Metz, The Social Concept

The New Book & What We've Been Up To

March 17, 2009

I’ve been “off the grid”, blog-wise, for quite some time, as we’ve been on-boarding some new clients, and I feel like MetzMash has taken the brunt of this. I’ve been blogging at least once a week for the last five years, and I hope to not have a slowdown like this for some time in the future. Here’s what’s been happening in recent weeks, as there have been some pretty heavy developments.

New clients: In addition to our existing clients, we’ve begun working with a new travel brand, a new consumer packaged-goods brand, a new gaming brand and a new apparel brand in the last month or so, so there are a lot of really interesting things in the hopper.

The team: METZ has basically gotten a lot bigger. Both Melissa Chen and Rachel Steinberg have been coming into the office part-time, and we’re looking to increase their contributions in the coming weeks, as they’re both amazingly talented individuals, despite Melissa’s preference for “tart”-flavored frozen yogurt. ;)

The book: I’ve begun working on the sequel to There Is No Secret Sauce , and it looks like I’ll be going the “agent/publisher” route this time. My former client Christina pointed me in the direction of a really solid chap at a large agency in New York, and I’m hard at work on a proposal for the new book as we speak. I have a few titles in mind, and “Dance On A Volcano” seems to be my favorite, especially as it’s named after one of my favorite old Genesis songs. Although Sauce has been sold or downloaded about 2000 times now, we’re setting our sights about 100 times higher on this next one. It’s going to be all about lifestyle brand social web strategy. I’m attempting to write the definitive tome on the topic.

Guerilla Speaking Gigs: I just gave two talks at LaidOffCamp last week. One was called “Booked F**king Solid,” and it was sort of my bastardization of Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid , of which I’m a huge fan. The second one was called “The Def Leppard Guide To Networking.” Both were largely improvised, and I’m beginning to refine my technique at what I call guerilla speaking, which consists of me coming up with a fun-sounding topic (like the above), and then writing the deck and speaking notes in one hour or less, and then delivering it, usually under the influence of two or three cups of Peets Coffee. There’s more to come on my two upcoming keynote talks in the near future.

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