This week it’s all about us as the Geek Whisperers do a status check on their own careers. One thing that stuck out is that we are all doing more face-to-face events these days. Social media, which is where we all got our start, is still there, but it’s implied as a tool we all use.
Matt is spending his days talking to, teaching, and learning from developers. He’s still using all his community-making muscles bringing people together, but the surprising things are that he is (a) going back to being more technical himself as he learns about distributed applications, the CAP theorem, and open source and (b) he’s getting called up to be on stage more often.
We also talk about the “retail politics” of event-based marketing, and how we’re seeing a lot of small events, specialized both by region but also by specialty or technology. We also note the importance of meetup.com – here are the Riak Meetups worldwide.
John talks about his upcoming event, The Reckoning. (Scoop: it is being rescheduled to Oct 18 to avoid clashing with everybody’s summer vacations.) He talks about working with startups vs big companies, and about turning free-form consulting engagements into more productized service offerings. He alludes to the dark art of pricing one’s services, but doesn’t really go into it. Is John’s role to DJ or to teach people to DJ? We’ll find out over time.
John has also been speaking more and being called on to work the front of the room in partnership with the companies he consults with. He’s also developing more media properties in partnership with companies. For example, he’s producing one podcast now, the Nutanix Community Podcast, with another coming soon.
Amy continues to work on the white spaces where the PR (public/press relations), AR (analyst relations), IR (investor relations), and paid social media teams are not. In short, she works mostly with the geeks and bloggers. She is finding more resonance with the other parts of marketing, such as paid social and field marketing — the folks formerly known in the Geek Whisperers as “The Dark Side.”
She’s started a new podcast, Elements of Solidfire, and has kept up her “roving reporter”-style program by picking folks from around the company, giving them a mic, and sending them out asking questions. (After this podcast she also has started
We end up answering the question, “How surprised are you at your current role? from a scale of 1 (not surprised) to 10 (very surprised)”
Matt came in at a 7. He is surprised about the speaking and getting to be more techie.
Looked at from the 10 year path, Amy is at a 10, very surprised that she is where she is, starting from her first tech event at Cisco Live in 2011.
And John said 2-3, because he was thinking about this consulting and startup gig for a while. He clarified that this was from a 2-3 year time span – looked at over 10 years, he’s in a completely different place than he was.
Join us next time for more interviews with Geeks about what they’re doing!
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