On The Road

I’m excited to get back on the road again. I love traveling, networking and working tradeshows (for some weird reason).

Monday I’m off to Minneapolis to work for Coffee Fest, handling all their social media from the event. I’m presenting an introductory social media workshop on Thursday’s Executive Summit and an advanced social media skills workshop early on Sunday morning. I’m excited to be at this show again, figuring I’ll see some people I recognize from Coffee Fest Meadowlands back in early March.

Next Monday, I travel to Dallas, from Minneapolis, to attend People Report’s Summer Camp Workforce Symposium, along with the top executives from major restaurant multi-unit corporations, such as Darden, TGIFs, Taco Bell and Dunkin Donuts. There are people attending this that I’ve had wonderful social media relationships for over half a year now, but never met. Now I get to meet them.

I’m available by email, cell phone or social media throughout the two weeks on the road.

Year Two: Chalkboarder’s Course

From the beginning, I’ve had a vision for Chalkboarder, to be an extremely creative, very personal and highly effective relational networking and social media services firm.

Comparatively, I see Chalkboarder as the “Orange County Choppers” of brand development agencies – creative, fun, selective, a little crazy and a little “bad”. We’ve been moving in that direction since the beginning.

As we begin year two, this vision has solidified. We’ve got great clients:
Coffee Fest
Dessert Professional Magazine
Rewarding Feedback
Oak Grove Coffeehouse
Jenee Halstead Music
Nicky USA

While we’re hospitality/gastronomic centric, our client diversity is wonderful. We’ve got proposals out to companies in even more diverse industries:
Event/Tradeshow/Conference Management
Premium Cattle Ranching
Chocolate
Manufacturing
Social Web Applications

We’ve expanded at our one year anniversary to establishing field sales representation in New York City and Los Angeles, something we’re deeply excited about. In year two I’m intent to put together a shop in Portland that has permanent staff capable of video/audio production, animation and effective brand content production for clients. I seek to expand our proprietary networks of contacts internationally, leveraging our ability to put brands together to clients and effectively engineering successful relationships for them.

To our existing and future clients – we’re definitely excited about being in community with you!

Social Media Questions at Coffee Fest

One Year And Growing

It was a year ago that Chalkboarder was created. My partner Judith and I spent eight weeks writing a business plan and meeting with Paul Speer of SCORE (a former CTO managing 5000 internationally in Web 3.0 development). Of course, not all has gone according to that plan and we’ve grown in unanticipated directions.

We’d like to take this moment to thank current and past clients:

Coffee Fest
Rewarding Feedback
Social Grub
Angela Tunner Brand
World Twang
Jenee Halstead
Dessert Professional Magazine
Oak Grove Coffeehouse

We’d also like to thank the following individuals for great conversations and dialogue over the past year:

Paul Barron, Carri Bugbee, Marsha Collier, Kerry Finstead, Matt Milletto, Zachary Cohen, Traca Savadago, Michael Atkinson, Amanda Hite, Joni Doolin, Jill McFarland, Brie Nadal, Kat Cole, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Eric Qualman, Chris Guillebeau, Ola Ayeni, Justin Levy, Ron Ruggles, Dan Schwabel, Amber Naslund, Sonya Schweitzer, Pia Proal, the crew at Evergreen DynamicsSo and so many, many others.

I personally would like to thank Judith Smith (VP/Co-Founder), Jennifer Kingman (Partner), Bill Bridgmon (Partner and VP Sales), David Rogers, Roger LeClerc, David Hiler, Cecilia Kingman-Miller and James Kingman. Your encouragement and support is greatly valued.

As part of our One Year Birthday, we’re very pleased to announce reaching a milestone. We’ve partnered with two outstanding individuals to empower deeper and more aggressive growth, based in Southern California and New York/New Jersey.

Southern California
We’re very excited to partner with Chef Sandra Mallut, an extremely accomplished professional pastry chef with deep connections world-wide, including Disney. Sandra will spearhead relational connections and socialmedia client development in California, Nevada and the Southwest, in addition to the dessert industry. Welcome aboard, Chef!

New York/New Jersey
We’re also very excited to partner with Matthew Vitrola, a double major honors student at Brown University, majoring in economics and linguistics, with a focus on new media and the social web and a professional interest in the hospitality industry. Matthew’s extrovert and analytic skills will be a valuable addition to Chalkboarder in pursuing new business in the Northeast. Welcome aboard, Matt!

We’re very appreciative of all the support, dialogue and encouragement we’ve received, especially from Social Media Club PDX here in Oregon. We’re excited to serve the community and our clients with greater knowledge and skill as we all move forward together.

Where’s the cake? Anyone want a slice? Ice cream too? The Vueve Clicquot is over at the bar 🙂

Jeffrey J Kingman
CEO/Founder

Facebook and what the new changes mean to the restaurant business

Facebook and what the new changes mean to the restaurant business. A podcast.

This week I was humbled and honored to participate in a podcast hosted by Paul Barron (@paulbarron), Publisher of Fast Casual Magazine. The other participants were:

Carri Bugbee (@CarriBugbee), Andrew Pascal (@ARKFoodie), and Nash Sherchan (@iRestaurant)

It was deep and enlightening to be a participant.

Jeffrey

From Paul Barron’s blog Social Coco:

What a great forum with some awesome people to discuss the recent changes at Facebook and how this may affect the restaurant business.

Joining us today: @iRestaurant @CarriBugbee @JeffreyJKingman @arkfoodie

Facebook released a variety of changes at the most recent F8 Conference.

From the Huffingtonpost:
“Having built one of the Web’s most popular hangouts, Facebook is trying to extend its reach through new tools called “social plug-ins.” These enable Facebook’s users to share their interests in such products as clothes, movies and music on other websites. For instance, you might hit a button on Levis.com indicating you like a certain style of jeans, and then recommend a movie on another site. That information about the jeans and the movie might be passed along to other people in your Facebook network, depending on your privacy settings.”

Listen in on some great ideas and commentary from experts in the restaurant industry speaking on the impact of Facebook.