One of the most sought-after consultants, speakers and thought leaders on marketing , new media and social media, Joseph Jaffe is President of jaffe, LLC, a thought leadership and marketing innovation consultancy.

In 2006, Joseph founded and ran strategic consultancy, Crayon, until it was acquired by Powered in January of 2010 and again by Dachis Group in December of 2010. Crayon's clients included The Coca-Cola Company, Panasonic, Kraft Foods and H&R Block. Powered, a social media agency, included Target, Verisign, Anheuser-Busch InBev, General Motors/Onstar in its client roster. Before that, Joseph was Director of Interactive Media at TBWA/Chiat/Day and OMD USA, where he worked on Kmart, ABSOLUT Vodka, Embassy Suites and Samsonite.

Jaffe's popular blog and audio podcast, "Jaffe Juice", provides daily and weekly commentary respectively on all things new marketing. You can join the conversation at www.jaffejuice.com. His podcast was voted a Readers' Choice Award as "Best Marketing Podcast" by MarketingSherpa. In 2009, he launched his first foray into video in the form of JaffeJuiceTV (www.jaffejuice.tv), in an effort to prove once and for all that he does not have a face for radio.

His first book, "Life After The 30-Second Spot: Energize Your Brand With A Bold Mix Of Alternatives To Traditional Advertising" (Wiley/Adweek) was released in June 2005 and focuses on how advertising is evolving in a world ruled by an empowered consumer and no longer governed solely by the 30-second spot.

His second book titled, "Join the conversation: How to engage marketing-weary consumers with the power of community, dialogue and partnership" (Wiley, October 2007) outlines the birth and rise of "conversational marketing" - a vision of how marketers can become part of the conversation, instead of constantly disrupting it.

His third book, "Flip the Funnel: How to use existing customers to gain new ones," was published in February of 2010 and presents a powerful hypothesis that retention can become the new acquisition through the strategic incorporation and elevation of customer service, customer experience and customer initiated word-of-mouth, content creation and incentive-based referrals.

His forth book is currently in development and will be released in the first half of 2012. Joseph's impassioned, straight-shooting and honest perspectives have found their way to every major media outlet, including the likes of CBS Evening News, ABC World News, Bloomberg, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Fortune, Newsweek, Business Week, Ad Age, Adweek and the list continues.

Joseph is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School, as well as the Society for New Communications Research. He also has lectured at NYU's Stern School, Cornell's Johnson School of Business and Syracuse University.

Hailing from South Africa, he lives with his wife, daughter and two sons in Westport, CT.

Getting more from less using the power of conversation

It's a double-whammy - a catch-22. You see the world changing in front of your eyes- consumer empowerment, democratization of creativity and content production, loss of control, reduction of trust in a new social media playing field dominated by new phenomena (microblogging, lifestreaming), new players (Facebook, Twitter), new products (Amazon.com Kindle), marketplaces (iPhone App Store) and technologies (Nintendo Wii) and all the while, spinning out of control at the same time. You're under increasing and unprecedented pressure to increase sales or at the very minimum maintain status quo, amidst never-ending budget cuts and scrutiny. Innovation and Experimentation are vital and yet seemingly out of reach. Well here's the good news- investing in "commitment-based" marketing and coping during a recession are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they're interconnected. By "joining the conversation" through leveraging the power of community, dialogue and partnership, you'll quickly find yourselves on the right side of the "punch"- the 1-2 punch of growing your business and differentiating your brand from your competitors.