Business
Jack Molisani Jack Molisani knows how to put on an engaging and edifying professional conference. He founded and organizes the LavaCon technical content strategy conference, which draws hundreds of content professionals to cities like New Orleans and Portland each year. Jack has experimented over the years with virtualizing parts of his conferences, and he shares in this episode his discoveries about how to run online events. Jack and I talked about: the origins of the LavaCon conference his conscious choice to host LavaCon in smaller cities like New Orleans and Portland how he puts together the slate of speakers for LavaCon each year trends in content strategy - chatbots last year, structured content this year the history of content strategy and technical communication conferences his definition of content strategy the need for a content champion above the content silos, a UN of content, headed by a Chief Content Officer the challenges facing the conference industry how to virtualize conferences supporting small businesses during the current COVID-19 pandemic DITA and other good skills - like public speaking and improv - to study during the current downtime his generous offer to review resumes for job seekers (details below) Jacks' Bio Jack Molisani is the president of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency specializing in content professionals: He's the author of Be The Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which hit #5 on Amazon's Career and Resume Best Seller list. Jack also produces the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management, to be held in New Orleans 25-28 October 2020. Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/V9NUL7VQNoU Resources Mentioned in This Episode Karen McGrane: Content In the Zombie Apocalypse Minimum Viable Infrastructure for Enterprise Content, by Sarah O'Keefe The LavaCon YouTube channel with free content: The LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy LinkedIn Content Strategy Group Free resume reviews or if your company needs staffing help: Jack@ProspringStaffing.com Podcast Intro Transcript When you attend a professional conference, you may not think about the details that happen behind the scenes. Jack Molisani definitely thinks about them. As the organizer of the LavaCon content strategy conference, he seeks out interesting locations, scours the profession for the best speakers, and follows industry trends, aiming to create gatherings that are both enjoyable and enlightening. Jack has been virtualizing parts of his events for years, so he also has some great thoughts on the current shift to online events. Interview Transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 66 of The Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Jack Molisani. He runs a staffing agency for content professionals and other technical professionals. He's written a book about how to manage a technical career. But I think he's probably best known as the founder and the organizer of the LavaCon conference. Let me welcome you to the show Jack and please tell the folks a little bit more about yourself and how LavaCon came to be in particular. That's what I'm interested in anyway. Jack: Sure. This is a fun story. Harken back to 1998, the Society for Technical Communications annual leadership summit. Someone had observed that at the time, none of the chapters in the Pacific Rim countries ever got to go to their own regional conferences because they were always held mainland US. So someone made the suggestion have a combined region, seven region annual conference, hold it smack dab in the middle of Hawaii. And I raised my hand, "I'll run that one." And it was a one-time event. And at the end of it, we had it in the fall of 2000 . . . conference. We expected about 140 people. 560 showed up.