I met @ruthkalinka at SXSW.  She is full of bubbles!

I had a chance to talk with Ruth this week about her passion and we identified 3 roles Ruth could play in your next project:

1. Conversationalist
2. Conference Evangalist
3. Design Strategist

Her passion for wine and the food industry was discussed.  In the last year, she has gone from wine n00b to understanding how different regions affect the taste of the wine.

Ruth is detail orientated, a bit “Type A” and loves people!

She’s in Philly but is able to work with you from anywhere

My twitter friend @wr3n works in technology but has a secret passion for nature.  She wants to be a park ranger at a national forest and give tours.

I think she would be great at it because she’s detailed orientated.  I could see her rescuing animals, putting out forest fires and maintaining a communications station with her dog at her side.

She recently went on vacation and watched a massive crane migration.

Ren can manage your redundant drive arrays and your nature preserve.

Find out first hand from successful Black Bloggers what you need to do to take your blog from a distracting hobby to a platform that delivers your message and builds your credibility.  If your content is unique and provides true value then you have the potential to generate revenue and qualified leads too!

Want to submit feedback about this panel?  Send an email to inter@sxsw.com

Thanks to Anjuan and Amani for the video recording and production help!

Panelists

Maurice Cherry @mauricecherry (SXSW Panel organizer)

J. Smith @jbrotherlove

Gina McAuley @BWBConference

Deanna “DeDe” Sutton @clutchmagazine

The discussion was about taking your blog to the next level.  From hobby to professional.  This included monetizing blogs, networking outside your blog topic, trying out new themes and functionality. It was great!

Gina Maculey of Blogging While Brown

Deanna illustrated how she tries out new things to see what works and what doesn’t.  She saw some blogs were using Seesmic which allowed you to leave video comments. She added this, excited to see what sort of movie comments her readers would leave. Turns out her readers weren’t that hot on the technology.

Gina talked a lot about the disenfranchisement of Blacks in blogging and how they need to realize the huge potential to earn money via content. She covered direct ads on the blog, funding for political blogs, funding for 501c3 and direct solicitation.  I hear Gina on this because after I heard Angel speak at last year’s Blogging While Brown, I stepped up and began testing out ways to monetize my blog.

Do Only Black Bloggers Care About Getting Paid?

I see a comment on my blog saying something to the effect “Are these Black blogging issues only?”

No they’re not.  Compensation for skill/time/value is a huge discussion in terms of content.  Especially content created on the web.  Women are also a group that isn’t compensated equally to what men make.  People are taking real life inequalities to the web.  This doesn’t have to be so.  The first step to equality is to discuss the imbalance.  The second step is to plan.  The third step is to act.

Summary

The panel was wonderful!  Full of detailed stories, passion and solid advice.  I was tweeting up a storm and will grab those tweets to insert here.

After the session, there was a big line at the microphone of people who had comments and questions. Baratunde was up first and thanked Maurice and the panel for the session. If you don’t know him, he’s a pretty big deal on the internet, on television and in real life work so I’m going to grab his bio from his site:

Baratunde exists at the intersection of comedy, politics and technology. His official duties include Web & Politics editor at The Onion, co-founder of Jack & Jill Politics and host of PopSci’s Future Of on Science Channel. Basically, he’s a smart, funny, extremely handsome dude.

I Belong Here

I saw a lot of people I had met at other conferences and that was really, really nice since I originally hated going to conferences.  Why did I hate them?  Because I went to conferences where everyone seemed to be socially awkward and not like me.  I felt unwelcome and out of my element.  This is a common feeling for women and Brown people in technology.

While googling, I couldn’t find any stories or posts on Black people or minorities feeling excluded or alienated from technology conferences.  I talked to two women last year who were in tech, active in social media, had serious technical skills and had attended conferences where they not only were in the minority but got that sort of “Why are you here?” type look.  It’s a hard look to face but talking with other women and Brown people has made it so much easier for me that now I simply look back and smile thinking, “I belong here.”

Adria Richards (me) and Corvida Raven

Faith Dow

Twanna Hines and Nichelle Stephens

Adria Richards (me), Twanna Hines, Anjuan Simmons, Liz Burr

Today I share this music video from Common and Will.i.am, “I Have A Dream”

As I shared on Twitter today, my family is new to the word, “freedom”.  My grandfather was a sharecropper and according to my mom, my great grandfather was a slave.  This means my dad and his siblings were the first to really have “opportunties”.  On my mom’s side (she’s the Jewish one), her great grandparents came from Poland.  My grandparents were born in NYC, grew up, met each other, got married and lived the “American dream” but not before my grandfather and all his siblings changed their last names from Jepnick to Richards in hopes of avoiding discrimination for being Jewish (anti-semitism),

I am grateful I have the freedom to truly pursue what makes me happy.  I thank the people before me who stood up for those of us who could not find our voices (or who had not been born yet!).

Thank you Dr. King

I’m happy to announce the webinars are now public and you can check out the list of Zendesk webinars for January on the blog.

These webinars showcase how companies increase customer satisfaction while streamlining their support process using Zendesk. It’s been one of my foundation tools as a technology consultant so I was excited to help spread the message by holding live webinars!

Who’s Using Zendesk?

Companies big and small. Twitter uses Zendesk because, as you can imagine, they get a ton of questions from the Twitter community. Zendesk isn’t just for tech companies that are “web 2.0″.

Businesses focused on health, law, education, construction and even yoga are using Zendesk to effectively manage incoming questions and requests from their customers.

What’s In A Zendesk Webinar?

The webinars will show you how to use Zendesk, add popular integrations from  other cloud apps and how to go about customizing Zendesk to fit your needs. Since I’m running them, there won’t be any of that dry, boring sort of delivery. These are fun!

In the coming months, you will see webinars on Yammer, JIRA, 37Signals, SurveyGizmo, Get Satisfaction and more! We’re also doing a special series called, “Welcome to Zendesk” to help you get familiar with helpdesk practices and workflows.

What is Zendesk?

It’s a tool for your business.

Many of us answer questions from customers.  Right?

Most of us do this via email or by phone.  This works for a while until the business starts growing and then we start falling behind.  This is also a problem where someone who was working with a customer goes on vacation and all their email correspondence is sitting there in their Inbox.

Zendesk centralizes your communications with customers so you can quickly and accurately help them.  This is the core of customer service!

My Experience with Zendesk

I personally have been using the desk for a year to manage requests from my IT clients.  At first, I wasn’t sure if my clients would accept the new system but they quickly began sending requests for help!

For those of you who watch my live show at AskAdria, I did two shows involving Zendesk.  The first on in April had to do with a t-shirt they sent me (see video to watch my feedback on tech t-shirts that don’t fit women).  The second show evaluated Zendesk as a tool make you a tech support hero because when a tool makes your job effortless, you should say thank you!

Why You’ll Love Zendesk

If you’re a fan of David Allen’s GTD methodology or have been to Merlin Mann’s 43folders site, you know “Inbox Zero” can be something of a myth like finding a cheesburger eating unicorn on rollerskates.

Zendesk works as the central nervous system of your business allowing you to keep track of sales, support and development requests.

If Zendesk were an apartment, we would be showing you how to setup a fabulous flat that would be featured in apartment therapy!

There are other companies in the helpdesk market like Kayako, Cerberus and what not but Zendesk excels due to their streamlined functionality, clean design, extensive use of API and oh yeah, awesomeness!

Working With Zendesk

I’d also like to share that working with Zendesk rocks!  The people who make up the team are just entirely too much fun!  Not only that, they are seriously focused on making it easy to deliver great customer service.  I had the opportunity to visit Zendesk headquarters in San Francisco after Blogworld in late October and then again in December for the holiday party.

Zendesk is hiring so take a look and see if you could be the next uber funky developer to join the team!



Photo credit: adria.richards, Laughing Squid, etnika, adamjackson1984

I am sharing the following email correspondence to illustrate how some people have no clue that their energy is so negative that even I don’t want to associate with them.  No longer willing to spend time with emotional vampires and people who play mind games, I’ve tried, for several years now, to tell “Chuck T” (name changed for privacy), that I simply do not and will not interact with him.

Hopefully today…he gets it

Adria Richards

So the moral of the story is that you should continue to give people second chances but strike them out at 3.   What he wants is to use my skills for his gain.  I have decided that investing in any “causes” associated with this guy are a disservice to the people “receiving” the services and a disservice to myself because I can do a whole lot more when I’m surrounded by positive, motivated people.

Remember, People don’t change. What you observe: is.

Don’t hang around and “hope” people you work with will change. Establish your boundaries and deflect toxic folks like this.

Photo Credit: Chris Halford

direct mp3 link

We had a great time discussing all the basics of starting a geek business and the audience had great questions!

• Good and bad logos
• What if your client always pays late?
• What makes you uniquely geeky?
• Great business cards bring great business
• Letters of Agreement as informal contracts
• GTD ways to digitalize receipts
• Why you need an accountant
• How to get better at networking in a crowd
• and much more!

To get notified of the next one, sign up for the newsletter which goes out once a month.

I’ve had some very exciting things go on in the last week and I’m feeling so thankful that it’s a good time to share the love.

I will be giving away 3 tickets to tomorrow night’s webinar, What Every Geek Needs To Start A Company with me and Chris Pirillo hosting.

Winners:

Howard and Benedict

Congrats!  Your tickets are on the way.

If you are already an IT consultant or thinking about launching something soon, this webinar is going to give you all the business basics as well as specific things us geeky/nerdy folks deal with like:

• Finding potential client leads
• Pricing our services
• Why Geeks need contracts
• Networking with other humans

It will be a 2 hour, live phone call and we’ll discuss, take feedback and recommend tools to get you on the path to geek success!

Rules

1. There are 3 tickets up for grabs
2. The most interesting submissions will win
3. Post a comment or do a blog post about how you could benefit by attending
4. If you do a blog post, you must link back to this post
5. Contest ends 9/24/2009 3pm CST

Audio Recording

This was recorded using the iPhone 3G S!

NOTE: I stand up and go around the room passing out books in the beginning so it will be quiet at first.

Recommended Reading

The books I handed out helped to shape my career. I will be doing reviews of these powerful books at adriarichards.com this summer for:

• Outliers
• Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation–and Positive Strategies for Change
• The Four Hour Work Week
• Get Clients Now!: A 28-Day Marketing Program for Professionals, Consultants, and Coaches
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity
• Secrets of Six Figure Women: Surprising Strategies to Up Your Earnings and Change Your Life

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