Over 4,000 marketers will make their annual pilgrimage to Cleveland this week to attend Content Marketing World (aka CMWorld or CMW). CMWorld brings together the best minds in marketing to exchange stories, predict trends, and gripe about overused buzzwords (these are content creators, after all!). In the spirit of learning, we wanted to call out a handful of select marketing influencers who marketers turn to for trusted advice. The following list is comprised of the most influential marketers that are speaking at CMWorld this year, as well as leading day-to-day online conversations.
How did we build this list?
This list was built using the Traackr platform, which measures for an influencer’s reach, resonance, and relevance. Reach measures the total size of the influencer's audience, across all social platforms. Resonance scores influencers based on how engaged their community is with the content they produce. The more comments, likes, retweets, and shares an influencer gets the higher their resonance score is. Relevance measures how “on topic” the influencer’s conversations are to keywords. For this project we used keywords around content marketing and influencer marketing to determine which influencers discuss these topics the most. See the exact keywords we used to build this list below. (And for a top 50 list of #CMWorld influencers, check out TopRank’s Lee Odden’s post.)
The Most Influential
Although CMWorld will have over 180 speakers this year, this list is comprised of the top 20 voices shaping the content marketing space and influencing their peers:
- Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute*
- Michael Brenner, CEO, Marketing Insider Group
- Juntae DeLane, Sr. Digital Brand Manager, University of Southern California
- Ian Cleary, CEO, RazorSocial
- Bryan Kramer, International Keynote Speaker, Emcee and Event Host, PureMatter
- Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Marketing
- Jay Baer, Author, Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers (Fun Fact: Also the most retweeted digital marketer)
- Carla Johnson, Marketing and Customer Experience Consultant, Type A Communications
- Pam Didner, Adjunct Instructor, West Virginia University
- Chad Pollitt, Adjunct Instructor, Rutgers University
- Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Advisor, Content Marketing Institute
- Arnie Kuenn, CEO, Vertical Measures | Search, Social & Content Marketing Services
- Christoph Trappe, Chairman (Midwest, U.S.), Internet Marketing Association
- Andy Crestodina, Strategic Director, Orbit Media Studios, Inc.
- Gini Dietrich, Chief Executive Officer, Arment Dietrich, Inc.
- Brian Carter, CEO / Digital Marketing Consultant, The Carter Group (TCG)
- Roger C. Parker, Owner, Published & Profitable
- Mark Masters, Managing Director, ID Group
- Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
- Pawan Deshpande, CEO, Curata
How to: Meet your favorite influencer
How many of these influencers are you already following? Which are you about to follow right now? CMWorld is a great place to meet your favorite online marketing influencers in real life. If influencer outreach seems like a daunting task (whether for personal or professional purpose) take a look at these tips from the influencers themselves. Your favorite influencer might even be the one giving you advice on how to approach them. Here is how to connect with influencers at a conference. If this isn’t personal influencer engagement, we don’t know what is. If you still have questions about how you can be working with influencers, feel free to tweet us @Traackr or @Jfeiseee.
Influencer marketing session (with Microsoft!)
If you are attending #CMWorld this year, don’t miss our lunch and learn session, The Microsoft Factor, Scaling Influencer Marketing to Transform a Global Brand on Wednesday, September 7th at 12:35pm. This session will dive deep into what factors are keeping your influencer marketing program from scaling. We bring Microsoft on stage to discuss how influencer marketing is at the heart of its digital transformation. If you can’t attend CMWorld in person this year, follow the live tweets at #CMWorld and check back to see our full recap of the session later this week. Happy CMWorld!
*No, we did not rig this; Joe Pulizzi (founder of CMI and host of CMWorld) really is the most influential at the event, which totally makes sense.