepracor, Standard and Poor’s, Stryker Orthopaedics, and Johns Hopkins University. Casey has a B.A. in political science from the University of Minnesota and currently lives in Minneapolis with his wife and family.
Ellen Dudley
Co-founder of Crowdscanner
Ellen is on a mission to live an interesting life. Initially pursuing a career in Biomedical Engineering, she left her job in 2009 to design and organize events that would spark amazing connections between people. She is a strategic thinker and a self taught coder and designer and has spoken about her passion for emotional design, and the re-engineering of face-to-face interactions using social gaming at conferences from Boston to Berlin.
Now she is the co-founder of CrowdScanner, an Irish startup based in New York, experimenting with technology to stimulate discussions between people in gatherings. Their psychological mobile games and visual design installations provoke people to hunt for what they have in common with others, and start conversations in fun and interactive ways.
Jenise Fryatt
Owner Eventprov & Icon Presentations
Jenise is the Founder of Eventprov, interactive improv experiences for conferences, workshops & retreats; and Co-Owner/Marketing Director of Icon Presentations AV for events, in Southern California. She has been involved in the event industry for more than 20 years. She writes for three blogs, manages 2 Twitter accounts, 3 Facebook pages, an online community for event professionals (Engage365) and a LinkedIn networking subgroup for event management professionals.
Ryan Hanson, CSEP
Creative Director & Owner BeEvents Design
Ryan is an award winning Creative Director and Owner of BeEvents. Combining a love of all things theatrical and a constant sense of creative wonder, with a passion to push the event envelope, Ryan approaches events as opportunities to create moments of magic with lasting brand appeal. In 2007, he founded BeEvents, an event design and production firm focused on creative strategy. Beyond a brand, BeEvents is a call to action to continuously contribute to the conversation and the experience through the creation of event environments that take risks, tell stories and bring people together to share something meaningful.
Elizabeth Henderson, M.E.Des., CMM
Chief Sustainability Strategist, Meeting Change
Elizabeth Henderson is the Chief Sustainability Strategist with Meeting Change based in Calgary, Canada. She led the design team for the 2011 GMIC Sustainable Meetings Conference in Portland, Oregon, which used gamification to drive attendee learning and engagement. She is leading the design team for the 2012 event in Montreal, Canada and is here on behalf of the Green Meeting Industry Council.
Ruud W. Janssen
Managing Director, TNOC in Switzerland
Ruud Janssen is the managing owner of ©TNOC, an unconventional marketing collective. He is also the founder and curator of TEDxBasel and TEDxYouth@Basel. With a background in Marketing in the Hospitality and Meetings & Events Industry over the past 20 years, Ruud is Meeting Professional International’s accredited trainer and university lecturer on various topics related to the Events, Marketing & Communication Industries. He is also the Director on the International Board of Directors of MPI International, a board member of the Meeting Support Institute and a Steering Committee member of Project Meeting Architecture. In the past he has served as President for MPI in the Netherlands and worked for companies such as Steigenberger Hotels & Resorts and Congrex Group. His educational background is in hospitality marketing from the Hotel Management School Maastricht and Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.
KiKi L’Italien
Senior Consultant at Delcor
I drink red wine and I eat red meat. Most of what people say about me is true. My focus is helping associations connect with member communities through effective communications and social media strategies.
Ms. L’Italien is a member and chair for the Component Relations Section Council of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE). She also contributed to the Decision to Volunteer study published by ASAE in 2008 and co-author for Social Networking for Nonprofits: Increasing Engagement in a Mobile and Web 2.0 World on social media released by ASAE (2010).
Additionally, KiKi is the regular moderator for the weekly Association Chat held every Tuesday on Twitter, author of the Acronym Soup blog and hosts the weekly webcast for associations in social media, the Social Media Sweet Spot.
Kurt Nelson
President of The Lantern Group
Kurt is a recognized leader in human motivation, organizational culture and team development. For over seventeen years, Kurt has worked on developing and delivering motivational programs, culture change programs, incentive programs, communication campaigns, training sessions, focus groups, team development sessions and strategy initiatives that get people to work more productively and effectively.
Kurt founded The Lantern Group, Inc. in 1997. The Lantern Group helps companies improve the motivation of their managers and employees. From 2006 through 2009 one out of every four pharmaceutical representatives in the U.S. had their incentive compensation plan rolled out to them Kurt and his team. Kurt has his MBA from the University of Iowa and his PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Capella University.
Eric Olson
General Manager for the Active Network
Eric Olson is General Manager, SMB at Active Network. In this role he is responsible for driving the global strategy for the technology company’s events solutions, including the popular attendee management solution RegOnline. A former event marketer himself, Eric has helped thousands of businesses apply integrated technologies to reduce costs, improve customer engagement and leverage rich data to increase the strategic value of events.
Justin Ramers
Director of Online Marketing at Active Network
As online marketing director of Active Network’s Media + Marketing division, Justin Ramers oversees online marketing initiatives (including a strong emphasis on social media) for Active Network’s consumer products and online media properties including Active.com, CoolRunning.com, SportsPower.com, iHoops.com and Laxpower.com among others. Ramers also advises Active Network’s software and marketing clients on social media practices that maximize consumer outreach. His team is responsible for driving millions of incremental visits a month to Active Network media properties through both email and social media channels including Twitter and Facebook.
Lynn Randall
Managing Partner Randall Insights, LLC
Lynn has a lot of energy. Mostly, she focuses that energy to improve the performance of meetings and events. Her consulting practice spits out all kinds of event-related brilliance, with special emphasis on:
- cooking up the right recipe of virtual solutions to enhance a physical event
- applying the lessons of neuroscience and macroergonomics to supercharge engagement
- extracting the story from event data to provide a blueprint for action
Ben C. Roth
Vice President of Creative, George P. Johnson
Since joining GPJ in 2009, Ben has led creative for IBM’s global engagement marketing portfolio. A champion of insight-driven design strategies, he directs worldwide teams delivering highly innovative and measurably successful integrated solutions; including IBM’s revolutionary Signature Event Experience execution model. Prior to joining GPJ, Ben specialized in retail innovation and experience design, working with category-leading companies, such as Walmart, PepsiCo, The Home Depot and Jack Daniel’s.
Deb Roth
President, Pink Powered by Moss
As an innovator in the industry Deb Roth has continued to combine ideas and materials while bringing new product to the events arena. Her visuals and designs continue to win awards and attesting to the prominence and power of Debra Roth and her Pink Inc. brand, they were acquired by Moss, Inc. This catapults Debra and Pink, now Powered by Moss’ artistic vision further into the Event Design community.
Debra Roth is telling the truth when she says she learned about stretch-fabric from the inside-out. Beginning in the heyday of the 80’s performance art movement, Debra combined postmodern dance production with abstract-shaped costumes made of stretch-fabric that she, literally, performed within. And to enhance the theatrical experience, she designed and sewed brightly-colored, highly imaginative stretch-fabric stage set elements – complete environments, all of which became the basis of her business, Pink Inc. almost thirty years ago.
Cece Salomon-Lee
Principal at PR Meets Marketing
Cece Salomon-Lee has 15-plus years’ experience translating technology innovations into cohesive and successful campaigns that cross from public relations to marketing and virtual events. She has been an active participant in the emergence of the virtual events industry, originally in her roles with technology pioneers ON24 and INXPO, a consultant and contribute to Virtual Edge Institute, and co-author of The Virtual Buzz blog. In addition to her work in the virtual arena, Cece is a noted industry expert in social media for events, and often weaves the social aspects of virtual events into her blog posts. Cece is frequently sought by the media for her expertise.
Mike Scott
Executive Vice President of Dale Carnegie Training in the North Central States.
Besides training an astounding 1,000 people per year at Dale Carnegie, Mike has worked on projects for companies like Cargill, Medtronic, Thomson Reuters, Lawson, University Hospital Services, Johnson & Condon, Prudential, Ryan Companies, Short Elliott Hendrickson, Michael Foods and Pentair Technical Products.
Mike’s hard work at Dale Carnegie led him to win the National Sales Award twice, and he has ranked among the top 35 trainers in North America. Furthermore, while serving as a member of the Dale Carnegie Executive Team, Mike and his team earned the Board of Directors’ Award from Dale Carnegie & Associates three times over the last five years.
Adrian Segar
President at Conferences that Work
Adrian is an energetic champion for participant-driven and participation-rich meetings that uncover and satisfy actual attendee needs for relevant content, education, answers, and connections. He is the author of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, and loves to sing and dance.
Erica St. Angel
VP Marketing at Sonic Foundry
Erica oversees community-building for Mediasite by Sonic Foundry, including its annual conference, user group and social media strategy. With 5 years of hybrid event planning experience, she’s a regular speaker on blended meeting tips and tech, and her work has earned both industry and marketing awards, including the Forrester Groundswell Award for the use of social technology.
Andrea Sullivan
President at Brainstrength Systems
Andrea Sullivan is President of BrainStrength Systems, a learning and performance organization providing presentations and consultation on brain-friendly meeting design, leadership development, performance improvement, and personal mastery. Andrea holds a Master’s degree in Organizational Psychology and has introduced brain-compatible programs into many organizations, including Fortune 500 companies such as Merck, Aetna, and Northrup Grumman Corporation, and the American Board of Internal Medicine. Andrea has recently focused on the meetings industry to contribute to efforts toward making meetings more engaging, productive, and conducive to genuine learning.
Glenn Thayer
Professional Host & Content Strategist
Glenn Thayer is a professional presenter and host for live and hybrid events. His clients include Hewlett-Packard, Bayer, AAA, Progressive Insurance, and more. He is regularly seen on PBS as a pledge drive host and can be heard on radio and television representing clients such as Comcast and Quiznos. Glenn uses multiple formats to engage keynote and breakout presenters in a two-way dialog with the face-to-face and virtual audience. The result is a high level of engagement and educational value for the attendees.
Bob Vaez
President at Eventmobi
Bob is an engineer and a passionate event professional with deep expertise in mobile & web technologies for the conference and trade show arena. He has over 10 years of experience managing and developing some of the world’s advanced systems while working for a number of startups and large corporation in Silicon Valley, California and Toronto, Canada. He is currently the President & CEO of EventMobi, where he has brought his knowledge of event industry and attendee behavior to help and create one of the most widely used mobile event apps that enhances attendee experience and provides direct value to event organizers, sponsors and destinations alike.
