Tom Webster

Tom Webster is a specialist in consumer behavior, and he has spent nearly 20 years telling stories with numbers and trying to gain insights from data. If you believe brands need to become media, then brands need to understand their audience--and that's simply not possible without inviting them into the process. That's been the foundation of his work, and he's passionate about helping brands understand just what it takes to incorporate the voice of the consumer into their marketing, sales and operations.

His blog, BrandSavant, is about the proliferation of data being generated by social, digital and traditional media, and how to actually gain insight from this data. Despite (and perhaps because of) the metric tonnage of data being generated by today's web analytics, deriving representative, actionable data remains a challenge for marketers, brand managers and pretty much anyone trying to hit a target. The blog is an effort to plant a flag for quality in that regard--to ask better questions, in the hopes of getting better answers.

He is also the principal author of a number of widely cited studies in digital and social media, including The Social Habit, Twitter Users in America and an annual series of studies on Podcasting. He's the co-author of "The Infinite Dial," the longest-running research series examining consumer usage of digital and traditional media in America.

He is currently Vice President, Strategy and Marketing for Edison Research (best known as the company that provides all of the exit polling data for the networks during the U.S. elections and primaries--if you watched coverage of the 2008 Presidential Election, you saw our data).