Tom Gerace

Thomas August Gerace (born December 21, 1970 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is the founder and CEO of the social networking site Gather.com, where members share user-generated content online and earn a portion of the company’s advertising revenue. Gather.com was founded in 2005 by Gerace and the American Public Media Group (APMG), whose CEO and president is Gather's chairman, William H. Kling.

Gerace received a Bachelor of Arts in Social Studies, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1993. He was a senior business analyst at the Harvard Business School, where he authored case studies including "The National Information Infrastructure and the Internet." He also assisted with the creation of the curriculum for the "Managing in the Marketspace" course within the MBA program.

In March 1996, Gerace and his brother, Samuel P. Gerace, Jr., founded Be Free, a publicly traded online marketing services company. Gerace was the Chief Marketing Officer and was awarded two U.S. Patents (5,848,396 and 5,991,735) for profiling computer users and targeting advertising based on that profiling. He raised more than $200 million and launched both U.S. and European operations. Gerace left Be Free when the company was acquired by ValueClick in 2002. Gerace later served for two years as Senior Vice President, Marketing for National Leisure Group (NLG), a $1 billion annual seller of travel.

Tom Gerace is also the founding committee chair of SMAC, the Social Media Ad Council, and industry group launched in September 2008. SMAC is, according to its own description, "A group of advertising, communications, brand management and social media executives coming together to create a common vocabulary, standard buying units, and uniform measurement methods for social media."

External links

* [http://www.gather.com Gather]
* [http://tom.gather.com Tom Gerace on Gather]
* [http://smac.gather.com SMAC: Social Media Advertising Council]