Mark Brooks

An authority on the business of social networking

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NEW YORK 212-444-1636
LONDON 020-8133-1835

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Social Networking Watch (est. August 2006) has no ads, no fluff, just raw news, official rankings and CEO interviews relevant to the Social Networking Industry.
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Mark Brooks operates a boutique consultancy that exclusively serves social networking and internet dating companies. He has served and advised PlentyofFish (7 years), Meetme, Dating Factory, Global Personals (9 years) and numerous high performance dating sites, and has worked in the online community space since 1998.

When Mark earned his B.S. Engineering Management from the University of Hertfordshire (near London). He originally ventured to the U.S.A. to help start a community aerial photography company in Pennsylvania in 1991.

After graduating in 1994, he sold laser metrology systems to the likes of HP, Intel and Seagate.

By 1998, Mark saw the potential that the internet held for helping people connect and moved to California and started an adventure and social events club serving Silicon Valley that grew to 3600 members, and then help start eturn (now Remoba), an early competitor to Plaxo. In 1999 Mark helped develop an early personality profiling dating site called Hypermatch which was sold to EZBoard.

In 2003 he worked with Jonathan Abrams at Friendster to seed the Friendster community through media relations, promoters and events. He then joined FriendFinder to assist Dr Conru and Dr Zhang with media relations and business development. He left FriendFinder with Dr Zhang to help design and build the personality profiling based diet social network, Diet.com, and then worked as VP for Cupid.com to overhaul the site design and acquire a speed-dating company and expand it into 70 U.S. cities.

SocialNetworkingWatch.com was started in August 2006. SocialNetworkingWatch.com has no ads, no fluff, just raw news, interviews, official rankings and commentary relevant to the social networking industry.

Mark's expertise in the industry has made him a regular speaker at conferences around the world and a highly sought after consultant to social networking companies.

He also guest writes for TechCrunch and manages the speaker agenda and media relations for the Social Media Conference.