About us
Company Brief and Leadership
Research
A Consulting Firm that helps You
Leader Networks is a strategic research and consulting firm that helps companies use digital customer experience to gain competitive advantage. We work with clients to develop digital business strategies, launch new digital products and business models, create and grow online communities, and craft social selling campaigns and operations.
Engagement
World's Top Companies
Our efforts pay off – by enabling organizations to better engage their customers, drive new product and service innovations, reduce costs, and boost shareholder value.
Our clients include some of the world’s best-known companies – from Cisco Systems, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, and Royal Dutch Shell to Fidelity, Thomson Reuters, Cognizant, and the World Bank. They also include leading organizations like The Children’s Hospitals Network and LexisNexis Martindale Hubbell.
Experience
Since 2006
Leader Networks was established in 2006 by Vanessa DiMauro, a recognized authority on digital business and online communities.
"We looked to Leader Networks to help us build our engagement model for a Services Planning wiki called The Collaboratory. As a result, subsequent use of The Collaboratory increased by over 80%. Within a year of launch, The Collaboratory won the “Collaboration Project of the Year Award” at Cisco."
Vice President of Planning and Bold Initiatives, Cisco Systems
Leadership
Vanessa DiMauro
Vanessa DiMauro is CEO of Leader Networks, a research and consulting firm that helps companies use digital and social technologies to gain competitive advantage. She is a strategist, advisor, researcher, author, and keynote speaker.
Vanessa is a pioneer in the field of online communities and in using digital business solutions to gain customer insight and increase revenue. She has shaped the digital business strategies of some of the world’s most influential companies, including Cisco Systems, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Royal Dutch Shell, Cognizant, and the World Bank.
Before founding Leader Networks, she held leadership positions at Cambridge Technology Partners, Computerworld, and CXO Systems. Her perspective on digital business has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Forbes.
Vanessa was named one of Forbes’ Top 40 Social Media Masters Worldwide and one of CEOWorld’s Most Powerful Women in Social Media, and identified as one of 20 Top Digital Influencers of 2018 by Whatagraph. She was also recognized as Research Fellow of the Year by the Society for New Communications Research.
Vanessa DiMauro is faculty at Columbia University in the Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) Master’s program. She sits on several boards, including the Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board and Network Activator.
Adam Zawel
Adam Zawel is the Vice President of Strategy with Leader Networks, a research and consulting firm that helps companies use digital and social technologies to gain competitive advantage.
Adam is a veteran online community leader who helps organizations develop and grow their online community initiatives and is an experienced research analyst. He served as Director of Palladium Group’s online community (XPC) and was Chief Collaboration Officer with INmobile, where he built and managed a community for the most influential executives in the wireless and telecommunications industries. He also was a Research Director at Yankee Group. Adam is the creator of Network Activator, a toolkit for community facilitators.
Kim Burke
Kim Burke is a Senior Strategist at Leader Networks, a research and consulting firm that helps companies use digital and social technologies to gain competitive advantage.
Kim’s professional history spans marketing, public relations, publishing, and television. She creates compelling content in all its forms – from web sites to white papers, video scripts to bylined articles, ebooks to client stories, brochures to blog posts. In her work, Kim fuses sales goals, buyer needs, brand voice, key messages, and calls to action to create marketing pieces that drive results. She also collaborates well with designers and developers.
As a marketing and content consultant, Kim has served clients including MIT, Accenture, Brown University, EMC, and PwC. Previously, she held senior marketing communications positions with Keane (now NTT Data), a billion dollar IT services firm, and Cambridge Technology Partners, a global IT consulting company. She holds a B.A. in English from Colby College.
Peter Ward
Peter Ward is a Senior Consultant with Leader Networks responsible for providing insights and working with organizations in developing innovative strategies for achieving sustainable business relationships with select customers and strategic partners. He is currently focused on the evolution of B2B relationships, the business and operational implications of increased levels of collaboration and the drivers behind the ‘leveling of the playing field’ between manufacturers and their supply chain partners.
Peter brings broad experience and deep insight having worked across multiple industry sectors in both consulting and operational roles with an emphasis on building and maintaining strategic relationships with clients, enterprise software companies and thought leadership organizations. He was one of the founders of the Palladium Execution Premium Community™ (XPC) – a global on-line forum enabling senior executives to exchange best practices pertaining to strategy and performance management. Peter has held senior leadership positions at Palladium Group, Inc., Casenet, Inc. and Cambridge Technology Partners and served on several advisory boards.
Ryck Lent
Ryck Lent is a Senior Strategist at Leader Networks, a research and consulting firm that helps companies use digital and social technologies to gain competitive advantage. Ryck is a digital strategy veteran with more than 35 years of digital content and community product development and implementation experience. Ryck has worked with a wide range of organizations including: AARP, the AFL-CIO, the Democratic National Committee, portal services firm iBelong/Verlytics, Mainspring Communications, Monster.com. Ziff-Davis’ ZiffNet and ZDNet.
Among other accomplishments, Ryck pioneered downloadable software demos, weekly tech news interviews and a distance learning initiative at ZDNet; introduced social networking for early Web experts at Mainspring; created social networking affinity groups at iBelong/Verilytics and rebuilt Monster.com’s job seeker online community. Prior to his work with online communities, Ryck was a successful newspaper and magazine publishing entrepreneur.
He earned a BA from Antioch College and a Master’s in Public and Private Management from Yale University’s School of Management.
Websites & Digital
- Custom Web Design
- Digital Marketing
- Ecommerce
- Joomla
- Wordpress
- WooCommerce
- Managed Hosting
- Mobile Design
- Blogs
- Wireframing
- User Experience (UX)
- Custom Development
Design & Print
- Logos
- Packaging
- Event Displays
- Signage
- Brochures
- Catalogs
- Sell Sheets
- Business services
- Infographics
- Icons
- Presentations
- Advertisements
Marketing & SEO
- Marketing Plans
- Competitor Analysis
- Content Creation
- Email Newsletters
- SEO
- Keyword Research
- Keyword Monitoring
- PPC Campaigns
- Social Media
- Analytics
- KPI Reporting
- Marketing Automation