Throughout the next couple of days, we are planning to announce the speakers of the 2010 Internet Ministry Conference. First off, we would like to introduce you to Dan Zarrella!

Dan Zarrella

Keynote: The Future Of The Internet: 2011 and beyond

Session: Social Media Marketing 101

Twitter: http://twitter.com/danzarrella

Dan Zarrella is an award-winning social, search, and viral marketing scientist and author of the O’Reilly Media book “The Social Media Marketing Book“. He has a background in web development and combines his programming capabilities with a passion for social marketing to study social media behavior from a data-backed position and teach marketers scientifically grounded best practices.

His Link Attraction Factors report helped readers determine which topics, days, times, and keywords attract links in social media stories for semantic content optimization, while his Viral Content report details the motivations, preferences and habits involved in online content sharing. His Science of ReTweets Report analyzes the when, why and how Twitter users ReTweet things, and explains how marketers can effectively get more ReTweets, and TweetPsych is linguistic analysis tool he built that allows users to generate psychological profiles of any other Twitter user or list based on the contents of their Tweets.

He has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Wired,Fast Company, Forbes, The Financial Times, Huffington Post, The London Times, The Miami Herald,Slashdot, Smart Money, AdAge, NYPost, Mashable, The Twitter Book, and TechCrunch. In 2009 he was awarded Shorty and Semmy awards for social media & viral marketing.

He has spoken at numerous conferences, including: PubCon, Search Engine Strategies, Iowatasmic,Convergence ’09, 140 The Twitter Conference, The Cool Twitter Conference, WordCamp Mid Atlantic, Social Media Camp, Inbound Marketing Bootcamp, and Social Fresh Nashville, and he currently works as marketing product owner at HubSpot.

What other people have said:

“Zarrella calls himself “The Social Media and Viral Marketing Scientist” and is one of the few people on the web with the credentials to back up such a bold claim.”
-Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb)

“@danzarrella just launched something I had drawn on our whiteboard a couple weeks ago”
-Ev Williams (Twitter CEO)

“Let Zarrella take you to social media marketing school. You’ll learn more from reading this book than from a month of research on the Internet.”
-Guy Kawasaki, cofounder of Alltop.com

“If I could be any other person for a day, it would be Dan Zarrella. Either him or Brad Pitt. But Dan’s smarter. This book is why I say that.”
-Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs

“We’ve covered several utilities that have found fun and creative ways to analyze Twitter messages, but TweetPsych takes the cake.”
-Josh Lowensohn (cnet News)

“… [Dan Zarrella is] arguably the most knowledgeable of the ReTweeting trend”
-Nathania Johnson (Search Engine Watch)

Danielle Hartland over at Church Marketing Sucks just finished a great 5 part series on Facebook and your church. I would recommend reading it. Here are the links to the posts!

Facebook for Churches: Getting Your Church Staff to Care

Facebook For Churches: How Our Church Uses Facebook

Facebook for Churches: Pastors on Facebook

Facebook for Churches: Resources (posted by Kevin Hendricks)

Facebook for Churches: Next Steps