Jacob Morgan

Principal and King

Jacob is widely regarded as a thought leader and community leader in social media.  A key to his success is identifying strategies, objectives, and metrics for companies that mean the difference between success and failure.

Jacob co-founded Chess Media Group with the goal of helping companies understand the business side of social media in an accountable and measurable way.  Jacob leads the social business strategy at Chess Media Group and provides the vision for how companies can achieve measurable returns on their social media investments.  Jacob also develops partnerships, business opportunities, and focuses on long term growth and strategy for Chess Media Group.

Jacob’s new book, Twittfaced – Your Toolkit for Understanding and Maximizing Social Media was published in September 2009 by Clay Bridges Publishing. Entirely co-authored through online collaboration, the story of how his book came to fruition demonstrates the power of social media and how online communities and collaboration can yield business successes.

Jacob is a Power 150 AdAge ranked blogger and a regular contributor to Marketing Profs and Social Media Today.   He is frequently asked to comment on social media by major news outlets including Wall Street Journal Blogs and LCI France, a national TV news network.

Previously Jacob ran another social media startup, an SEO consultancy, and worked for an online marketing agency.  Jacob has worked with brands such as Adobe, Conde Nast, New Horizons Computer Learning Centers, Salesforce, Sandisk, and Coremetrics.

Jacob is passionate about travel, people, ideas, and chess.  Today he maintains a busy schedule of speaking and consulting on the topic of accountability and measurement in social media.

Connie Chan

Principal and Queen

Connie, a senior marketer with 13 years of management, consulting and marketing experience, co-founded Chess Media Group to help companies to better communicate with their customers and target markets through social media. Connie leads the client servicing and account management, overseeing and coordinating teams on intricate projects. Connie makes sure things get done.  On time. On budget. On strategy.

Connie’s key ability is her skill at developing and implementing effective strategies, and delivering integrated demand-generation campaigns that measurably deliver value to clients.  She uses her extensive experience in traditional marketing to help clients to integrate social media strategies and traditional marketing, and recommend the right balance that drives business results.

Prior to co-founding Chess Media Group, Connie has been optimizing online and offline marketing for companies such as Ivanhoe Cambridge, Good Earth Cafes, Rogers Communications and for clients that include McDonald’s, Insurance Corporation of BC and Greyhound at DDB Worldwide.

Olivier Blanchard

Director of Social Business Strategy

Olivier’s professional experience is a rare mix of marketing communications, brand management, strategic business development and Social Business program development acquired over a 15 year management career. A veteran of both the B2B and B2C space, Olivier earned his stripes working with a diverse breadth of verticals, from manufacturing, retail, food service and sportswear to professional services, technology, distribution and multimedia. His experience working with businesses of all sizes – from Fortune 500 on down to start-ups – has helped him gain a thorough understanding of how to navigate the maze of operational complexities found in most organizations.

As the Director of Strategy, most of Olivier’s work focuses on helping companies properly develop, operationalize, deploy and manage social business programs both internally and externally. His contributions to measurement best practices and the clarification of ROI in the Social Media space have given him worldwide acknowledgment.

In his not-so-free time, Olivier publishes the top-rated BrandBuilder Blog, has served as Marketing Hub Editor for Corante.com, and is an occasional contributor to Interactive/Media/Design (the Royal Academy of Art’s blog – The Hague). Olivier also sits on a number of boards including SmartBrief’s Social Media Advisory board, Social Media Club Greenville, and UK-based LikeMinds.

Olivier holds an International Baccalaureate degree from the International School of Brussels and a BA degree from Furman University. He is completely fluent in English and French.

Sonny Gill

Social Media Strategist

Sonny is an experienced online marketer who has helped develop integrated social media campaigns for large corporations, startups, and virtual companies. Sonny has worked himself into the forefront of the social media space through insightful content created on his social media & community blog, www.sonnygill.com. Sonny’s active presence on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us as well as his work in the trenches of social media, gives him the kind of savvy that helps clients stay ahead of the curve, build a meaningful digital presence and connect with untapped communities online.

Chris Peri

An advisor to Chess Media Group, Chris focuses on strategic data and analytics approaches; especially in “fuzzy” areas such as social media.  He helps guide process and strategy to help clients answer business value questions.  Chris worked in new media technologies for over 15 years and and is always developing his own unique and interesting applications.  As the former CTO of Mashable, Chris is well versed in analytics and custom algorithms.  Chris has also spent several years working on a project for NASA where he was the director of content delivery and information services.  Chris also has his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley in architecture where he focused on virtual technologies.