Speakers Bios & Abstracts

Platzhalter Speakers
Matthias Lüfkens
CH

Managing Director, Digital, EMEA at Burson-Marsteller

Biography

Matthias Lüfkens, leads the Digital Practice of Burson-Marsteller across Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA).
 
Before joining Burson-Marsteller Lüfkens was Head of Digital media at the (WEF) where he designed and implemented the digital strategy. After bringing Davos to the world as Senior Media Manager he brought the digital world to Davos through his innovative use of Social Media, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube and Livestream. Under his leadership, the Forum became the most followed international organisation on social networks.
 
As digital expert, he has advised a wide range of Fortune 500 companies as well as non-profit organisations on the benefits of using social media as a strategic communication tool. He is a specialist in combining traditional media outreach with innovative on-line outreach campaigns.
 
Lüfkens has become an authority about “Digital Diplomacy”, namely the use of social media by world leaders. He has authored the study which looks specifically at the use of Twitter and social networks by heads of state and government and the the interconnections between them. Matthias Lüfkens frequently speaks about the topic and tweets .
 
Previously a journalist, he was Baltic States correspondent for , and the in the early nineties (1991-96) when the Baltic countries regained their independence. In Vilnius he also founded , an English language city guide series which has been hailed as an Eastern European publishing phenomenon and grown to become a Europe’s leading provider of city information with guides to over 70 cities across 24 countries.
 
From 1996 – 2004 he was Deputy Editor-in-chief of television in Lyon, France leading a multi-lingual team of European journalists working in 7 languages. He is an occasional digital columnist for French-Swiss business magazine Bilan, and a frequent speaker at a number of higher learning institutes and major technology events such as LeWeb in Paris, Lift in Geneva, the Next Conference in Berlin, SIME in Stockholm and TedxZurich.
 
Matthias lives in Messery a small town on the southern shores of Lake Geneva where he is active in the local community teaching the elderly how to surf the internet and putting the city on key social networks such as Facebook . He is married to Nicola Williams, a travel writer with Lonely Planet and has 3 children. In his free time, when not slavishly tracking tech trends, Matthias films and edits videos for his multiple YouTube channels. You can follow him on Twitter and in French @lufkens.