AGBeat’s top 50 industry influencers

Steve Farnsworth

[dropcap style=”style1″]W[/dropcap]ell known for his B2B content marketing and inbound marketing work, Steve Farnsworth is a social media strategist working with tech companies and B2B. He offers advice and tips at The @Steveology Blog.

As a director with the Silicon Valley Brand Forum and an adviser to other professional organizations, Steve has moderated panels, spoken at or facilitated industry events at Intel, Yahoo!, HP, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Adobe, Electronic Arts, Hewlett-Packard, and Stanford. In 2012, he was appointed the Communications and Social Media Advisor to TEDxSanJoseCA.

He’s highly invested in the tech world, and offers keen insight into his industry at every turn.

Ted Rubin

[dropcap style=”style1″]S[/dropcap]ocial marketing strategist, keynote speaker, brand evangelist, and acting CMO of Brand Innovators, Ted Rubin penned the book, Return on Relationship, a movement he started nearly five years ago. He has been involved in digital marketing since 1997 and worked for some of the largest brands around, and is on the Advisory Boards of Crowdsourcing Week, EvenVoice, Expressible, OpenSky, SheSpeaks, and Zuberance. Rubin is influential, not just because of his expertise, but because of his unrestrained enthusiasm – he is fun to listen to and is a highly engaging speaker and social media user.

Tonia Ries

[dropcap style=”style1″]T[/dropcap]onia Ries is a branding genius, no lie. She is an experienced media professional with a background in marketing in sales, and you may already know her for her #RLTM Realtime Report which has been around since 2009, or her co-founding of The Realtime Conferences (formerly TWTRCON).

In 2002, she founded and remains the CEO of Modern Media which builds media brands, produces conferences, and designs web sites and marketing strategies.

Ries is influential not only for her branding expertise, but has been on the cutting edge of digital media since before it was ever even referred to as social media. She never rests on her laurels and always pushes to innovate.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul

[dropcap style=”style1″]T[/dropcap]his East Coast gal is stuck on West Coast time, and once dreamed of being called the Honorable Abayomi-Paul. Tinu Abayomi-Paul is the Owner of Leveraged Promotions, established in 1998.

She is influential because she has long helped brands of all size to become visible online, which sounds easy but is not. She is the editor of Women Grow Business, and serves on the Social Web Advisory Board at Web.com.

Abayomi-Paul is a Website Promotion Specialist, Author, and Entrepreneur. She teaches search-centric traffic generation to entrepreneurs and builds custom online marketing systems for larger companies.

She shows people how to generate more leads using the internet, and how to leverage web visibility to make those leads into lifelong connections. Repeat business is the cornerstone of an empire. Bottom line: she is too smart for her own good.

Tristan Walker

[dropcap style=”style1″]A[/dropcap]t age 29, Tristan Walker is an entrepreneur-in-residence for Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture-capital firms.

He was one of the first employees at Foursquare, the founder of CODE2040, which gets highly motivated young students of color into tech internships.

Walker is a serial entrepreneur, but not because he fails over and over, but because he is a born leader. He hasn’t even cracked his 30s yet, so watch out for his name – he’s an entrepreneur star in the making.