Most sought speakers – October 2008

Mark Schaub, this month’s fastest mover

Surprising changes in this month “most-sought speaker”, compared to the scores in September. Some of our leading speakers have suddenly dropped off the list and we see a range of relative new-comers in our top-10.
One of the reasons for that change could be that last month’s statistics were still dominated by the Beijing Olympics, where celebrities like Tom Doctoroff got quite some hits among the traditional media. Now, even the milk melamine scandal and even more the financial crisis is hitting the headlines hard. But it is too early to see specific speakers emerging from that chaos, although it could explain the high score of William Bao Bean.
Shaun Rein lost quite some of his earlier advantage – he took a well-deserved break in the past month – but retained his first position.
Fastest mover was Mark Schaub (he came from a much lower position compared to William Bao Bean). What triggered off his rise might have been the podcast we did on the milk-melamine crisis: close to one hundred people listened to this podcast and while the others worked pretty well, Mark Schaub’s podcast was leading. But all the others who figures in a China Speakers Bureau podcast, like Paul Denlinger, Sam Flemming, James Farrer, Amy Sommers and William Bao Bean are all in the top-10, suggesting this new tool really triggers off more traffic. Reason enough to continue this experiment.