Top Digital Marketing Experts in 2009

Dave Bell

Co-founder, Gummicube

Was among those formalizing what it meant to get an app discovered rather than just published, as the term "App Store Optimization" began to spread.

With the App Store past 100,000 listings, simply being available no longer guaranteed visibility. Work like Bell's turned discoverability into its own marketing discipline.

Also featured in 2008

Frank Eliason

Director of Digital Care, Comcast

Was named "the most famous customer service manager in the U.S." by BusinessWeek in 2009, cementing @ComcastCares as the reference point for brands doing customer service on social media.

The recognition reflected how quickly social customer care had gone from novelty experiment to something companies were expected to staff seriously.

Also featured in 2008

Dennis Crowley

Co-founder, Foursquare

Launched Foursquare with Naveen Selvadurai at SXSW in March 2009. It was his second location-based startup, after Dodgeball, which Google had acquired in 2005.

Check-ins gave local businesses something they had never had online: a public signal that a customer had walked through the door, plus a built-in way to reward regulars, since the most frequent visitor became the venue's "mayor."

Scott Monty

Head of Social Media, Ford

Led Ford's Fiesta Movement in 2009, giving 100 social media creators a European-model Fiesta for six months and letting them post about it freely, about a year before the car went on sale in the US.

It was one of the first times a major automaker handed a launch to outside creators, and it became an early template for the influencer programs brands ran over the following decade.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Co-founder, VaynerMedia

Co-founded VaynerMedia with his brother AJ in 2009 after building Wine Library TV, a daily video show that grew his family's wine business. That October he published Crush It!, his case for building a business on social media.

His argument that attention earned online could be turned into revenue gave small businesses a playbook for Twitter and YouTube while most brands were still treating both as experiments.

Also featured in 2011, 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2026

Brian Solis

Principal, FutureWorks

Co-wrote Putting the Public Back in Public Relations with Deirdre Breakenridge in 2009, arguing that social media had shifted PR from pitching journalists to talking with customers directly. The year before, he had mapped the sprawl of social networks in the Conversation Prism.

For PR teams watching brands like Comcast answer complaints on Twitter, the book made a practical case for treating social channels as part of the job rather than a side project.