Shani Higgins

Former CEO of Technorati

• Born: 1973
• Place of Birth: place unknown

Primary Company/Organization: Technorati

Introduction

After working for a number of investment, software, and publishing firms, Shani Higgins was hired to head day-to-day operations at Technorati, Inc., the company behind the Technorati.com blog search engine. Higgins launched Technorati Media, the world's largest social media advertising network, as well as Technorati's private advertising exchange. She also arranged the company's first content acquisitions, acquiring the blogs and staff of Blogcritics and the Silicon Valley Moms Group. From 2011 to 2016, she served as the company's third chief executive officer (CEO).

Early Life

Shani Higgins-Levine was born in 1973, the daughter of an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and later naval officer William F. Higgins and Wendy Higgins. Her mother was a teacher and then a real estate agent. The family eventually included six children. Shani attended Rutgers University, earning a bachelor of arts degree in communications with a double minor in art history and economics.

In 1996, Higgins became director of partner services and director of commerce market development for Infoseek/Go Network. Three years later, she became vice president of business development for SmartPlanet (Ziff Davis). Her next position was as a venture capitalist for the Benedek Investment Group in New York City. She was vice president for business development for Tacit Software before being hired by Technorati, Inc., in 2007. Technorati is today the parent company of the Technorati Media ad network, the Technorati.com blog search engine and directory, the Blogcritics site, and the AdEngage advertising platform.

Life's Work

Higgins headed Technorati's strategy and day-to-day operations, focusing on business development. The company doubled its revenue and by 2010 became profitable. Higgins oversaw the launch of Technorati Media, which became the world's largest network for social media advertising, covering more than three thousand sites.

Higgins oversaw two critical acquisitions: those of Blogcritics in 2008 and of SV Moms in 2010. SV Moms (the Silicon Valley Moms Group) was a blogging network of about two hundred women and mothers founded in 2006. After the Technorati acquisition, SV Moms cofounder Jill Asher became the editorial director of both Technorati.com and Blogcritics, while SV Moms editors Akemi Bourgeois and Vanessa Druckman were made editors of the new Technorati Women Channel, absorbing the SV Moms blogs and other Technorati blogs by women on parenting, food, fitness, style, and household finances.

Blogcritics was founded in 2002 as a self-described “sinister cabal of superior writers”: an online magazine with fifty members contributing blog entries to the online magazine. Anyone was allowed to contribute, and the number of contributors rose to the thousands. After being acquired by Technorati, Blogcritics founders Eric Olsen and Phillip Winn became full-time Technorati employees, although Olsen stepped down in 2010.

Higgins was also in charge of the development and launch of Technorati's private exchange, which went live in April 2011. A private exchange is an advertising network that lets online publishers like Technorati sell advertising space directly to advertisers, rather than going through a middleman. This generally leads to greater revenues for the company and lower costs for the advertiser, offering more direct control over the advertising inventory. Usually these arrangements are used in addition to third-party advertising networks (like those offered by Microsoft and Google, among many others), but publishers that want to retain total control over advertising inventory and its suitability for their audience may rely exclusively on a private exchange. Technorati's private exchange is run on AppNexus and automates real-time bidding for advertisers and a customizable dashboard for publishers on the Technorati network.

Higgins was promoted to CEO of Technorati in 2011. Exiting CEO and new executive chairman Rich Jalichandra credited her oversight of the day-to-day business over the previous three years for the company's success. By 2011, Technorati had become the third-largest social media property behind Facebook and Twitter.

Not long after being promoted to CEO, Higgins was the subject of controversy at the annual PR Summit Conference in San Francisco. While speaking about some of the results of Technorati's annual blogger survey, which forms the basis of the “State of the Blogosphere” address that Technorati executives have delivered since 2004, Higgins remarked that paid posts—posts for which a blogger is compensated, especially by a brand or company featured in the post—were no longer stigmatized. Transparency had become of increasing concern: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations required that bloggers who received free samples to review products reveal that compensation, and this had led to an increasing desire on the part of bloggers to make their relationships to any brands clear and aboveboard. Higgins drew a line between this and her statement. Concern for transparency, after all, did not mean an aversion to paid posts, only the need to identify them explicitly as such. Others in the blogging community expressed concern that this kind of thinking could lead to blogs being turned into grassroots advertising.

Higgins noted the increase in female bloggers and in personal blogging, as well as the more aggressive targeting of bloggers by brands looking for promotion—although the amount of free material sent to bloggers in the mere hope of a mention online declined after the 2008 financial crisis. She saw blogging increasingly as one part of a larger social media strategy, particularly as more bloggers maintain presences on Twitter and even Tumblr in addition to their blogs—and may, on top of that, have a Facebook page associated with their blog. Blogging thus became less about a single site and more about a social media identity represented by a cluster of overlapping activities and outputs. Communication among bloggers is important for the same reason.

Higgins remained the CEO of Technorati until its acquisition by Synacor in 2016. Around the time of her departure, Higgins joined the women's leadership group HiPower. She then took a sabbatical until January 2019, when she joined Mozilla as its vice president of revenue and business operations. In 2020, she became the senior vice president of global partnerships at LivePerson, Inc., a conversantional AI platform.

Personal Life

Higgins is married and lives in San Francisco; she and her husband have two children. She is a fan of the Korean barbecue food truck Seoul on Wheels.

Bibliography

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print.

Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. New York: Wiley, 2010. Print.

Rosenberg, Scott. Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.