The Social Media Scientist

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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, 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 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.