I spent a fast-paced, heavy-hitting hour on the phone today with a consulting client and it was so much fun! I introduced them to the basics about effective blog reading, blog writing, RSS, OPML, Custom Search Engines and using Twitter effectively for marketing and business development. It was intense! The client, who is a recently acquired and very technical B2B service provider, said it was immediately valuable and much appreciated.

I forget sometimes how many people have yet to learn the beauty and powerful value of personalized content syndication and related technologies. I could probably spend all day, every day, getting people excited about it, if I didn’t have an awesome day job. As it is, I do one hour-long phone consultation each week. (Info) To be honest, I’ve got that much time allotted but I’m not filling each week’s hour up. I’d like to though, because I love doing consulting work.

My advice for anyone out there reading who is also jazzed about this stuff? Don’t forget how much opportunity there still is to teach people how to really effectively leverage the basics. It might not feel that way to many of us, but these are still very early days in the history of social web technologies.

I regularly do one-hour long telephone consulting sessions on launch planning and product development. I really enjoy doing that kind of work. My most recent client in that capacity was a pre-launched e-learning platform called Nixty. Glen Moriarty, Psy.D., CEO and Co-Founder of NIXTY, had these kind words to share about our work together. I thought I’d share them here. You can find more information about my consulting services here. Drop me a line if you’d like to discuss our working together.

“Marshall provided us some great insight into our platform and user experience in particular. We had demo’d the product for a variety of different target markets, but we hadn’t really thought through the user experience for one of our main segments. Marshall pointed out this blind spot and then offered several very practical recommendations to tighten up these parts of our platform. In addition, he provided us with some great referrals and pointed us to some hard-to-find resources. I wouldn’t be surprised if one year from now, I reflect back on my conversations with Marshall as being pivotal to our success with acquiring and maintaining users. I strongly recommend his services, especially for those of you who
might be trying to navigate the social Web.”

Thanks, Glen!

Over at ReadWriteWeb, where I spend most of my time, we write mostly news and analysis but some “how-to” type posts. Below you’ll find one of my favorite how-to posts I’ve written lately, originally titled Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web. I thought I’d repost it here in case any Marshallk.com readers missed it and because it’s relevant to my consulting work as well. Clients regularly hire me to advise or assist in the creation of strategic groups of contacts on various platforms. It’s super helpful. Check out this post and you’ll see why (and how).
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Pride is rarely something appropriate to show in public, but tonight in particular and here on my personal blog – I think it’s ok. Yesterday I wrote a blog post that became the 500th story I’ve written over the last 3 years to be featured as a headline on Techmeme. I’m quite proud of that.

If you’re unfamiliar with Techmeme, it’s a mostly-automated “meme tracker” that captures the most discussed blog posts in the tech blogosphere. More than 8,000 authors have made an appearance on Techmeme, but only 4 have made more appearances than I have.

Headline #500 was Sunlight Foundation Receives $4m For Obama Era Data Visualization. I’m glad that was the topic.

The Techmeme leader-board is maintained by robots on Crunchbase. Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch gave birth to those robots. Thanks guys.

You can click on the image to see the full list, in context.

One of the services that I provide for consulting clients is assistance in recruiting bloggers and social media experts for hire. In the past 2 months I’ve helped 3 companies find company bloggers or community managers. Right now I’m working on a list of 3 to 5 high-quality candidates for a community management position for a very innovative and cool startup.

What would a job like that involve? If you’re a startup company reading this post, should you hire a community manager? To explore this question in general, I’ve reposted below a post I wrote this Spring at ReadWriteWeb. It’s titled Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers? I’ve posted it in full below for the benefit of casual readers, but the original post has been read by more than 10,000 people, 69 of whom left comments, many of which are also worth reading. I should also take this opportunity again to thank the 22 people who contributed their thoughts to my research on the article.

If you’d like to learn more about the particular community manager role I’m trying to fill, email me at marshall@marshallk.com. This position in particular is best for someone on or willing to move to the East Coast, but that may not be 100% essential (and other companies will be looking to hire for similar positions in the future) so… if you’d like to do this kind of work now or later, drop me a line. Whether this kind of position is of interest to you or not, I hope you’ll enjoy the following discussion.

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world – being social is becoming an important full time job.

“Community Manager” is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang’s growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.
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I’m making two exciting announcements tonight.

Personal

Most important, I’m getting married to my partner Mikalina! Many of my work contacts here on the blog haven’t met Mikalina but many of you have. She’s wonderful and I love her very much. We’ve been together for more than 4 years already and she’s studying to be an environmental engineer. Or a ceramicist – she’s a rock star in both and hasn’t decided what to do about it yet.

We’re looking to get married pretty darned soon, I proposed to her last weekend when we were vacationing on the Oregon Coast.

Yay!

Work Changes

Readers here may or may not have known that I have only been working roughly half time at ReadWriteWeb since I came on board there in September. That’s now going to change.

The other 30 hours each week has been spent doing consulting, for more companies than I can count right now.

I absolutely love consulting – but ReadWriteWeb is growing fast and site editor Richard MacManus has offered me a great full time position as his VP of Content Development. I’ll be working there full time on a number of initiatives that we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. For now we’re saying that I’m going to be working on premium content, publishing systems and all-around magic, some of which will be behind the scenes. I’ll also continue working in my capacity as lead writer there, so you can expect roughly the same output from me as well.

I am really excited about getting to bring some of my other ideas to fruition with a team of good people and Richard’s support, though. I’m very proud to have been part of the team at RWW that helped the site move from being the 27th most linked-to blog on the web up to #9 today. (Take that Mashable! And look out, ICanHasCheezburger, we’re coming to get you next! I kid, kind of.)

Consulting

I’m really going to miss the rush of consulting, but in order to stay fresh and in touch with the market, I will continue offering one 1 hour consulting session per week. Those sessions are fast paced and a lot of fun, so let me know if you’re interested in scheduling one. Feedback from past associates and clients can be found here.

Did I Mention That I’m Getting Married?

Thanks for all the interest and support that friends have offered here and privately. I’m very excited to be moving into new stages in the two most important parts of my life. I think many of you will really like what you see us come up with over at ReadWriteWeb. The joy that will come from the transition in my personal life will be much less public but I thought I’d let readers here know about it too.

Late next week I’ll be announcing a change to my work life. It’s exciting stuff that I hope readers here will appreciate, but it will lead to a major reduction in the time I spend doing consulting work. I’ll be finishing up projects that have already begun (if I haven’t discussed this with you don’t worry about it) but I won’t be taking on new projects after next week.

I honestly love consulting and will continue offering limited one hour sessions periodically, but I will no longer be spending half of my time on it. I’ve got another opportunity I can’t pass up.

In other words, if you’ve been thinking of getting in touch with me for a high-energy, rapid-fire one hour session about product usability, market positioning or launch planning – now’s the time because the pipe is going to be far more narrow very soon. I’ve been doing three or four one hour sessions per month for the past year and people love them. Let me know if you want to do one next week by email at marshall@marshallk.com

Otherwise, hang tight for some news next week. It’s nothing earth shaking but it should be pretty exciting. Thanks as always for your ongoing support.