Psychology of Online Influence - Speakers

Dr Barbie Clarke
Founder and Managing Director, Family Kids and Youth 

Barbie founded Family Kids and Youth nine years ago. An international youth researcher for over 25 years, she was formerly Director of the Family division of GfK NOP. A BACP trained child psychotherapist, she has worked with young offenders, and in schools in Tower Hamlets. She has conducted many studies that have been published, both for government agencies and stakeholders. Currently Family Kids and Youth is working on several studies that are looking at children’s interaction with social media. She is LEA Governor of a Primary School, and sits on the BBC Children’s Editorial Advisory Board.

Benjamin Ellis
Co-Founder, SocialOptic

Social technologist and serial entrepreneur Benjamin Ellis has worked in the on-line world since the mid 1980′s. He has worked with companies including Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks in Silicon Valley, and on projects with Microsoft, IBM and Motorola. After more than two decades working at the leading edge of technology, Benjamin is still passionate about what it can achieve, particularly at the intersections between people, communication and software. He is mainly known for his roles at Redcatco and SocialOptic, and his support for start ups and growing UK digital businesses – predominately though the Digital Mission with Chinwag and the UKTI. He makes the occasional appearance on Radio and TV, explaining the way that technology is changing the how businesses work, and also contributes to a number of blogs and print publications. Benjamin is also active in the academic domain as both a researcher and student.

William Higham
Trends Forecaster and CEO, The Next Big Thing 

William Higham is one of Britain’s leading consumer trend authorities, an expert in innovation strategy, predictor of consumer change and renowned trends author. Higham runs forecasting consultancy The Next Big Thing, working with a range of clients: brands from BSkyB and BBC, to Barclays and Budweiser; and agencies from Mindshare to Mediacom. As CEO, he liaises with clients, researches and writes leading edge trend reports, runs innovation workshops and trend training sessions, and moderates and co-ordinates focus group and online research. 

His popular guide to trend forecasting 'The Next Big Thing' (Kogan Page, 2010) has a been translated into four languages. Until recently he was also the Managing Director of leading edge research company OnePoll - the fastest growing online research business in the UK, where he oversaw online and mobile research campaigns. Devoting his time more now to The Next Big Thing, he stills works with OnePoll as a consultant.

Elizabeth Kessick
Head of Insight, Just Giving

Elizabeth helped transform JustGiving from a tiny start-up in 2001 into becoming the world's largest online fundraising community.

As Head of Insight she’s responsible for understanding the behaviour and needs of JustGiving’s 13 million + users. Elizabeth has a background in journalism, design and usability, and cut her teeth working for high-tech start-ups in Canada in the late 90s.

Nathalie Nahai
The Web Psychologist

Nathalie is pioneering the new field of Web Psychology, which studies the effects of (and interactions between) our digital environment and our social and cognitive processes. Nathalie was also awarded Social Media Week London 2012 Speaker of the Week for her talk during the original Psychology of Online Influence session. 

Nathalie is currently writing a book on the Psychology of Online Influence for Pearson, and as part of her research we want to know how you create influence online. As an esteemed conference delegate, we're offering you a whopping 50% discount if you pre-order the book - simply submit your email address on the day, or sign up on the website (quoting the delegate discount code 'CHINWAG').

Stephen Haggard and David Stillwell
Cambridge Personality Research

Individuals are unique combinations of relatively few dimensions, which a personality test can measure in as little as 2 minutes. The myPersonality Facebook application that was developed 4 years ago has measured the personality of over 6 million users. Academic research at the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre examines this unprecedented dataset in order to understand the links between personality and behaviour. Commercially this brings the results to marketers through Cambridge Personality Research which developed Preference Tool to bring psychological insights to advertising.

Martin Talks
President, Digital, Draftfcb 

Martin Talks is a serial entrepreneur who has floated a shares company on the London Stock Exchange and recently sold his agency Blue Barracuda to Draftfcb.

He is now Global Digital Lead for the Draftfcb Group of companies and has already launched a new digital agency in Dubai. He curates a website on the increasing merger between Man and Machine and hopes one day to be a robot. He regularly speaks at conferences and events.

Craig Sullivan
Group eBusiness Manager, Belron 

Craig is the Group eBusiness Manager for Belron® (you may know them as Autoglass®, Carglass® or Safelite®). He looks after optimising visitor behaviour and making things nice for millions of customers, on 35 websites in 19 languages. Craig has been blending usability, customer insight, analytics, multi-variate testing, emotion, psychology and optimisation techniques for several companies over the last 11 years. He has built teams, run projects or used conversion voodoo on the likes of John Lewis, LOVEFiLM, Ocado, Waitrose, Zoopla and a smattering of tech startups. He tweets about 70 times a week on UX, Neuropsychology, Mobile technology, Persuasion, Copywriting and more as: @OptimiseOrDie.

Craig talks regularly at marketing and UX conferences and is rated as a top speaker by delegates because of his knowledge, engaging presentation style and practical tips.

Stuart Battersby and Matt Purver
Co-Founders, Chatterbox 

Stuart & Matt are co-founders of Chatterbox whose Conversation Platform helps brands streamline their social media engagement. Stuart holds a PhD in Human Interaction and has a background in Computer  Science. His interests lie in understanding the structure of conversations and building technologies for the social web. Alongside Chatterbox, Stuart has kickstarted @positivefail.  Matt has 20 years experience of research and development in commercial and academic areas, with the last 10 years focussing on computational linguistics and the study of language in interaction. After time at Cambridge University, King's College London and Stanford University, he now lectures in Human Interaction at Queen Mary.

Jonny Bentwood
Head of Analyst Relations and Strategy, Edelman 

Jonny leads Influential Engagement at Edelman. An advocate and evangelist of social media, Jonny created TweetLevel, BlogLevel and the Social Media Index and is the author of a white paper focussing on the psychology of online influence. His work has featured on CNN, Sky News, the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, Mashable, AdAge, The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb.

Jonny is a director and founding member of the IIAR and is a regular speaker social media, including the Royal Institute, Forrester’s IT Forum, Oxford University and Social Media Week.

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