Adena DeMonte is a versatile marketing and product strategist, with a passion for building meaningful social experiences around quality content. Currently the Director of Marketing at Badgeville, The Social Loyalty and Smart Gamification Platform, Adena was the company’s third employee and has helped the team grow to 35 employees with over 80 industry-leading customers and $15M in funding.

Prior to Badgeville and a focus on B2B marketing, Adena’s career has led her from theatre directing to local journalism to technology reporting to community management and social media marketing. Born in New Jersey, she earned her BFA in Theatre Studies from Chicago’s DePaul University in 2005, where she focused on directing and scenic design, and earned minors in journalism and sociology. After a brief reporting internship at the Palo Alto Weekly, Adena began her full-time career as an editorial assistant and reporter at Red Herring Magazine, covering venture capital, Internet software, mobile, and clean technologies. At Red Herring, she launched and produced a series of daily news webisodes which later became RedHerring.tv. Her writing has also appeared in notable tech publications such as GigaOm.com, Earth2Tech, and Mobile Marketing Watch.

It didn’t take long as a technology reporter to realize that she wanted to be part of the startup world, as opposed to covering it from the outside. Adena then joined early-stage startup Diddit.com (Ludic Labs, acquired by Groupon), a social bucket list of thousands of things to do, as the head of community management, content creation, and customer support. She went on to manage social media marketing for Nokia Point & Find, a revolutionary mobile augmented reality technology with advanced image-recognition capabilities, which was featured as a key technology in Tim Kring and Nokia’s Emmy-Award nominated Alternate Reality Game Conspiracy for Good.

In her free time, Adena enjoys blogging, performing, watching television (Dexter, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Mad Men, House Hunters and other reality tv guilty pleasures), drawing, supporting social liberties, traveling, road trips, visiting her family in New Jersey, photography (Flickr),  and “pinning fashion & design” (Pinterest).

She looks forward to continuing and growing her career as a user / customer advocate, marketer, and design-focused product innovator.