GIANNI CATALFAMO

After completing his Nuclear Engineering degree at the Milan Polytechnic in 1981, Gianni worked for 2 years at IBM as a Systems Engineer, prior to switching to sales and marketing with Olivetti; in 1986 he founded the Italian operation of Lotus Development Corp., initially working out of its European HQ based in Windsor, UK, and then setting up the first Lotus office in Milan. His responsibilities at Lotus grew along with the success of the company in Italy which in the 7 year of tenure as Country General Manager moved from 2 employees and USD 700,000 in sales to 35 employees and over USD 10 million in sales.

In 1993 he joined Image Time as partner of the agency which In 1999 was acquired by Omnicom and became part of Pleon which in 2010 merged with Ketchum to form Ketchum Pleon, one of the world's largest communications consultancies. For many years Country CEO for Italy, he was European Director for the Technology Practice and later European Director, Digital & Social Media.

In this capacity, he coordinated the development of the Digital & SoMe offering across Europe, defining and articulating the agency's methodology, and creating the education program needed to make KP "a 100% digital Agency"; he was routinely involved in new business pitching in this area as well as in getting new accounts off to a good start to then hand it over to country teams.

In 2012 he left Ketchum to set up his consultancy boutique called cc:catalfamo focusing on massive deployment of Digital & Social Media programs in very large, international contexts.

He lectures on the matter both in Italy and abroad and writes on this topic on the 'Social Media' channel of his blog; some of his written works have been selected as required reading for the SDA Bocconi Graduate School of Management's course, 'Internet for Business Communication'.