NEW YORK: Talkwalker has named Tod Nielsen as its global CEO, effective immediately.
He is succeeding Robert Glaesener, who is transitioning to chairman of the board of directors after 11 years as CEO. Nielsen will be based in the social analytics and monitoring company’s New York office.
Most recently, he was president and CEO of FinancialForce, an enterprise resource planning company that integrates business processes, for nearly four years. Nielsen was replaced by Scott Brown, a more-than-two-decade veteran of Cisco, when he left FinancialForce in November 2020.
Nielsen has served as CEO of Salesforce company Heroku and has held executive positions at Salesforce, VMware, Oracle, BEA Systems and Microsoft.
He said he plans to leverage his experience in scaling companies to lead the consumer intelligence platform’s growth.
“I started at Microsoft in the 80s. I’ve been with companies and know what they need to do to scale,” said Nielsen. “I’ve been a platform systems software person, and I can bring these experiences to Talkwalker to really understand how we take advantage of our technology to be a core marketing platform.”
During his four years as COO and co-president of VMware, he helped to drive the company’s market cap from $5 billion to $50 billion, and he also pointed to his work at Salesforce and Microsoft when they experienced tremendous growth.
In the past decade, Talkwalker has grown from a startup to having 500 employees worldwide. In 2020, the company gained 800 clients, experienced 38% revenue growth, with 46% growth with enterprise clients. With offices in Luxembourg, New York, San Francisco, Frankfurt, Singapore, Paris, Tokyo, London and Milan, Talkwalker works with more than 2,500 brands. The platform monitors social channels and online media in 187 languages.
With this data, brands can determine public sentiment about their products, and agencies working with brands can use the data to create ad campaigns or marketing or PR plans.
“It’s an insightful way to find out where the puck is going, what people want and how brands can position their companies to take advantage of what consumers want,” said Nielsen.
Talkwalker this year also launched a podcast-monitoring platform that has access to more than 35,000 podcasts.
