Business News

AGBeat’s top 50 industry influencers

(Business News) In an effort to expand horizons, we have listed 50 influencers that we are inspired by and learn from on a regular basis.

Published

7 years ago

January 2, 2014

The American Genius Staff

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Marsha Collier

marsha collier [dropcap style=”style1″]M[/dropcap]arsha Collier specializes in writing, social media marketing, eBay business, e-commerce, user experience, community relations and online customer service.

What is most fascinating about Collier is that she has already written over 45 books, several of which are a part of the “for Dummies” series. She sold over one million books by 2007 and now spreads her passion for social media to universities and conferences around the world and hosts #techradio.

Few people in the industry have worked as hard as Collier, and her determination and devotion are clear in her accomplishments.

Matt Hixson

matt hixson tellagence big data expert [dropcap style=”style1″]C[/dropcap]o-Founder and CEO of social media prediction company, Tellagence, Matt Hixson is passionate about changing how businesses approach social media by identifying trusted relationships in social networks and predicting behaviors within specific topics of interest. Prior to Tellagence, Hixson spent over a decade delivering corporate initiatives from bringing an enterprise startup from concept to market in nine months, to pioneering social strategies, to driving strategy development at an $80 million organization. Hixson never puffs his chest, never condescends, yet is one of the smartest people in his industry and his company Tellagence, is poised to explode in 2014.

Meghan McCain

meghan mccain millennial expert [dropcap style=”style1″]E[/dropcap]xamining important topics for Millennials on her television show, Raising McCain, Meghan McCain has offered a unique insight into a budding generation.

On her Twitter account, she is authentic, brash, cusses, and is real, just as she is in her show. She is influencing not only her own industry, but viewers and listeners who desperately seek to understand Generation Y.

With her determination and refusal to accept the status quo, watch for McCain to be a voice for her generation for years to come.

Michael McClure

michael mcclure real estate professional, influencer [dropcap style=”style1″]C[/dropcap]EO of Verified Professionals, offering a CPA- like certification for the real estate industry, Michael McClure is also the founder of Professional One Real Estate and the co-author of the Swanepoel Technology Report.

McClure is also a CPA and worked at Price Waterhouse for a decade before entering real estate where he went on to co-found RaiseTheBar Radio and the Raise the Bar Facebook Group.

One of the perpetual good guys, McClure has devoted an unfathomable amount of unpaid hours to helping the real estate industry to suck less.

Miriam Slozberg

[dropcap style=”style1″]A[/dropcap]s a SEO and Social Media Consultant, owner of Gemini Rising, and co-owner of Social Influence University, Miriam Slozberg is highly invested and influential in social media.

Slozberg has captured our attention through her evangelism for and expertise regarding Klout, social media scoring site.

She is one of the few excellent source of information about Klout and what it means for businesses, and freely on her Twitter account, @msmir.

Keep clicking for other influencers you must meet:

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The American Genius Staff

The American Genius is news, insights, tools, and inspiration for business owners and professionals. AG condenses information on technology, business, social media, startups, economics and more, so you don’t have to.

34 Comments

Linda Bernstein

January 2, 2014 at 2:22 pm

So many terrific people here! I love this list.

Reply
Christopher S. Penn

January 2, 2014 at 2:40 pm

Thanks for including me! Much appreciated.

Reply
Ted Rubin

January 2, 2014 at 3:50 pm

Honored to be included 🙂

Reply
Miriam Slozberg

January 2, 2014 at 4:05 pm

Very honored to be included! Thank you.

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Amber Osborne

January 2, 2014 at 4:27 pm

Honored to be included among those who inspired me to get into this industry. Thank you!

Reply
annhandley

January 2, 2014 at 4:45 pm

This list is stuffed full of people I’m lucky enough to call friends, as well as many who have influenced *me*. Thanks for adding my name to the roundup.

Reply
Charles E Gaudet II

January 2, 2014 at 5:51 pm

Thank you for the honor! I’m both humbled and grateful to be included among this least of extraordinary people.

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AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
AmyVernon

January 2, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Thanks so much for the honor folks. I’m fortunate to have met many of these folks, and now have a whole list of others I want to make sure I catch up with!

Reply
Liz Strauss

January 2, 2014 at 7:31 pm

Thank you, AGBeat, for the thought and work that went into writing about all of us. You captured the people who have influence not just their resumes, making this fun to read. I’m honored that you included me.

Reply
Michelle Poccia

January 2, 2014 at 8:34 pm

This list is chock full of GENIUS! Congrats to all who are on it! And thanks AGBeat for my 2014 Stalker List!

Reply
Danny Brown

January 2, 2014 at 8:56 pm

Nice to see such a diverse group, and appreciate the fact you took the time to share reasons why people might want to connect, versus a generic “OMG, these guys are just awesome, y’all!!”

Cheers for the kind inclusion, and Happy New Year!

Reply
J Philip Faranda

January 2, 2014 at 9:33 pm

I hope to meet Michael McClure in person someday! He is remarkable.

Reply
Belinda Summers

January 2, 2014 at 11:00 pm

Gee! A bunch of people I look up to. 🙂 How I wish to be one of them someday.

Reply
Matt Hixson

January 2, 2014 at 11:38 pm

This was a great way to start the year. Thanks for including me.

Reply
Belinda Summers

January 3, 2014 at 1:00 am

Gee! A bunch of people I look up to. 🙂 How I wish to be one of them someday.

Reply
Lucretia M Pruitt

January 3, 2014 at 3:02 am

Some of my favorite people on here… Glad to see AGBeat and I agree on so many awesome people as influences!! Congrats for a solid list and kudos to some awesome folks.

Reply
Lucretia M Pruitt

January 3, 2014 at 3:02 am

Some of my favorite people on here… Glad to see AGBeat and I agree on so many awesome people as influences!! Congrats for a solid list and kudos to some awesome folks.

Reply
Michael Q Todd

January 3, 2014 at 6:37 am

Great list and especially great endorsements well done for taking the time and effort have subscribed to you

Reply
S. Anthony Iannarino

January 3, 2014 at 10:39 am

Thanks so much for including me on this all-star list! I am honored!

Reply
Heather MacLean

January 3, 2014 at 11:34 am

Great list. Nice to see some really familiar faces as well as some new ones.

Reply
agbenn

January 3, 2014 at 1:36 pm

As the Founder and Publisher of The American Genius, I certainly do not want to sound callous, and text can be so impersonal. We hear your feedback, and have noted it for future reference. When we see people, we see human beings, whatever their race or gender.

In saying that, our pick if we were considering race or gender ie. a particular Hispanic Influencer, it would have undoubtedly been His Holiness, Pope Francis. However, because we’ve covered His Holiness, several times in the past month, it gave way to another open spot out of hundreds of thousands of potential people we considered one by one. To be quite honest, I actually had to go back and look and read every entry to see if anyone was or wasn’t Hispanic.

For the record, I am Hispanic, and I am honored to have our team present this list as it is, and with innocent hearts. We do know several of the persons you’ve mentioned and do hold them in very high regard.

So thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback and encouragement, and we look forward to meeting and getting to know a few on your list. 🙂

Reply
Brian Hansford

January 3, 2014 at 1:47 pm

So nice to see some new faces in a list. It gets old seeing lists with the same names over and over just to get SEO juice.

Reply
agbenn

January 3, 2014 at 2:01 pm

Maya, bless your heart for sharing your kind thoughts and ideas with us. We agree with your sentiments profoundly, and thank you for recoginizing the complexity of what we’re presenting through our lists. We’ll take your idea and have the team bounce it around and see if we can’t do something as meaningful more often. As you know, things become passe when over done, even when done well. For the record, you influence me in thought provoking ways, and that’s not easy to do with a guy like me.

Happy New Year, and kick 2014’s ass!

Reply
tracysestili

January 3, 2014 at 5:19 pm

I love listening to Brian Carter speak. He’s not only funny, but real. Plus he presents data in a way that you didn’t think of. Glad to see he made the list and a few of my other faves. 🙂

Reply
Eve Mayer

January 4, 2014 at 5:47 pm

Whoa, I’m so lucky to be on this list! Thank you very much for thinking I’m somewhat as cool as all those respected peeps!

Reply
Pingback: Liva Judic on #MindfulSocial this weekMindful Social Marketing

Business News

Too connected: FTC eyes Facebook antitrust lawsuit

(BUSINESS NEWS) Following other antitrust hearings, we’re expecting to hear more about the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, soon.

Published

5 days ago

September 24, 2020

Patrick Auger

Facebook being crossed out by a stylus on a mobile device.

Facebook might be wishing it had kept the “dislike” button.

On September 15, the Wall Street Journal announced that the Federal Trade Commission was preparing a possible antitrust lawsuit against the social media titan. Although the FTC has not made an official decision on whether to pursue the case, sources familiar with the situation expect a determination will be made on the matter sometime before the end of 2020. Facebook and the FTC both declined to comment when asked about the story.

The news comes following a year-long investigation by the FTC that has looked into anti-competitive practices by the Menlo Park-based company. This past July, the United States House of Representatives held hearings in which they grilled the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook regarding their business practices. In August, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also testified in front of the FTC as part of the department’s antitrust probe into the organization.

The FTC seems to be especially interested in Facebook’s past acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, which they believe may have been done to stifle competition. In internal emails sent between Zuckerberg and Facebook’s former CFO David Ebersman back in 2012, the 36-year-old seemed worried that the apps could eventually pose a threat to the social media conglomerate.

“These businesses are nascent but the networks established, the brands are already meaningful, and if they grow to a large scale the could be very disruptive to us,” Zuckerberg wrote to Ebersman, “Given that we think our own valuation is fairly aggressive and that we’re vulnerable in mobile, I’m curious if we should consider going after one or two of them.”

When Ebersman asked him to clarify the benefits of the acquisitions, Zuckerberg stated the purchases would neutralize a competitor while improving Facebook.

“One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.” Zuckerberg said.

This isn’t the first time the FTC has investigated Facebook either. Last year the agency fined the company $5 billion for the mishandling of user’s personal information, the biggest penalty imposed by the federal government against a technology company. As a part of the settlement with the FTC in that case, Facebook also promised more comprehensive oversight of user data.

If the FTC does pursue an antitrust suit against Facebook, it could end up forcing the social media giant to spin off some of the companies it has acquired or place restrictions on how it does business. Considering how long it will take to file the litigation and prove the case in a courtroom, however, it seems that Zuckerberg will once again be “buying time.”

Business News

What you need to know about the historic TikTok deal (for now)

(BUSINESS NEWS) No one really knows what’s happening, but the TikTok deal’s impact on business, US-China relations, and the open internet could be huge.

Published

1 week ago

September 22, 2020

Lisa Wyatt Roe, Staff Writer

Male black hands holding app opening TikTok app.

So, maybe you’ve heard that Oracle and Walmart are buying TikTok for national security!

Um, not exactly.

Also, Trump banned TikTok!

Sort of? Maybe?

But then he said he approved the Oracle-Walmart-TikTok deal!

We guess?

The terms of the proposal seem to shift daily, if not hourly. The sheer number of contradictory statements from every player suggests no one really knows what’s going on.

Just one example: Trump said the deal included a $5 billion donation to a fund for education for American youth. TikTok parent ByteDance, said, “Say what now?”

Here’s what we think we know (as of this writing):

Oracle and Walmart would get a combined 20 percent stake in a new U.S.-based company called TikTok Global. Combine that with current US investors in China’s ByteDance, TikTok’s parent, that would give American interests 53 percent. European and other investors would have 11 percent. China would retain 36 percent. (On Saturday Trump said China would have no interests at all. But that does not jibe with the reporting on the deal.)

Oracle would host all user data on its cloud, where it is promising “security will be 100 percent” to keep data safe from China’s prying eyes. But reporting has differed on whether Oracle will get full access to TikTok’s code and AI algorithms. Without full control, skeptics say, Oracle could be little more than a hosting service, and potential security issues would remain unaddressed.

Walmart says they’re excited about their “potential investment and commercial agreements,” suggesting they may be exploring e-commerce opportunities in the app.

The US Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is overseen by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, still has to approve any deal.

As for the TikTok “ban” – which isn’t really a ban because current users can keep it – the Commerce Department postponed the deadline for kicking TikTok off U.S. app stores to September 27, to give time for the deal to be hammered out. Never mind that it’s still not clear whether the U.S. government has authority to do that. Unsurprisingly, ByteDance says it doesn’t in a lawsuit filed September 18.

Whatever happens with the whiplash of the deal’s particulars, there are bigger issues in play.

According to business news site Quartz, moving data storage to Oracle mirrors what companies like Apple have done in China: Appease the Chinese government by allowing all data hosting to be inside China. A similar move could “mark the US, too, shifting from a more laissez-faire approach to user data, to a more sovereign one,” says China tech reporter Jane Li.

More obvious: Corporate sales and mergers are now part of the parrying between the U.S. and China, which adds a whole new playing field for negotiations among businesses.

In the meantime, TikTokkers keep TikTokking. White suburban moms continue to lip sync to rap songs in their kitchens. Gen Z continues to make fun of the president – and pretty much everything else.

And downloads of the app have skyrocketed.

Business News

Hobby Lobby increases minimum wage, but how much is just to save face?

(BUSINESS NEWS) Are their efforts to raise their minimum wage to $17/hour sincere, or more about saving face after bungling pandemic concerns?

Published

2 weeks ago

September 18, 2020

Anais Dersimonian, Staff Writer

The arts-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby announced this week that they will be raising their minimum full-time wage to $17/hour starting October 1st. This decision makes them the latest big retailer to raise wages during the pandemic (Target raised their minimum wage to $15/hour about three months ago, and Walmart and Amazon have temporarily raised wages). The current minimum wage for Hobby Lobby employees is $15/hour, which was implemented in 2014.

While a $17 minimum wage is a big statement for the company (even a $15 minimum wage cannot be agreed upon on the federal level) – and it is no doubt a coveted wage for the majority of the working class – it’s difficult to not see this move as an attempt to regain public support of the company.

When the pandemic first began, Hobby Lobby – with more than 900 stores and 43,000 employees nationwide – refused to close their stores despite being deemed a nonessential business (subsequently, a Dallas judge accused the company of endangering public health).

In April, Hobby Lobby furloughed almost all store employees and the majority of corporate and distribution employees without notice. They also ended emergency leave pay and suspended the use of company-provided paid time off benefits for employees during the furloughs – a decision that was widely criticized by the public, although the company claims the reason for this was so that employees would be able to take full advantage of government handouts during their furlough.

However, the furloughs are not Hobby Lobby’s first moment under fire. The Oklahoma-based Christian company won a 2014 Supreme Court case – the same year they initially raised their minimum wage – that granted them the right to deny their female employees insurance coverage for contraceptives.

Also, Hobby Lobby settled a federal complaint in 2017 that accused them of purchasing upwards of 5,000 looted ancient Iraqi artifacts, smuggled through the United Arab Emirates and Israel – which is simultaneously strange, exploitative, and highly controversial.

Why does this all matter? While raising their minimum wage to $17 should be regarded as a step in the right direction regarding the overall treatment of employees (and, hopefully, $17 becomes the new standard), Hobby Lobby is not without reason to seek favorable public opinion, especially during a pandemic. Yes, we should be quick to condone the action of increasing minimum wage, but perhaps be a little skeptical when deeming a company “good” or “bad”.