Web Social Architecture

On Blogging

After nearly a year at Razorfish, I’m resuscitating my blog. Why? Because blogging gets me out of the weeds and makes me smarter. In a way, I kind of think blogs are dead. Or more realistically, they’re just not as important as they were 6 or 7 years ago, when self-publishing was a transformative facet of the online experience. But for me, the practice of blogging is so very useful—it wakes me up to the interest and meaning of day-to-day things, and not doing it for the past year has made me dumber and less happy.

Here are a couple tidbits about how I approach blogging in a way that really works for me:

 

Never mind the audience.

If you’re trying to get famous blogging, you’re wasting your time. 99% of famous bloggers didn’t get famous by blogging—they have popular blogs because they’re famous, not the other way around. So don’t write for your audience. Write for yourself!

Nobody’s going to care. But more importantly, writing for yourself means no apologies and no excuses. You’re accountable to yourself alone for the quality of your thinking and for deciding what’s interesting and valuable to pay attention to. You’re the one who decides what matters—avoid trying to be popular and you’ll avoid the echo-chamber.

I’m not saying disrespect your audience! Don’t publish junk. Take pride in what you write, but take pride in how your thinking represents you, not in how much ephemeral attention or “popularity” your posts generate.

 

Always be blogging.

I’ll typically have a few dozen posts in draft mode at any given time. Every time I hear something interesting or have an idea I want to remember, I start a new post. (I use Windows Live Writer, which I think is still the best authoring tool out there.) Maybe a quarter of my draft posts ever get finished. So I essentially keep a long running list of things I’m thinking about, and whenever the ideas develop a bit I spend 5 or 10 minutes adding to the post.

Who cares if I waste time on posts I don’t end up publishing? The point, for me, is to keep thinking about stuff, not to finish anything. And because I’m not writing for a nonexistent audience that isn’t waiting with bated breath for my next post or who will stop loving me if my next post isn’t for another month, there’s really no pressure to finish posts. Writing for myself sure is less stressful!

 

Don’t try to “keep up.”

Forget about linking to other bloggers, cruising the web looking for relevant places to comment, etc—all the conventional wisdom from 5 years ago about how to build a following for your blog is less than unhelpful—it’s counterproductive to the development of original ideas.

And creating commentary on the hamster wheel of industry news is a waste of time. I actually think there’s a new kind of domain knowledge these days, and it’s less about collecting the full set of information, the traditional way of looking at mastery, and more about knowing what amidst all the noise you need to pay attention to because it matters. Filtering, not accumulation.

Don’t try to keep up. Instead, think hard about the stuff that sticks.

When I interview people, I always ask what they think the brave new world will look like. This is my way of understanding how well candidates can filter out the noise and tell a clear story about what really matters. And blogging is the way I get there, personally—which means not trying to be an industry commentator, but trying to be bigger than the industry, being about culture not news.

 

Anyway, if you’re reading this, I look forward to your feedback. And in return I promise to start actually blogging again! 

 

ZAAZ Hiring Community Managers

We are looking for community managers / moderators with broad experience interacting with customers online on behalf of brands. Above all else, we need brand-savvy, social media literate, agency-experienced doers. Detailed job description below:

COMMUNITY MANAGER

We are looking for a candidate that can thrive in a creative environment where collaboration, innovation and passion for the web are a must. This position will start out on a contract basis and has the potential to move into a full time position.

This position is located in Seattle at ZAAZ World Headquarters (no relocation).

Responsibilities:

Manage online communities, including both hosted communities like forums and blogs; and distributed communities across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Enact brand campaigns in social media. Publish branded content and manage conversations across media sharing venues. Promote content across social bookmarking and collaborative filtration engines.

Required Skills:

2-3 years community management, online customer service, or related.

Experience interacting with customers through social media on behalf of brands.

Broad and deep familiarity with social software and online community tools, including forums, discussion, blogs, ratings & reviews, IM, etc.

Immersed in and opinionated about best practices.

Constant personal and professional use of a mix of social media tools, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, etc. Extra points for Vimeo, Blip.tv, Tumblr, Posterous, etc.

Conversant in SEO/SEM, web analytics, web technology, mobile campaigns, community, creative/brand.

Ability to integrate with virtual teams across agency and client organizations. Collaborative. Communicative.

Superlative and prolific writing. High emotional intelligence and online social skills.

Likes fun.

Additional Desired Skills:

Top candidates will have all the above, and also agency experience.

About ZAAZ

ZAAZ is a premier interactive agency serving some of the world’s most enduring and recognizable brands. Few interactive agencies understand how to utilize web analytics in delivering rich, creative and thoughtfully designed brand experiences optimized for measurable results. Strategically positioned at the intersection of Logic and Creative, ZAAZ is the leader in providing performance-driven digital marketing across all channels and industries. We value a healthy work-life balance and committed individuals who are continually seeking to grow in their professions. Founded in 1998, ZAAZ is headquartered in Seattle and is part of the Wunderman/WPP group of companies. For more information and current open positions, visit www.zaaz.com

 

Have a question? Someone else is probably wondering the same thing. Ask in the comment thread.

ZAAZ Needs a Senior Social Media Strategist

Updated: Now recruiting for FTE as well as freelancers.

SENIOR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIST

We are looking for a candidate that can thrive in a creative environment where collaboration, innovation and passion for the web are a must. This position will start out on a contract basis and has the potential to move into a full time position.

This position is located in Seattle at ZAAZ World Headquarters (no relocation).

Responsibilities:

Help define and execute overall social media strategy, including onsite communities, brand campaigns in social media, product and service concepts, and more. Develop plans for the social media marketing mix. Consult on new media developments. Collaborate with account teams to identify opportunities for clients in social media and with creative directors to conceive and execute creative ideas. Marketing mentality a must. Collaboration crucial. Passionate + pragmatic = perfect. A challenging role for a thought-leading visionary who wants to help redefine how businesses use the online channel.

Required Skills:

5-7 years online strategic planning, product management, and/or marketing experience.

Experience implementing online community/web 2.0/social media efforts on behalf of brands, ideation through execution.

Familiarity with social media tools, listening platforms, internal operations and community management.

Conversant in SEO/SEM, web analytics, web technology, mobile campaigns, community, creative/brand.

User-centric thinker.

Experience being client facing.

Good communication skills, both verbal and written and comfortable presenting.

Likes fun.

Additional Desired Skills:

Agency experience

About ZAAZ

ZAAZ is a premier interactive agency serving some of the world’s most enduring and recognizable brands. Few interactive agencies understand how to utilize web analytics in delivering rich, creative and thoughtfully designed brand experiences optimized for measurable results. Strategically positioned at the intersection of Logic and Creative, ZAAZ is the leader in providing performance-driven digital marketing across all channels and industries. We value a healthy work-life balance and committed individuals who are continually seeking to grow in their professions. Founded in 1998, ZAAZ is headquartered in Seattle and is part of the Wunderman/WPP group of companies. For more information and current open positions, visit www.zaaz.com

 

Have a question? Someone else is probably wondering the same thing. Ask in the comment thread.

Vote for the Presentation You’d Most like to See October 15th at ZAAZ

Below are the submissions for our next social media event. Read the descriptions here, and then vote over on our Facebook page. The eight with most votes will be our presenters for 21 Slides!

For those not in Seattle, by the way, we are working out details on setting up a webcast for the event. We’re considering TwitCam, but we’re happy to here any other suggestions, if you have a favorite tool.

 

1. Lessons Learned from LOLcats.
There's a lot to be learned from the popular LOLcat meme. Why is www.icanhascheezburger.com so successful? What attracts users and keeps them coming back? Are there lessons to be learned from this phenomenon? (yes!) My presentation will include a brief history of the LOL meme, explore the magic ingredients of this social media success story, and present a few key takeaways that can be applied to social media and digital marketing in general.

2. Pulling the Pages out of Facebook: Social Web Optimization
Recent moves towards the vision of the Semantic Web by Google and Yahoo! are accelerating adoption of geeky sounding things like XFN, Microformats, and RDFa. These standards have the potential to move social networking out of walled gardens and into the open Internet itself. I'll look at how semantic markup adds social value to Web sites now, and speculate on what the social future of the Semantic Web might look like.

3.The Social Media Mindset: An InfoCamp case study
The 15th of October is 4 days after the 3rd annual InfoCamp (which I can already tell you is going to kick ass). This year, attendance grew sharply, and interest in InfoCamp hit a critical mass of sorts. InfoCamp is a crowdsourced conference. It is real-time, in-person social media inside a conference format. It is the Wikipedia to more traditional conferences’ Encyclopedia Britannica. This gravitation towards InfoCamp is part of a larger expectation that drives social media – that users can and should generate their own content in a variety of formats, not just digital ones. I’ll show how we used social media to promote InfoCamp. I’ll show examples of how people used our Wiki, twitter, and Facebook presence before the event. I’ll show examples of how social media was used during and after the event.

4. Social Media: All that Glitters is not Gold
A covert mission of exposing a very traditional retail company to social media. One woman. No budget. Few tools. And now with internet restrictions!

5. OMG my (online) life is over. Mom's on Facebook.
How to gracefully deal with the generation gap as your parents, aunts, uncles, and even grandparents join in this "social media" thing. Mom keeps spamming your Facebook posts with mom-comments, Dad got lost in quizzes, but at least neither of them Twitter (whew).

6. The Desperate Housewives of Facebook: Why are they so goddamn bored?!
Facebook recently published an audience statistic that stated the most prolific segment on their site was married women between the ages of 35-40. Basically, housefraus. And honestly, we know it's true. From their seemingly exhausting ability to post up-to-the-minute updates on their over-achieving children, their opinions of Oprah's afternoon guest, how precious someone's twins are, and what god awful family vacation they're planning. Why do they torture us so? And, more importantly, why are they addicted to FaceCrack? This presentation works off this crazy data point to get to the bottom of the Facebook Housewife craze -- and exposes the horror below.

7. Cinching All My Love to You: A Social Media Romance
Here’s a little story about Jack and Diane two American kids growing up in the heartland. No wait, that’s been done before. This presentation is the story of Jo and Nancy, a relationship that starts, develops, and ultimately meets its end on CinchCast.com. Through the words, voice, images and text of our two love birds, attendees will experience the excitement new love can bring...and the drama when things don’t work out as planned. This presentation will be better than any Knot’s Landing or Melrose Place re-run. It is love social media style.

8. Humanizing Social Media: A Few Stories.
Social media is the place where stories are shared and experiences are formed. Only when brands provide return on emotion to their customers, can they fully benefit from social media. People want to know that they’re being heard. By acknowledging their contributions, and teaming up with their most loyal customers, brands can begin to build stronger relationships with their fans. I’d like to share some collected examples of how companies are using social media to build deep and long lasting relationships with their enthusiasts. Some you’ve heard of, others will surely be new.

9. Are you ready for a mobile makeover?
I spearheaded a campaign in which I was able to get the attention of the powers that be over at Waggener Edstrom. A very special twitter page, a Facebook fan page and some fabulous videos on YouTube, helped me break the mold.

10. Government is no longer the bureaucratic monolith you thought it was
At the Washington State Department of Transportation we are using Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, and Flickr and other social media tools to reach audiences. While I don't want to focus on any one element or tool I plan to share amazing stories of how we used them during "snowpocalypse" to help people get home, and won several national awards for it. Also we have incredible direct messaging features that folks in Seattle should be aware of. Did you know you can get Seattle area travel times, mountain pass reports and border wait times via Twitter direct message?

11. Social Telephone Game :: It’s never what they say, it’s what they mean
Do you flinch every time you see your brand being drug through the mud on the social web? Are your inboxes across various social media tools filling up with hate mail? Your unhappiest customer is not likely what they appear to be. Learn how to read between the lines of your social community and harness them for the brand advocates they are.

12. Defamation and Social Media – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
Should you really send that tweet calling your competitor a “douchebag”? What about that status update letting the world know how your mechanic is a “lying, cheating scumbag who would steal medicine from a pediatric ward?” How liable are you for giving all the baddies out there a well-deserved, spleen-filled bitch-slap? In this session, I will walk through a very quick explanation of defamation law and explain how it might apply to the social media landscape. I will also provide a few practical ways that might protect your right as an American to roast the bejeezus out of the asshats of the world, without getting sued into oblivion.

13. An Ecosystem Approach to Social Media: Turning Crap Into Fertilizer
The landscape of social media is a complex system. So are ecosystems: gardens, wetlands, and forests are full of complex webs of dependencies (nutrients, shelter, food) and controls (checks & balances). There are well-established methods for describing and designing ecosystems to produce desired results - and revenue. So the question is: how do we design social media to satisfied customers and cold, hard cash? The answer: Crap. In nature, it's the "nightsoil" that keeps the system going. One creature's crap is another's food. We can identify the byproducts of social media - the waste, the shite, the cruft, the fluff - and find ways to make it feed the system, we've created a self-sustaining Poop Loop. In fact, if we DON'T have a strategy to process the crap, it'll poison the system. So we need to find ways to turn social media manure into fertilizer. How is it done? First identify role types. Then map their inputs and outputs. Finally, design mechanisms to connect one entity's outputs to another's inputs. Congratulations, you've just turned crap into fertilizer. Just one of the many lessons we can learn from ecosystem science.

14. Itsy Bitsy Spiders: Everything I need to know about social media I learned in Kindergarten.
A simple but powerful perspective on social media which shows how it is different from other online tasks like SEO or website design and content. It is NOT about the BIG spider (Google) but all the itsy bitsy spiders that weave their own small webs and catch only the tastiest stuff. What makes social media interesting is not real-time search, but selective, passive content delivery. All we have to do is remember show-and-tell from kindergarten. Find the good stuff, tell your class about it.

15. Two Manifestos: 500 Years of Social Media History repeats itself
A 5 minute journey from Martin Luther and his 95 theses that resulted in Protestantism (1517); to the Cluetrain Manifesto and their 95 theses that defined modern social media (1999).

Martin Luther demanded that the Catholic Church stop selling religion and Cluetrain demanded that companies stop selling their message. The story of two manifestos with the same message: stop trying to profit from being an intermediary and be honest.

The presentation will tell the story of the tithes that the Catholic Church sold as God-proxies. This imposition of a tax for access to God led to the Protestant Reformation. Protestantism was founded on disintermediation. Not by accident, this act of rebellion was followed almost 500 years later by a similar message by some of the original founders and drivers of the Internet and web. They felt that corporations had largely begun to take the role roughly equivalent to the Catholic church - speaking in Latin (corporate-speak) and profiting by the control of information and access. The Cluetrain Manifesto put them on notice.

 

So many fantastic ideas! Cast your vote now!

October 15th is the Next ZAAZ Social Media Event: 21 Slides

Mark your calendar: Our ongoing series resumes October 15th. And this time, you can participate. Here is the announcement:

****************************

What is 21 Slides?
90 minutes. 8 social media presenters. Five minutes each. No more than 21 slides. Add beer.

ZAAZ is inviting local social media digerati, strategists, and media dabblers of all backgrounds to submit presentation ideas to compete for the eight available 5-minute presentations slots. The submissions are reviewed by the event directors to assess quality and social media relevance (no vacation slide shows, please) – then the approved submissions are posted with a brief description on this Facebook event site and presented to the community at large for a vote. The 8 most popular topics as voted by the community will be chosen to present at 21 Slides – with a clear winner being adorned with a social media tiara and sash.

Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=258514510526&ref=mf

Participants in the presentations are encouraged to take creative risks, in terms of content and presentation, and to not just show-off their social media project portfolios. That would be lame.

We’re looking for submissions that present an engaging narrative that tells a powerful story (whether through humor, empathy, concern, enlightenment) about the role or influence that social media can have in our lives today.

Anyone and everyone is encouraged to submit a topic, subject to a few rules of course:

1. All presentations are 5 minutes max (and we do mean five minutes)
2. Social Media reference must be in the title of the presentation (and the primary focus)
3. No one may have more than 21 slides (get it?)
4. Commercials suck (don’t sell anything)
5. Event directors reserve the right to reject submissions based on content appropriateness.

Some possible presentations you might see at our 21 Slides event:

• An interactive PowerPoint that shows how you saved the breakfast sandwich purely on retweets.
• An uncensored look at some of the most powerful video imagery coming out of Iran on YouTube.com
• How to track Hurricane Bill using only your IPhone
• Junk you can do on Twitter besides lame ass status updates
• 10 ways to spice up your love life digitally

SUBMISSION TIMELINE:
September 10 – 22 :: Submissions accepted (PLEASE SEE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES BELOW)

September 22 :: Submission period closed and top concepts are reviewed for relevancy

September 24 – 31 :: Voting opens for top submissions

October 1 :: Final presentations announced

October 5 :: Presentations due from winning presenters (this means your full five minute presentation)

October 15 :: Happy Hour starts @ 6:00 PM, lights dim at 7PM and the show begins.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Send an email to 21slides@zaaz.com by September 22 with the following information included in the body of your email. You will receive email confirmation that your submission was received.

• Your full name
• Your email address
• Title of you presentation
• Describe presentation with as much detail as possible so we get the gist
• Twitter name
• What do you want the audience to walk away with from your presentation?
• How will you deliver your presentation? (PPT, slideware, tweets, interactive, etc.)
• What element of social media will you speak to?
• How do you plan to spice up your presentation? (lighting yourself on fire is grounds for immediate rejection – and so last century)

At the 21 Slides event, the presentations are preceded by a Z-bar sponsored happy hour after which the lights are dimmed, the crowd is hushed, and the social media enlightenment begins. In the spirit of community participation, we will have a split screen showing a live feed of twitter comments on the presentations as they unfold on stage.

See you there!

You're Invited to a Social Media / Beer Event at ZAAZ: Thursday June 18th

ZAAZ is hosting the latest in our social media events series next Thursday, June 18th, at ZAAZ hq in downtown Seattle. Join us from 6 - 9 for a panel discussion on agency / client relationships in social media. Panelists will include folks from the agency side who specialize in digital, brand, and PR; along with client-side web and community managers. Here's the announcement:

How do agencies help clients develop richer, more valuable online relationships with customers? Should agencies moderate communities on behalf of their clients? How will budgets adjust to accommodate ongoing, as opposed to project-based, work? What skillsets are best suited for in-house groups? Which agency type owns social media strategy? Should corporations create social media teams, or distribute the work across groups?

Confirmed panelists so far are:

Dave Ballantine, Director of User Experience, DNA

Ted Zahn, Creative Director, ZAAZ

Jordan Williams, Online Community Manager, REI

Marty Collins, Group Marketing Manager, Windows Social Media Team, Microsoft

Teri Citterman, President, Citterman Ink

Expect a very lively discussion around the future of agencies--I'll be moderating, so if you have thoughts about topics, please drop them in the comments below.

We'll have a Facebook event up soon, I'll update this post with the link when we do. UPDATE: Here is the link.

I hope to see you there--come say hello!

You're Invited: Social Media Event at ZAAZ Seattle July 8th

People keep asking me when we're going to host another event at the ZAAZ office's notorious Z-Bar in Seattle. Well...

 

I'm super excited about the lineup for this event, which includes industry leaders from corporate, agency, and independent circles who share passion and expertise in the human dimensions of social computing. Knowing most of these folks pretty well, I think I can guarantee an evening of thought-provoking conversation.

The format for this event will be similar to the previous one I organized, which seemed to go pretty well. We'll have short talks from each speaker followed by a panel discussion. Plus, snacks and beer.

Here's the rundown on the speakers:

Brian Fling of Flingmedia is a full-fledged mobile design geek and human Swiss Army knife. His talk, "Mobile 2.0: Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond" will explore some of the social dimensions of the emerging mobile world.

My colleague Justin Marshall is behind some of the most exciting work we've done in social media. His take on social media for marketers, titled "Money, Media, and Your Mom's Peach Cobbler: Social Media Marketing Done Right," offers guidance for marketers looking to engage with customers online.

Samantha Starmer is a highly-respected thought leader in the local information architecture community. In addition to her work at REI, she co-teaches the UW Information School's Summer IA Institute. Her talk, "Single Athletic Female seeking Single Slender Male: The Marriage of Social Media and Metadata," promises to reveal the secrets of better online living through metadata.

Nancy White of Full Circle Associates has been doing online community since WAY before it was cool. Her broadly-ranging expertise includes online learning and facilitation, communities of practice, technology in the developing world, and social technology in general. Her talk is titled "Slow Community."

Wendy Chisholm is a former co-editor of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and a passionate advocate for universally-accessible design online and off. She's currently working on what promises to become "THE book" on accessibility for the emerging Web.

We're really lucky in the Seattle area to have access to such quality thinkers and experts. I hope you'll join us, and if you do plan to attend, drop me a note at ryant (at) zaaz dot com so I can get a rough headcount.

The Facebook event is here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=66791410200.

I hope to see you there!

ZAAZ Needs UX People: Associate Director of User Experience, and More

We just posted a job opening for an Associate Director of User Experience to manage the UX side of our Microsoft accounts. This is a great chance for a top-level UX mind to lead in a fun, creative, leading-edge environment.

We also are looking for UX folks at every level, from entry to senior. If you know folks with the UX passion who pass the road trip test, send them our way.

You can see all the job descriptions here.

The Big Leap: New Mactopia Site Integrates Community

Yesterday we launched a major client site that has a couple important community features. Hopefully the level of complexity involved isn't apparent on the site itself, but I'm proud of the work, because we did some complicated stuff.

Meet the new Mactopia, the web home of MacBU, the Microsoft group that creates software for the Mac:

This site is a great example of a business moving from a broadcast to a participatory model on the web. The old site had little more than a web email form supporting customer interaction: Click Submit to send your message into oblivion. Today the new site includes numerous access points for customer interaction, all serving core user requirements, dynamically layered throughout the site, algorithmically filtered, and aligned with the brand.

Two new areas of the site support direct interaction among customers and between customers and the company:

• The existing NNTP technical support groups are now mirrored on the site itself, in a web-based forums interface that adds features to make them easier to use. They synch in both directions, and discussion threads are now searchable along with other support content.
• The popular Mac Mojo blog, formerly hosted on MSDN, is fully integrated with the new site, and the best content from the blog is dynamically integrated with product pages, providing a way for people considering a purchase to look under the hood, ask questions, and get to know the people and thinking behind the products.

To integrate these areas of the site in a meaningful way, we had a number of challenges to solve:

• The existing NNTP groups were working. We had to keep from breaking them.
• The MVP community, crucial contributors of technical support and general help for Mac Office users, strongly prefers to interact with the NNTP groups through a newsreader interface--which is an inappropriate interface for the users they're there to help.
• Support Forums created by the community and Help content published by the company serve the same user need: Get a solution to a problem. The two kinds of content needed to be differentiated, so authorship is clear. But there's no way to know whether a given question has the best answer in one place or the other.
• While the Support Forums and Help content are both searchable, there's no way to rank search results by relevance across the two areas, and the databases being searched return differently-structured data.
• Integrating the blog with the main site means many people who aren't familiar with blog conventions will encounter it. We needed to present the most broadly interesting content, along with the standard newest content, front and center.

This list is really just the tip of the iceberg, and I think it's interesting because these are challenges typical to any large project that involves integration of community content. We had to make compromises every step of the way. Only time will tell, but I think the site architecture will support great quality over the long term--thanks in large part to the passion and smarts of the fine folks at the MacBU.

MacBU took a huge step here by opening the site to user participation. They'll face huge challenges over the next year as they adjust to a brave new world of customer relationships online. A lot will depend on their ability to stay responsive in the face of a huge volume of questions and requests (the old site's monthly traffic was already in seven digits). They'll face tough questions about how to moderate borderline posts. Their commitment to transparency will be tested. They'll be unfairly treated.

All this adds up to a big opportunity. So pay attention. This is a ride almost everybody's in line for.

Fame! Fun! Free Snacks! Call for Speakers for Seattle UX Event

Last month, ZAAZ hosted an event at our Seattle office for the local user experience community with a group of four speakers. Lee Lefever of CommonCraft spoke on online community, Paul Ingram of Ingramlabs spoke on "inventrepreneurship," Jason Carmel of ZAAZ and Wishradar spoke on optimization, and Emma Rose of the University of Washington spoke on design ethnography. You can read my wrap-up here.

The event was a ton of fun. Each speaker gave a 15-minute talk, and we ended with a panel discussion and audience Q & A. The level of participation was really exciting. We had great audience questions, and the feeling was low-key and casual. The format is meant to encourage socializing (as is the beer).

We'd like make the event a regular series, and to do that we need you. If you've got a topic you'd like to talk on, drop me a note (ryant at zaaz dot com) and let's discuss it. This is a great chance to polish up the public speaking skills in a low-pressure, fun environment.

I'll figure out the schedule once we have speakers lined up and can juggle everyone's calendar. We're thinking sometime between now and the holidays.

Interested? Get in touch!