Thanks for visiting my consulting services page. These days I’m doing very limited consulting since taking a full-time position at ReadWriteWeb but I did negotiate approval of one hour of consulting per week as part of my contract there! I love doing consulting work and I hope you’ll consider hiring me for that weekly hour sometime soon. One hour might seem like very little, but there’s a whole lot we can do together to change your work in even that amount of time. There are a few other ways that an engagement can be scheduled differently, as well.

All my contact info can be found in this site’s right hand sidebar, just below my photo.

Here’s a description of the services I offer, along with some resources that will give you a head start before making a decision to purchase some time. In addition to these descriptions, I hope you’ll check out my feedback page where you can read what past clients and colleagues have said about my work.

Product Development Advising

My favorite thing to do with clients is to spend time looking at the websites, services and software they are building and offer advice about how that work could be improved. Our time together will begin with you showing me what you’re doing and telling me about your goals. I’ll take notes while you talk and then we’ll spend the rest of our time discussing ways I think your work could be more effective, examples of other companies I’ve seen succeed in similar work, and people and companies you should make sure to connect with or pay attention to. You’ll leave our session filled with links, ideas and excitement. These are fast paced sessions informed by my experience reviewing thousands of web apps over the last several years and consulting with scores of companies building apps.

Related links:
Dreaming of the Perfect Friend Adder - my critique of a particular company’s implementation of a common social media feature.
User Experience: Learning From the Pros - a post I wrote at ReadWriteWeb pointing out some good resources for any company interested in learning more about User Experience in website or application development.

Recruiting

Another service I provide is recruiting bloggers, community managers and related proffesionals for companies to hire. Companies that retain me for this service will receive a list of 3 to 5 high-quality candidates for the position. I charge a low flat-fee for this service because it makes everyone happy and I like to be a guy known for finding good people good jobs. Companies usually come to me after they’ve been unable to find someone on their own. Lately I’ve been placing one person every month or two. Sometimes this service is rendered in conjunction with an hour of strategic planning and/or an hour of training, but not always.

Related links:
Introducing Bloggers and Companies to Hire Them - a post that started this part of my consulting practice. I’ve now got a list of more than 50 quality candidates interested in blogging jobs, though I always refresh that list with new searches for each client.
Would You Like a Job as an Online Community Manager? - a post I put up as part of one recruitment search, based on a long discussion of the pros and cons of startups hiring community managers. More than 20 people were interviewed in writing that post, so it’s very informative in and of itself.

In the photo on the left I’m having a great time interviewing people at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Photo credit: Kris Krug

Launch Planning

I’ve been on both sides of a lot of product launches, as a journalist being pitched for coverage and as a consultant preparing companies to seek out coverage. It can be simple, but it can be very complicated as well. I help clients identify the best bloggers for them to reach out to, prepare press materials, communicate strategically and then run a press embargo for maximum coverage. Every good launch strategy includes steps to maximize publicity impact not just for launch day but into the future as well. I don’t represent companies like a PR agent, I don’t contact bloggers or press myself at all, I help clients develop the skills to stand tall on their own in the social media space.

Related links:
Thoughts on Product Launch Promotion - I’ve got a basic formula for launch planning that has come out of launching tens of products and writing up hundreds. This post outlines where that general formula was at the time I wrote it.
Social Media for Marketing - this post outlines what I did when working at the last startup software company I worked for, SplashCast. We had a hugely successful company blog and this post spells out how I recommend all companies consider using a company blog.
How and Why Embargoes Work in the Tech Blogosphere - this post from ReadWriteWeb has a title that speaks for itself. See the comments there for other peoples’ perspective on how good the advice is.

Content Aggregation & Competitive Intelligence

RSS has been my bread and butter for years. My essential message has been the same since I got into this industry: take in information through effective RSS reading practices and put it back out by publishing feeds strategically. I’ve written more about this than I could link to here, but here are two case studies in which I did this kind of work for consulting clients.

Related links:
How to Build and RSS and Blog News Site for Your Project - I built a blog-tracking news site for Sun Microsystems to highlight the latest and best blog coverage of their giant Java One conference this year. I also got to interview Neil Young at the conference! This post describes in near total detail how I built the site.
Softrax: Powering News for Financial Executives With RSS - technical and non-technical discussions of a project in which I built a research and publishing system for a financial services training company out of really inexpensive software. They report that time on site and return visitors climbed substantially upon implementation, which was the goal.

Speaking

I am available for speaking to companies, public meetings and other groups. My talks are high energy, full of real-world examples of social media success and they are funny. My talk to a group of bloggers with a wide range of experience at one recent conference, for example, was standing-room only and afterwords was described as “mindblowing”. Contact me to discuss what kind of speaking engagement you’re interested in.

Give me a call

I’ve got very limited availability to do the kinds of work described above, most of my time is spent blogging and running the content strategy at one of the biggest tech blogs on the web. I do love consulting though so I hope you’ll contact me to discuss what we can do together in the time available. Thanks for taking the time to check out my site and good luck to you in your new media adventures!