Community & Conversation is the social-media blog of Edward F. Gumnick, a writer, consultant, and designer based in Houston, Texas.
Ed likes to spend as much time as possible talking to interesting people about ideas. In pursuit of that passion, he offers his services as a communications consultant, business strategist, writer, graphic designer, voracious reader, coach, sounding-board, and cheerleader to his clients, most of whom own and operate small, service-based businesses.
He graduated from the University of Dallas in 1985 with a bachelor of arts degree in politics, which hasn’t turned out to be anywhere near as useless as you might expect. During almost 25 years in the graphic-communications field, he has explored the roles of typesetter, proofreader, designer, quality-control supervisor, estimator, production manager, teacher, trainer, salesman, boss-man, consultant, and entrepreneur in settings that have included a publishing company, commercial type shops, ad agencies, a university printing plant, and a start-up design firm.
He was working at the University of Houston as assistant director of printing when a strange new phenomenon called the “World Wide Web” suddenly peeked up over the horizon, and he’s been an enthusiastic Internet user and advocate ever since. In 1999, he left UH to establish his own graphic-design firm, Starfall Graphics. Clients include The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, University of Houston, UH-Downtown, and UH-Clear Lake, as well as several dozen small businesses.
On October 1, 2009, he addressed the monthly meeting of the Houston chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizer (NAPO) on the topic of social media. He presented an overview of the key social tools and discussed the ways in which these technologies are changing the landscape of business and culture. The presentation identified resources to help small businesses design and implement a social-media strategy.
Community & Conversation began as a set of visuals to accompany that presentation. You can view those slides from the Social Media 101 page. My plan is to expand the outline to incorporate more content from the presentation, and to use it as the framework to turn Community & Conversation into a larger blog project.
