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SmartData Collective, an online community sponsored by Teradata and moderated by Social Media Today, provides enterprise leaders access to the latest trends in Business Intelligence and Data Management. Our innovative model serves as a platform for recognized, global experts to share their insights through peer contributions, custom content publishing and alignment with industry leaders. SmartData Collective is a key resource for executives who need to make informed data management decisions

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This site is owned managed by Social Media Today, LLC.

Social Media Today, LLC

Social Media Today LLC helps global organizations create purpose-built B2B social communities designed to achieve specific, measurable corporate goals by engaging exactly the customers and prospects you most want to reach.

Premium content produced by Social Media Today

» The Evolving Social Customer
» How to Save a Planet- On a Budget
» The Revolution in Venture Funding

We help large companies leverage the enormous power of social media to build deeper relationships with potential customers and other constituencies that influence the development of new business. We have found that our primary metrics of success are levels of engagement and business leads. One thousand people who come regularly and might buy an SAP, Oracle or Teradata system some day is better than a million people who definitely won't.

Our company, Social Media Today LLC, is a battle-tested, nimble team of former journalists, online managers, and advertising professionals who have come together to make a new kind of media company. With our backgrounds, and passions for, business-to-business and public policy conversations, we’ve decided to focus our efforts there. For these conversations we’d like to have, we’re assembling the world’s best bloggers and we provide them with an independent “playground” to include their posts, to comment and rate posts, and to connect with each other. On our flagship site, SocialMediaToday.com, we have brought together many of the most intriguing and original bloggers on media and marketing, covering all aspects of what makes up the connective tissue of social media from a global perspective.

Read about what we do [PDF]

Watch CEO Robin Carey talk about Social Media Today

Social Media Today's MyVenturePad.com case study at WOMMA 09

Listen to Robin Carey moderate "Bloggers, Buzz, and Business Leads"

What We Do

Our offerings for sponsors are detailed, varied and have been developed over the past year with the cooperation of our founding clients. These include everything from a comprehensive, long-term engagement with clients with the purpose of marrying great content from leading bloggers to specific goals, whether those are to build influence, to create measurable buzz, or to generate contacts and sales leads.

eMarketer says "Social network advertising to account for 10.8% of online market" (read this article). Marketing Profs says "Digital media is trouncing traditional channels among up-and-coming Millennials: 81% of affluent Gen-Y adults use Facebook every day—roughly double the number who read newspaper content (45%) or watch TV (44%) daily, according to a new study by L2. Moreover, 45% of such consumers read at least one blog every day."

We are also now happy to offer several specific, short-term programs in which we co-create content with sponsors, leveraging a model we call "meta-conversation." These programs include:

• Surveys of our members
• Branded "sub" communities
• White papers developed with leading bloggers
• Hosted video programs
• Podcasts of leading bloggers or other “influentials”

In developing our content assets, we make use of our site networks and the extended blogger networks we have developed for our sites for continued syndication and conversation. These assets will help your company or client connect to bloggers, to your customers and your prospects… and we will help measure those results.

You can find details about sponsorship and advertising in our media kit.

What We've Done

We launched the company in November 2007 with Social Media Today and The Energy Collective sites already built and operating as prototypes. Since then we have added MyVenturepad and The Social Customer with SAP as the lead sponsor, SmartData Collective, with Teradata in the lead, and Sustainable Business Forum supported by DuPont.

We’d be delighted to talk you about how you can create a successful, purpose-built BtoB community for your organization.

Social Media Today buzz

Christian Science Monitor talks about niche social networks with Robin Carey. Read it now (we're on page 2) »

SAP Wins AMI Partners 2010 Award for Best-in-Class Social Media Marketing on MyVenturePad. Read the write-up by Mark Lazen »

Oracle CRM wins award for TheCustomerCollective, launched by SMT with Starcom. Read it now »

Forbes.com interviews Robin Carey about Social Media Today and our other communities. Watch it now »

The New York Times Dot Earth blog calls The Energy Collective "is a valuable aggregator of views on one of the prime challenges of our time." Read more »

The Case for Third Party Online Communities by Johnathan Salem Baskin. Read it here »

Business Owner's Toolkit interview with CEO, Robin Carey. Listen now »

Robin Carey talks with Small Business Trends about what makes our communities what they are. Read it here »

"The success of the Social Media Today is due to their team's relentless pursuit of client value using the newest social media tools. Their ability to innovate a business model over two years ago, when most pundits said that social media had little or no business value, is truly remarkable and has stood the test not only of time, but of the most rigid standards for success."
- Don Bulmer, VP, Global Communications, SAP AG

"Social Media Today is the smart leader for insight about where media, marketing and technology are now and where they are going."
- Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light

"This has given us the platform to have a deeper relationship with our customers and has helped them better serve their customers."
- Alana Zamora, Director, North America Advertising, Oracle Corporation

About CEO Robin Carey

In 2007, Robin Carey founded Social Media Today, LLC, one of the first companies to manage online B2B communities that connect large organizations with people they want to influence. A veteran of the big-book print media world that included Fortune, Newsweek and BusinessWeek, she had built her reputation on architecting powerful strategies that delivered to blue-chip corporate clients and their agencies ways to corral and connect with their customers, and equally importantly, their customers’ trusted influencers. As traditional media went digital, and the internet went social, Robin was one of the first to realize that the emerging social media platforms offered huge promise to corporations seeking to interact directly with, and learn from, their customers, their employees, and experts from the Ivy Towers, the Street and the Hill.

SocialMediaToday.com was the first platform, and quickly became one of the leading communities for journalists and marketers looking to exchange information on this brave new world of social media. It was soon followed by theenergycollective.com, which has become a leading aggregation of international energy experts. Other platforms include MyVenturePad, TheSocialCustomer, SustainableCitiesCollective, TheCustomerCollective, GoverningPeople, and others. Online conversations are led by experts in their categories, many of whom are former journalists who see this new media model as the way of the future.

Robin was an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia. When she is not bringing together communities, she's bringing together individuals and organizations to assist in her work as co-chair of the Women's Refugee Commission, based in New York. She also serves as an Advisor to the Society of New Communications Research.

About CTO Mark Lazen

Mark is a writer, technologist and entrepreneur. For fifteen years, he has been mashing-up content and technology to deliver great customer experiences in news, gaming, 3-D CAD, interactive television and distance learning.

A one-time writer and editor for Time Inc. and others, Mark made the new media leap in 1995 when he was selected to spearhead digital product development for Time-Life Books. Two years later, he was in Silicon Valley for a multi-year stint with groundbreaking consumer CAD startup Books That Work. It was there that he began coding his first data-driven dynamic Web sites.

In 1997 he returned to the east coast to direct online sports development for news aggregator New Century Network and later served as a product and project director for online game company Bottle Rocket. In 2000 he was brought in to the publicly traded interactive television company ACTV to direct product development on top of a massively parallel message distribution system and a browser-based operating system approach that would come to be known as AJAX. Mark’s team and their cutting edge toolkit were acquired by Harcourt Inc. in 2005, and Mark served as the Director of Production for all media and software in the development of a series of distance learning programs.

As a partner at Social Media Today since the company was in its infancy in 2008, Mark oversees operations, development, design and editorial strategy. He has driven company growth from two communities to 10, and from 30,000 visits per month to 1.3 million. When he's not working, Mark can be found finger-picking a steel string guitar, or weaving through traffic on his bicycle. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, in a home overrun by dogs and children.

Contact Us

For sponsorship, media, advertising, and promotion inquiries:

Kelsey Arnold
advertising@socialmediatoday.com

Editorial inquiries:

smartdatacollective@socialmediatoday.com
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