Susan Halligan is a Social Media Consultant based in New York working with cultural organizations, non-profits, startups and authors on Social Media strategies spanning employee activation, content development, Community Management, Customer Engagement, monitoring and measurement. Her specialty is integrating social media into traditional marketing and communications channels.

As the former Marketing Director of The New York Public Library (NYPL), she established the first-ever marketing department for the 100-year-old institution and transitioned the library from traditional communication platforms to new media platforms. Susan built the library’s social media footprint to make @nypl the #1 public library in the world on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. The library’s “Don’t Close the Book” advocacy campaign was named by MarketingSherpa to the 2010 Viral and Social Media Hall of Fame and the library was awarded the 2010 PR News Non-Profit PR Award: “Use of Twitter, Success through a Coordinated Staffing Model”. Susan began her career in book publishing, including Princeton University Press, William Morrow and Simon & Schuster.

Twitter handle: @srhalligan

Amanda McCormick is ever optimistic about the future of storytelling in all its forms, after a circuitous journey working in independent film production, story development for Dimension Film, building the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s first digital strategy and completing an MFA in fiction at Columbia University before joining the world of high tech. She blogs about social media and creative technology at http://jellybeanboom.com and works at the social media optimization startup SocialFlow.

Twitter handle: @amandamccormick

Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture, and co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York; the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader and co-editor of White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. He is the creator of the Open Utopia, an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, and writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral, The Nation, to the prurient, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of the international direct action group, Reclaim the Streets. In 2009 he was a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he helped organize The College of Tactical Culture. With funding from the Open Societies Foundations he co-created the School for Creative Activism in 2011, and is presently co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism. Duncombe is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.

Twitter handle: @srduncombe

Jason Carey currently serves as Director of Marketing and Communications for Brooklyn Public Library, one of the largest non-profits in New York, with 60 locations in Brooklyn that serve the borough’s 2.5 million residents with free access to computers, books and materials, educational and cultural programs.  At the Library, Jason oversees marketing and communication strategy for the organization and leads a staff of marketing, publicity and creative professionals who serve as the in-house agency for the Library.  Throughout his tenure at the Library, Jason has led several key initiatives including launching a robust social media and email marketing strategy, creating new opportunities for corporate donations and rebranding key consumer facing assets including the library card, website and signage.  Prior to joining the Library, Jason held marketing positions with Mervyn’s/Target Corporation, where he managed media planning, consumer research and credit card marketing;  Levi Strauss & Company, where he was integral to re-branding one of Levi’s product lines, and an online startup in San Francisco.  Jason is a native New Yorker, lives uptown, and enjoys reading the New York Times op-eds.

Twitter handle: @jasonnyc73

Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur—VP of Community and Content of Small Demons, founder of Cursor, and Publisher of Red Lemonade. For most of the past decade, he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. Books he edited and published landed on bestseller lists from the Boston Globe to the Singapore Straits-Times; on Best of the Year lists from The Guardian to the Toronto Globe & Mail to the Los Angeles Times; the last book he edited there, Lydia Millet’s Love in Infant Monkeys, was selected as a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Last year the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and Mashable.com picked him as the #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape of Publishing. He has spoken on the history and future of writing, reading and publishing around the world—in Korea, Australia, the Netherlands and Italy, at CalArts and Yale, at Book Expo America and GigaOM RoadMap.

Twitter handle: @r_nash

Aziz Isham is the president and co-founder of Arcade Sunshine Media, a multimedia publishing company based in Brooklyn, NY and Washington, DC.  Arcade Sunshine’s first project, Here on Earth, was called ‘the benchmark for interactive books in any genre’ and was one of the first multimedia publications to feature social media and twitter integration.  Since then, Arcade Sunshine has created projects with a number of leading publishers, independent authors, non-profits and broadcasters. Before starting Arcade Sunshine, he was VP of Development for JWM Productions, one of the country’s top production companies, where he created and produced dozens of hours of documentaries for A&E, National Geographic, History and many more.

Twitter handle: @arcadesunshine

Corey Menscher is co-Founder of Findings.com, a groundbreaking tool for collecting, sharing and discussing clips you find in ebooks, or from any website on the internet.  He has been a web application developer and interface engineer since 1995, and has been involved in several startups and small-businesses ranging from online classified ads to NYSE market data usage reporting. He has also been adjunct faculty at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), from which he graduated in 2009, and will be an adjunct professor at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in Spring 2012. His other projects include location-based mobile games and wearable computing devices. He lives on New York’s Upper West Side with his wife, son, and a brand new baby daughter.

Twitter handle: @cmenscher